The spring chill lingered, and the muddy water from melting snow flowed along the town's ditches, except for one particular spot.
That scorched earth, located on the edge of the town and named "Burning Battlefield," was where Long Wu burned his life away for the last time.
Today, the town's residents reverently refer to it as a "sacred place," preferring to walk several miles rather than set foot there.
In their eyes, every inch of that land was soaked in the blood and glory of heroes, and was sacred and inviolable.
However, today, this desolate sacred land has welcomed an uninvited guest.
Lin Yi, with a hoe on his shoulder and old boots covered in mud, calmly walked into the scorched earth.
He did not hesitate at all, as if he were not stepping into the place where heroes fell, but walking towards his own backyard vegetable garden.
"Clang!"
The hoe broke through the hard, scorched earth, its crisp sound exploding like thunder in the silent air, instantly attracting the attention of everyone in the distance.
"Stop! What are you doing!" An elderly man with white hair trembled with anger as he rushed over, leaning on his cane, followed by a group of indignant residents.
"Lin Yi! That's where Lord Long Wu sacrificed himself! How dare you... how dare you desecrate it like this!"
"Stop right there! This is a grave disrespect to heroes!"
Shouts and angry curses rose and fell.
In their view, Lin Yi's actions were tantamount to vandalizing a hero's tombstone, an unforgivable crime.
Lin Yi did not stop, nor did he even look up.
He simply stood silently, hoe after hoe, using all his strength to turn over the hard, iron-like earth beneath his feet.
Sweat trickled down his forehead, dripping into the black soil and evaporating instantly, as if it had never existed.
Only when the old man rushed in front of him and used his cane to firmly block his hoe did Lin Yi slowly straighten up, his gaze calmly sweeping over the angry faces.
"A hero burns himself not to leave behind a barren land for posterity to admire." His voice was not loud, but it clearly reached everyone's ears, carrying an undeniable power. "He did it so that things could grow anew on this land."
After saying that, he ignored everyone, bent down, picked up a pinch of soil from the newly turned soil, and carefully put it into a transparent sample bag.
The crowd was quiet for a moment, then erupted into an even bigger commotion.
But Lin Yi had already turned and left, leaving behind only a resolute back view and a patch of scorched earth, its surface turned up by a hoe, like a scar.
Back in the academy's temporary laboratory, Lin Yi immediately analyzed the scorched earth samples.
Under a high-powered resonance microscope, he made an astonishing discovery.
Those seemingly lifeless scorched earth actually contained extremely small amounts of "Dragon Flame Crystals" and "Time-Space Echoes".
This is the trace left after Long Wu completely shattered his authority and energy during his final outburst.
Although these remnants have lost their destructive power as weapons, they are like dormant energy seeds, containing a pure and stable source substance.
"This...this is simply a natural new energy substrate!" Excitement gleamed in Lin Yi's eyes.
He immediately gathered the best young men in the academy, young men who had fought alongside him and had an almost blind trust in him.
He laid out his entire plan: "We can design an 'ash conversion array.' Using the most basic resonance technique, we can stably extract these remaining energies and then inject them into the improved soil. We are not here to desecrate the sanctuary, but to allow the power of heroes to continue in another way!"
The boys' enthusiasm was instantly ignited.
Blasphemy?
No, this is a legacy!
They worked day and night to calculate, design, and deduce, and soon a set of precise and efficient conversion array blueprints was born.
When Lin Yi and his students reappeared in the "Holy Domain" carrying equipment and array materials, Chu Yao found him, her beautiful face showing a hint of worry: "Lin Yi, I understand your thoughts. But the people in the town don't understand; they see that place as a spiritual refuge. By doing this, you might be seen as a public enemy, as an opportunist exploiting the remains of a hero."
Lin Yi looked at her, a gentle smile on his face: "Chu Yao, what do you think is true blasphemy?"
Before Chu Yao could answer, he continued, “To enshrine the sacrifice of heroes, to turn it into a cold stone monument, a symbol that must not be touched, and when people’s lives do not improve and they are still struggling in suffering, to point to that desolate place and say, ‘Look, we have heroes’... that is true desecration. To treat sacrifice as an unattainable ornament, that sacrifice loses its meaning.”
His gaze returned to the scorched earth, his eyes resolute: "I want everyone to see that heroes leave behind not pain and taboos, but hope and sustenance."
The "Ash Conversion Array" was activated amidst skeptical and wary gazes.
Invisible energy particles, like iron filings attracted by a magnet, slowly rise from the scorched earth, converge into the center of the array, and then, after a gentle transformation, silently flow into the surrounding fields like spring rain.
They planted their first crop—the most common wheat seed.
As the days went by, the doubts never stopped.
One evening, when the first person to notice something was wrong exclaimed in alarm, the whole town was in an uproar.
On that once barren, scorched earth, a neat row of wheat seedlings had sprouted.
Most incredibly, the tip of each ear of wheat emitted a soft yet bright glow.
As night falls, the entire wheat field seems to transform into a Milky Way on earth, with countless points of light spreading out like stars, both tranquil and magnificent.
