"Meat! The Heavenly Lord has given us meat!"
Gao Yiye's shout exploded across the entire village, instantly bringing High Family Village to life.
Everyone rushed over at once.
"It's chicken!"
"This is chicken breast! Sure, it's huge, but I'd never mistake chicken breast."
"With a chicken breast this big… it must've been carved off a divine chicken!"
"Definitely a celestial chicken from the heavens!"
No one in the village remembered the last time they tasted meat.
In the years before the drought, some families still raised chickens. But year after year the dry spells grew worse. When people barely had grain to survive, who could afford to feed poultry?
High Family Village had long since become a place where not even chickens or dogs survived. Aside from a bunch of starving humans, there wasn't a single living creature left.
So when this slab of meat appeared, the entire village nearly wept with joy.
Gao Chuwu immediately grabbed a knife, eager to hack off several chunks to go home and feast.
Gao Yiye stopped him, expression stern.
"The Heavenly Lord said we've eaten bland food for too long. If we suddenly eat too much meat, our stomachs won't handle it. We must eat slowly. Brother Chuwu—this warning is especially for you."
Gao Chuwu scratched his head.
"Huh? Even meat has rules?"
The village chief stepped forward.
"The Heavenly Lord must've been warning fools like Chuwu. If you eat too much and ruin your stomach, you could die. Don't give him much—he'll surely eat it all at once."
Gao Chuwu blinked.
"Eh? Why me?"
The chief instructed,
"Everyone gets one or two taels of meat. Children get half. The rest will be sliced into strips and hung to dry, or it'll spoil."
A middle-aged man spoke up, anxious.
"Chief, we don't have enough salt. If we dry the chicken without curing it, it'll spoil. Rather than let it rot, better that we just eat it. Even if I get diarrhea and die, I'd rather die full."
Gao Chuwu instantly echoed,
"Yes yes, Chief! I'd rather die from diarrhea than waste good meat!"
Hearing this, Li Daoxuan couldn't help laughing. Instead of reclaiming the extra meat and putting it in his fridge, he walked into his kitchen and fetched a bag of salt.
Right in front of Gao Yiye, he poured out a sparkling white pile—like snow falling from nowhere.
The villagers looked up, stunned. A cascade of pure white salt spilled from the sky, glittering like crushed ice, quickly forming a small mound.
Gao Yiye didn't even need to explain. She simply spread her hands.
"All these little schemes of yours—how could the Heavenly Lord not know? Don't dream of becoming fat in one meal. Now that we have salt, cure the meat properly."
"So much salt?"
"Salt is expensive!"
"To give us this much… heavens…"
"No need to buy salt for a long, long time!"
Once again, the villagers fell to their knees and kowtowed wildly toward the sky.
And thus, everyone in High Family Village suddenly had work to do.
The men raised their knives and chopped the giant chicken breast into long strips. They crushed the large sparkling salt crystals into powder, rolled each meat strip until it turned snowy white, then hung them up to dry in the wind.
The work was exhausting.
But every villager wore a smile.
By evening, cooking smoke rose from every household.
Every pot held the same thing—chicken congee.
Tiny minced bits of meat, boiled with white rice and a handful of cabbage leaves until thick and fragrant. Delicious, comforting, and gentle on the stomach.
Gao Chuwu inhaled five huge bowls.
Even the delicate Gao Yiye ate two.
Watching them, Li Daoxuan couldn't help swallowing hard. He grabbed his phone and ordered a bowl of "chicken rice soup" to steady himself.
While eating, he opened his online banking app. His savings: a little over 20,000 yuan.
Not much.
Today's custom order for the Hakka walled village already cost him 2,000.
If he wanted to continue helping the tiny villagers in the box, money would flow out like water.
He thought for two seconds, then opened QQ and clicked a contact he hadn't spoken to in half a year.
"Bro, it's Li Daoxuan. Half a year ago you asked if I wanted freelance work. I refused back then. That was… my naive youth. If you still have design jobs, I'm willing to take them. Price is negotiable."
The avatar lit up almost instantly.
"Ha! I've been waiting for this. I've got a gig right now—character designs for a game company. Four designs, five days, deadline tight. Pay is 3,000. You want it?"
Li Daoxuan replied instantly.
"I'll take it."
Dawn arrived.
A new day in Shuangqing City.
Li Daoxuan stretched, rubbing his temples as he got up.
For five consecutive days he'd worked until 2 a.m., rushing to complete the character designs. The client nitpicked details, he revised accordingly, and then they decided the first version was best after all.
Classic.
But the job was accepted, payment sent, and 3,000 yuan hit his account.
Only then did he collapse into bed and sleep like the dead until sunrise.
These five days, busy earning money to feed his "family," he barely tended to the tiny villagers—just fed them at set times and refilled the water in the Lock&Lock container. He hadn't monitored them closely.
Now free again, he decided to spend the day with his tiny "pets."
But the moment he sat beside the diorama box, he sensed something wrong.
All the miniature villagers were gathered by the pond, whispering anxiously.
He quickly shut his window to silence outside noise, pressed his ear against the box, and finally heard their tiny mosquito-like voices.
"Someone stole water. Look—the pond's water level dropped a lot overnight."
"Yeah, look here! So many messy footprints. Lots of people came to steal water last night!"
Li Daoxuan looked closely.
Sure enough—with his scale-altered Lock&Lock box acting as a pond—its water level had dropped drastically. In reality the box was 20 cm long, but magnified 200 times in their world, it became a ten-zhang-long lake.
And such a large pond had lost half a foot of water in one night.
Whoever stole it… was impressive.
Or rather, there were many thieves.
His gaze followed the messy footprints toward the village outskirts—
but the prints led straight to the edge of the diorama… and vanished.
He frowned deeply.
The biggest limitation of this viewing box was its narrow field of vision.
He could only see High Family Village.
The outside world was completely unknown, invisible.
He absolutely needed a way to extend the viewing distance inside the box.
Only then could he understand what was happening beyond the village.