Daybreak arrived.
Li Daoxuan stared at the morning light coming through his window, his eyes bloodshot and dry. He had spent the entire night reading through historical materials without realizing it.
He had done a broad sweep of that humiliating period of late Ming history and now had a general grasp of the timeline.
But plenty of details remained unclear.
History books loved to use the Spring and Autumn brushwork, which was just a fancy way of saying they were stuffed with euphemisms and hidden agendas. Half the accounts contradicted each other anyway. Trusting them completely would be a fool's.
He double-clicked a document on his desktop. It held the key questions he had summarized during his all-nighter.
Question 1: Objects dropped into the diorama box had their length, width, and height magnified 200 times. Volume increased proportionally, and weight went up with it. As a liberal arts student, he had no idea how to calculate the exact numbers, but a 50-gram egg turning into hundreds of tons was roughly the idea. Based on that, feeding each miniature person cost him almost nothing.
Forty-two people? Easy. He could let them eat well, drink well, and live comfortably.
But feeding millions, or tens of millions, while also keeping them safe? That would bankrupt him overnight.
So what was his goal here? Just these forty-two people? Or as many late-Ming commoners as he could manage? Or the entire country?
If it was the latter two, his resources were nowhere near enough. He would need a different approach.
Question 2: The late Ming was a war zone. The little people's lives were in constant danger. Meanwhile, he still had to eat, sleep, shower, and occasionally go on a date. He could not guard the diorama box twenty-four hours a day. He might step out to buy groceries and come home to find all forty-two slaughtered by the imperial army, the Manchus, or rebels like Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong.
His diorama box would become a ruin full of corpses.
The odds of that happening were extremely high. He had to improve their self-defense capabilities.
Question 3: The diorama box was 2.5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. That gave him a visual range of about 500 meters by 300 meters inside. Barely enough to cover Gaojia Village and the surrounding fields. Anything beyond that was invisible to him. Was there any way to expand his field of vision?
Those were the three most urgent issues he had identified overnight. Question 3 was a mystical problem, so he would have to let nature take its course.
He decided to focus on the first two.
His eyes landed on Question 1. He considered himself fairly kind-hearted, so he did not want to save only these forty-two people. If possible, he wanted to help as many impoverished commoners as he could. Ideally, the whole nation.
That meant he could not just keep dropping food into the box himself.
That approach was unscientific and would only breed a bunch of numb, lay-flat freeloaders. He had to motivate the little people to grow their own food and take charge of their own survival.
Plan set. Time to act.
First priority: water. Without water, nothing else mattered.
But how to deliver it? Point a running faucet into the box? Terrible idea.
A column of water magnified 200 times would not be a water supply. It would be a devastating flood.
A spray bottle? A humidifier? He did a quick search and found that even the finest mist from a humidifier had droplets 0.3 millimeters in diameter. Scaled up 200 times, those became 6-centimeter water balls packed densely together. Spray that over the village and it would be a super rainstorm capable of flattening their thatched roofs.
His gaze shifted to the Lock&Lock container on his desk.
He picked it up and held it over an empty patch of land beside the village. It would fit perfectly. He reached his hand into the box and dug into the ground, scooping out a massive crater in one motion.
Early morning inside the box.
The villagers woke early, as always. The moment the sun rose, these hardworking people began preparing for their daily chores. But with the severe drought, not a single blade of grass grew in the fields. No farming to do. Normally, they would have been out foraging for wild vegetables, but with over a hundred grains of giant white rice and a few massive cabbage leaves stored at home, there was no rush.
So they busied themselves with other tasks. Weaving bamboo baskets, sharpening knives, mending clothes.
Gao Yiye decided to mend her tattered robe. She grabbed a needle and thread, carried a small stool outside, and sat down in the morning light. She was just about to thread the needle when she heard a rustling sound near the house.
She turned her head. Surprisingly, it was Shan Shi'er.
"Eh? Why are you still in Gaojia Village?"
As it turned out, last night, following Tianzun's instructions, she had given Shan Shi'er a full meal, warned him not to speak a word of what he saw here, and then told him to return to the city.
But after seeing rice the size of millstones and gigantic cabbage leaves last night, Shan Shi'er, though unable to comprehend it, felt deeply shocked and wanted to stay in this village a little longer.
After stepping out of Gao Yiye's house, he had simply slept under the eaves.
As a pampered advisor, he had never woken up this early before. Startled awake by Gao Yiye, his head was still a bit foggy as he rolled over and sat up.
"Eh? It's already daylight?"
Gao Yiye looked at him. "Didn't I tell you to go back to the county town last night?"
Shan Shi'er blinked slowly, still groggy. "Ah? Why didn't I go back last night?"
He frowned, thinking hard.
"...Hmn. This is what you call... utterly baffling."
The moment he finished his sentence, Gao Yiye's expression changed.
She saw a giant hand descending from the sky. It dug into an empty patch of land beside the village, and the ground instantly rumbled and shook, revealing a gigantic pit.
Shan Shi'er followed Gao Yiye's gaze. He could not see Li Daoxuan's hand. He only saw a giant pit suddenly appear in the ground. The dirt, sand, and stones inside the pit were scooped up by an invisible force and placed to the side.
Shan Shi'er followed her gaze. He could not see the hand. He only saw the ground splitting open, dirt and stones flying into the air as if scooped up by an invisible giant.
His mind went blank.
"What the...?" He blinked. Rubbed his eyes.
"Did I wake up too fast? Should I go back to sleep for a bit?"
He even forgot to make his signature four-character summary.
The noise carried through the village.
Doors creaked open. Heads poked out, hair still messy from sleep.
"What's going on?"
"Is that an earthquake?"
"Everyone, come look!"
Men, women, children. They came stumbling out, some still rubbing their eyes, one old man clutching a rice bowl he had forgotten to put down.
They stopped at the edge of the clearing.
Nobody dared go further.
Gao Yiye hurriedly jumped up and shouted, "Fellow villagers, don't go over there! Don't interfere with Tianzun casting his divine magic!"
The villagers all halted in unison.
After stopping the villagers, Gao Yiye looked carefully and saw Tianzun's giant hand dig a few more times, creating a massive rectangular pit in the ground that was over ten zhang long, five zhang wide, and eight zhang deep.
Then, the giant hand brought out a transparent box and slowly lowered it from the sky, placing it perfectly into the freshly dug pit, before tamping down the soil on all four sides.
Shan Shi'er and the villagers could not see the giant hand, but they could see the large transparent box. They watched as it slowly descended from the sky and, without the slightest deviation, settled perfectly into the giant pit.
Everyone stared in complete bewilderment.
Li Daoxuan clapped his hands. "Perfect. The reservoir is built."
He picked up a cup filled with water and slowly poured the water from the cup into the Lock&Lock container.
And so, the little people in the box witnessed a miraculous spectacle. A waterfall suddenly appeared in the sky, and a massive torrent of water descended from the heavens, crashing into the large box on the ground. In no time at all, the box was filled to the brim with water.
The villagers were completely dumbfounded.
After a long while, they finally heard Shan Shi'er speak.
"I suspect the Milky Way has fallen from the Ninth Heaven."
Gao Yiye said, "You used more than four characters this time."
Shan Shi'er clutched his head. "No four-character phrase could possibly capture such majesty!"