Lin Yi stood on the edge of the field and announced, "I call this wheat 'Guardian Wheat.' After the harvest, it will be given priority to families who were injured due to awakening or lost loved ones in battle."
In the crowd, a middle-aged man mustered his courage and asked the question that was on everyone's mind: "Lin Yi... if we use a hero's... ashes... to farm, won't he be unhappy if he's watching from heaven?"
This problem weighed heavily on everyone's mind like a boulder.
They revered the heroes, but also feared offending their spirits.
Lin Yi remained silent for a moment, then suddenly bent down and scooped up a handful of soil mixed with glowing wheat ears from the field.
He raised the handful of soil as if it were a heavy promise, and addressed everyone, and to this very land, loudly proclaimed: "If Brother Long Wu were still here, he wouldn't say anything about sacredness or anything like that. He would slap us on the back of the head and roar—'What are you all standing there for? Eat up! You'll have the strength to fight when you're full!'"
This rugged yet familiar phrase seems to truly come from that forthright hero.
There was a deathly silence in the crowd at first, then someone burst out laughing, followed by a second, a third... Finally, everyone laughed, their laughter tinged with tears of relief.
The huge weight in their hearts has finally been completely removed.
The news that the "Guardian Wheat" had been grown in the "Sanctuary" swept across the entire continent like a storm.
This groundbreaking move seemed to open a completely new door for everyone.
People are beginning to re-examine the "trauma" left by those wars.
The once bottomless rift valley, cleaved open by divine war, is no longer a terrifying forbidden zone, but has been transformed into a massive power plant that utilizes geothermal energy to provide the city with a continuous source of power.
Those broken fragments of time-space armor, imbued with extraordinary power, are no longer sealed away in museums to gather dust, but are instead melted into steel bars to build the strongest cross-sea bridge.
Even the fragment of authority that Lin Yi had buried to suppress the "template" was carefully extracted, diluted and ground countless times, and made into a harmless teaching catalyst, which was used in enlightenment courses to help talented children complete their first awakening more safely and gently.
Sacrifice is no longer the end, but a new beginning.
The legacy left by heroes is no longer a cold monument, but has been integrated into every aspect of people's lives, becoming the cornerstone of civilization's progress.
Deep underground, in the well of memories that imprisons Ivan, the ever-present whispers take on a touch of warmth for the first time.
"The Well of Memory... I smell... the... aroma of wheat..."
However, not all entities are happy to see such changes.
On a moonless night, the last vestige of the Cleaner's consciousness, like a venomous snake in a sewer, silently gathered above the former site of the "Sanctuary".
It was once a loyal lackey of "Template", and was most adept at manipulating rules and people's hearts.
It plans to repeat its old tricks, using "blasphemy" as a pretext to evoke a deep-seated sense of collective guilt within humanity, allowing this guilt to become a new breeding ground for its own re-establishment.
It hovered in the air, gathering its power, preparing to unleash that bewitching mental shock.
But it soon realized it was wrong.
Here, there is no longer anything "sacred" for it to profane.
What was once the "battlefield of burning wounds" is now the liveliest place in the town.
Children chased fireflies in the glowing wheat fields, their laughter as clear as silver bells.
The elderly people brought out their reclining chairs and sat on the large stone platform that was once the core of the formation, fanning themselves with palm-leaf fans and basking in the moonlight.
Even the stone tablet at the entrance, originally intended to commemorate Long Wu, had its inscription erased and replaced with a new line of large characters written in lime water, resembling a simple agricultural reminder:
"On the third day of the third month, we sow the seeds of hope; on the fifth day of the fifth month, we receive the light."
Sacred, tragic, solemn... all the emotions it could exploit vanished without a trace.
Instead, there is vitality, hope, and the vibrant life of everyday people.
The scavenger felt an unprecedented sense of confusion and powerlessness.
Its power originates from human negative emotions, while here, there is only the purest joy and peace.
It made one last attempt to condense, transforming into a barely perceptible whisper, like a cold wind, that reached the ear of the man on the edge of the field:
"You shouldn't...make heroes so...ordinary."
Lin Yi looked up at the starry sky, as if he had been waiting for it to arrive.
He didn't turn around, but simply faced the dazzling starry sky and softly responded:
"Heroes should be ordinary people."
He paused, his gaze sweeping over the wheat field that resembled stars fallen to earth, a smile playing on his lips.
“What’s extraordinary is that each and every one of them dares to grow flowers from the ashes.”
The moment the words fell, as if in some kind of response to his statement, a sudden change occurred.
Right in the very center of the wheat field, the tallest and brightest of the Guardian Wheat plants, which had absorbed the most "Dragon Flame Crystals" and "Time-Space Echoes," silently blossomed with the ears of wheat at its tip.
Those are not ordinary flowers.
Its petals are as thin as cicada wings, yet they shimmer with a metallic luster. Each petal presents a perfect crystallized dragon scale shape, with a faint golden halo flowing around its edges.
Without any earth-shattering fanfare or dazzling light bursts, it quietly blooms in the night, noble and mysterious.
As the night breeze blew by, the flower composed of crystallized dragon scales swayed gently above the wheat fields, like a sleeping dragon slowly opening its eyes in a silent promise.
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