Dawn broke.
Li Daoxuan rubbed his bloodshot eyes and glanced at the pale morning light spilling through the window.
Without realizing it, he had spent the entire night poring over historical records—an immersion into the humiliating final decades of the Ming dynasty. He now grasped the broad outline of that chaotic era, though countless details still eluded him.
And those records…
They were riddled with contradictions, moralized judgments, and evasions—the usual "Spring and Autumn penmanship." Hardly trustworthy.
He double-clicked a file on his desktop—the summary of urgent problems he had compiled through the night.
Question One: Resources
Anything thrown into the diorama box expanded two hundredfold in length, width, and height. Volume increased proportionally; weight too—though the exact figure was beyond the skills of a liberal-arts major like him. A fifty-gram egg became several hundred tons.
By this calculation, feeding a handful of miniature people cost almost nothing. He could easily support all forty-two villagers, let them eat well, even thrive.
But supporting hundreds of thousands?
Or millions?
Protecting them, feeding them?
He would go bankrupt in the real world.
So the question was unavoidable:
What exactly was his goal?
To save only these forty-two?
To rescue as many Ming commoners as possible?
Or—at the most ambitious—save the entire dynasty?
If it was one of the latter two, then his personal finances were utterly insufficient. His goals needed re-evaluation.
Question Two: Protection
The late Ming was a land of war and chaos. The tiny people could die at any moment—from the imperial army, from the Jianzhou Jurchens, from rebels like Li Zicheng or Zhang Xianzhong.
Meanwhile he had to eat, sleep, shower, perhaps go on dates. He couldn't stand watch over the diorama twenty-four hours a day.
What if he stepped out to buy groceries and returned to find all forty-two villagers massacred—
the box transformed into a wasteland of corpses?
A very real possibility.
Therefore:
He had to improve their self-defense capabilities.
Question Three: Visibility
The diorama box—2.5 meters long, 1.5 meters wide—corresponded to only 500 meters by 300 meters inside their world. It barely covered Gaojia Village and its surrounding fields.
Anything beyond the visible area lay outside his direct influence.
Was there any way to expand his field of view?
This, however, was a metaphysical problem. Only time could answer it.
For now, he would focus on the first two issues.
As a man who still considered himself halfway decent, Li Daoxuan naturally couldn't limit his care to these forty-two villagers. If possible, he wanted to save as many suffering commoners as he could… and if fate allowed, perhaps even save the entire nation.
Therefore—
He couldn't rely solely on dropping food into the box.
That would create nothing but a population of pampered, dependent layabouts.
He needed the miniature villagers to grow their own food and rebuild their own lives.
And that meant—
He had to give them water.
With water, there could be vitality.
But how?
Using the kitchen faucet?
Ridiculous. A water stream enlarged two hundredfold would be a flood, not a blessing.
A sprayer? A humidifier?
The finest mist available online produced droplets 0.3 millimeters in diameter. After passing into the diorama world, they would become six-centimeter water balls—dense enough to flatten half the village.
He scanned his room.
His eyes landed on his Lock&Lock container.
Perfect.
He held the plastic box over the virtual map of the miniature world—found a patch of open ground beside the village—and nodded in satisfaction.
Then he reached down with his hand and dug.
Instantly, he carved a massive crater into the earth of Gaojia Village.
Early Morning
The villagers rose with the dawn.
Ordinarily they would have gone out searching for wild vegetables, but after receiving over a hundred massive grains of rice and several colossal cabbage leaves, they no longer needed to scramble for food.
So they turned to chores—
Weaving bamboo baskets, sharpening knives, mending clothes…
Gao Yiye, too, meant to patch her worn tunic. She stepped outside with needle, thread, and a small stool. Just as she was about to sit beneath the morning light to thread her needle—
She heard a rustling sound beside her house.
She turned—and froze.
It was San Sier.
"Huh? Why are you still in Gaojia Village?"
Last night, after feeding him per the Heavenly Lord's instruction, she had warned him not to speak of anything he had seen and then sent him back to the county town.
But after witnessing millstone-sized rice grains and house-sized cabbage leaves—phenomena he couldn't comprehend but found profoundly awe-inspiring—San Sier decided to linger a bit longer.
He had stepped out of her home, lain down under the eaves… and fallen asleep.
As a pampered county scribe, he had never woken this early in his life. Startled awake by Gao Yiye's voice, he blinked groggily.
"Huh? It's morning already?"
"I told you to go back to the county after dinner," Yiye said.
San Sier rubbed his eyes.
"Eh? Why didn't I go back? This must be what scholars call: utter confusion."
Before he finished, Gao Yiye's expression changed.
She saw it—
A colossal hand descending from the heavens, gouging a huge piece of earth from the ground beside the village. The earth trembled; dust flew. A massive crater yawned open.
San Sier followed her gaze.
He couldn't see Li Daoxuan's hand—only the earth suddenly collapsing, soil and stones lifting into the air as if dragged by an invisible force.
The world shook.
San Sier's mind went blank.
"W-what? Did I wake up too suddenly? Should I… go back to sleep?"
He even forgot his usual four-character summaries.
The villagers all rushed toward the disturbance.
Yiye hurriedly leapt to her feet and shouted:
"Everyone, stop! Do not disturb the Heavenly Lord while He works His divine magic!"
The villagers froze.
She turned back and watched solemnly. The Heavenly Lord's giant hand carved several more cuts into the ground, forming a massive rectangular pit—over ten zhang long, five zhang wide, eight zhang deep.
Then the hand produced a large transparent box, lowering it from the sky. It settled perfectly into the pit as the surrounding soil packed tightly around it.
San Sier and the villagers couldn't see the hand—but they could see the enormous transparent container descending gently like a heavenly artifact, landing precisely within the newly carved crater.
Everyone stared, dumbstruck.
Li Daoxuan dusted off his hands.
"Excellent. Reservoir completed."
He picked up a cup of water and slowly poured it into the Lock&Lock container.
Inside the miniature world—
The sky suddenly split with a roaring waterfall. A colossal torrent descended from the heavens, crashing into the transparent reservoir. In moments, the container was filled to the brim.
The villagers stood speechless for a very long time.
At last, San Sier murmured:
"It is as if the Silver River falls from the Ninth Heaven…"
Gao Yiye blinked.
"That's more than four characters."
San Sier clutched his head.
"No poem shorter than this could describe such grandeur!"