Once everything was arranged, the Village Chief waved his hand. "Distribute the rice! Let everyone have a full meal."
The forty-two villagers lined up outside Gao Yiye's door to receive their share. Each person got ten grains of white rice, each one the size of a millstone.
Ten grains. That was enough food for weeks.
But hauling them home was another matter entirely. The grains were too heavy to lift, so they had to push them along the ground, rolling them like boulders. It took ten trips just to move ten grains. By the end, arms were trembling, sweat was pouring, but nobody complained.
After the other forty-one households had claimed their share, a massive pile still remained in Gao Yiye's house. Dozens of grains lay piled together. Nobody dared complain that she got too much.
In the minds of these uneducated, superstitious villagers, Gao Yiye was no longer just a neighbor. She was a Saintess. A vessel of Tianzun. To doubt her portion was to doubt the God Himself.
Smoke began to rise from the chimneys.
Cooking divine rice required technique. A single grain could not fit in any pot. Men fetched chisels and stones, carefully fracturing the hard shells into manageable chunks. Even a fragment was large enough to feed a family.
But they did not cook it pure.
They mixed in wild greens. Tree bark. Grass roots.
Not out of stinginess, but survival instinct. Their stomachs, accustomed to roughage for years, might reject such rich, refined nutrition all at once. Mixing it stretched the meal across two days and eased the transition.
Using a magnifying glass, Li Daoxuan peered through their windows at the messy concoctions boiling in their pots. He shook his head.
"I gave you premium Northeastern rice, and you are boiling it with dirt and weeds? What the hell are you cooking? Cook it properly, for god's sake. How is your health supposed to improve eating like this? Are you really that frugal?"
He reached for a piece of pork from the fridge, ready to drop it in. Then he stopped.
Wait.
Starvation recovery is dangerous. If I dump high-fat meat into their systems now, they will get diarrhea. Dehydrated and weak as they are, dysentery could kill them.
He pulled his hand back.
Never mind. Take it slow. Adjust their diet gradually.
The food Li Daoxuan looked down on was already a rare delicacy for the villagers of Gaojia Village.
They cooked happily. No more hiding food. No more jealousy. Every household was eating the same thing, so everyone set up tables outside their doors to eat together. The pre-famine atmosphere had returned. The village felt alive again.
"It has been so long since we had rice this good," the Village Chief said, shoveling food into his mouth. "This divine rice is incredibly fragrant. Much better than what we grew ourselves. As expected of a gift from Tianzun."
Gao Chuwu held a massive bowl and ate like a man possessed. Young and big-framed, he could eat far more than others. While an entire family shared a dozen rice fragments, he devoured a dozen all by himself, scarfing it down as if he had not eaten in ten lifetimes.
People watched him nervously, genuinely worried he might choke himself to death.
Gao Yiye sat alone on her threshold, chewing slowly. A single mouthful took ages to swallow. Tears streamed down her face.
"Hiks... Mother," she whispered. "If only you were here to taste this."
Outside the box, Li Daoxuan had his own dinner.
He ordered takeout: a braised beef combo rice bowl. Including delivery, it cost exactly 29 yuan. A brimming bowl of rice topped with braised beef, braised radish, pickled cabbage, and the shop owner even threw in a free 300ml mini cola.
Compared to what the little people were eating, his dinner was an absolute flex.
He took a bite of beef and glanced at the diorama. For some reason, the braised beef bowl he usually found mediocre tasted exceptionally good today.
After dinner, the sky darkened. The villagers returned to their huts to rest. The diorama box became a static image again.
As for what some bored internet netizens had joked about, peeking at the female little people taking baths, that was pure nonsense. The diorama was in the middle of a severe drought. The river had dried up, vegetation had withered, and the well water was barely enough to drink, let alone bathe in. Where would they find water for a bath?
None of the villagers bathed. They did not even change clothes before getting into bed.
Li Daoxuan withdrew his attention from the box and stretched. This damn diorama could waste an entire day if he was not careful.
He pulled out his phone, opened the macro photo he had taken during the day, and logged onto his usual history and military forum.
He posted anonymously: "Everyone, look at this photo. The village is called Gaojia Village. The girl is Gao Yiye. The young man is Gao Chuwu. There are five government runners. What comes to mind?"
Reply 1: "The clothing on those runners looks like Ming Dynasty yamen runners."
Reply 2: "Gao Yiye, Gao Chuwu... those naming conventions also strongly resemble Ming Dynasty style."
Reply 3: "Exactly. I saw it at first glance too. This should be the Ming Dynasty. Shame we cannot tell the exact year."
Reply 4: "This diorama is amazingly well made. The miniatures are lifelike and realistically recreate a scene of Ming Dynasty runners bullying commoners. Where did you buy this? I want one too."
Reply 5: "That little girl Gao Yiye is pretty cute. I wanna peek at her taking a bath."
Li Daoxuan stared at the screen. "Fucking idiots. Why can their minds never move past peeking at baths?"
There was no reasoning with these people. He closed the forum.
But those replies did give him a rough idea.
Ming Dynasty?
Could my box really be overlooking the Ming Dynasty?
How is that even possible?
Forget it. Time to sleep.
July 13, 2023 AD. Summer. Shuangqing City.
At 7:00 AM, the temperature had already climbed to 33 degrees Celsius.
By noon, the sun would probably try to murder everyone.
Li Daoxuan groggily crawled out of bed. The first thing he looked at was the diorama box beside him. He had moved it from the entrance to the living room, and finally last night, right next to his bed, alongside his computer.
Everything seemed fine inside. The little people were awake.
Gao Chuwu and a few young villagers were eating breakfast, a very filling one. They were heading to the county town today to invite the advisor, so they needed energy. The Village Chief stood beside them, reminding them of the plan word by word.
Other villagers were carrying bamboo baskets, getting ready to forage for wild greens.
Li Daoxuan could not help but smile wryly. Are these little people going to search for wild greens, tree bark, and grass roots every single day? Is there zero variation?
Well, it made sense. They were exhausting all their energy just to survive. How could they have the mental bandwidth for anything else?
Time for today's feeding. As long as he fed them every day, their anxiety over survival would dissolve. Then they could finally think about other things.
Li Daoxuan opened his fridge and tore a leaf off the Napa cabbage he had bought yesterday. The leaf was quite large, over 40 centimeters long and a dozen centimeters wide.
He returned to the diorama box and gently placed it right in front of Gao Yiye.
At this moment, Gao Yiye was holding her bamboo basket, preparing to leave the village. Suddenly, a massive hand reached down from the sky and placed a gigantic cabbage leaf right in front of her.
From her perspective, this single cabbage leaf was thirty zhang long and ten zhang wide.
She stood frozen, dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the gift.
Author's note regarding scale: Thirty zhang is roughly 100 meters. Ten zhang is roughly 33 meters. To Gao Yiye, this cabbage leaf was the size of a skyscraper lying on its side.