The toy store was packed wall-to-wall with "weapons," none of which looked remotely useful.Li Daoxuan stood before the shelves like a disappointed general inspecting incompetent recruits.
Toy pistols? Absolutely not. Put inside the diorama box, they'd magnify into artillery cannons hundreds of meters long—great for scaring a dragon, catastrophic for tiny villagers.
A rubber-band gun? Ten centimeters in the real world, but inside the box it would balloon into a twenty-meter siege monstrosity. Impressive, yes—useful to villains the size of a grain of rice… no.
If he truly couldn't find anything workable, he'd have to downgrade to "DIY Stone Age." Toothpicks, chopped into one-centimeter stubs, becoming spears. Primitive, embarrassing, and guaranteed to turn the Gaojia villagers into the lowest-tier mob in any strategy game.
What they desperately needed was projectile power—something that let untrained villagers hit enemies without needing aim, discipline, or talent.
Projectiles… projection… throwing…
Li Daoxuan froze. His eyes sparked.
There, in the dusty, lonely corner of the store—the exiled island where rejected toys go to die—sat a box of miniature plastic trebuchets.
Three centimeters long. All plastic. Mechanism simple enough to make Zhuge Liang cough blood in the afterlife.
Perfect.
"Why didn't they make these when I was a kid?" he muttered, picking up the entire box. At the register he asked, "Boss, how much?"
"One yuan each."
"One yuan? For this magnificent three-centimeter industrial masterpiece?"
The boss shrugged. "Take the whole box. Fifty for twenty-five."
Deal. Scan. Beep. Victory.
Back home, Li Daoxuan sat before the landscape box and immediately saw Gaojia Village in full-scale pre-battle frenzy.
The female villagers split into two divisions:— Team Kitchen, preparing a "last-meal-before-war" worthy of hungry conscripts.— Team Oil, heating rapeseed oil in a pot the size of a sesame seed, which somehow still managed to bubble like a witch's cauldron.
The men hauled leftover stones and timber from building the "Daoxuan Tianzun Shrine," dragging them to the city wall as rolling logs and crushing rocks.
Atop the wall, a gaggle of villagers crouched around Bai-xiucai, listening intently as he demonstrated the proper "stab-the-enemy-in-the-face" posture.
Even the elderly and children knelt piously within the shrine, praying for divine protection with a sincerity that would shame seasoned monks.
Li Daoxuan grinned. This was entertainment.Good thing he hadn't slapped those bandits to death earlier—this was far better than binge-watching any drama.
Time to give the tiny folks a little "military aid package."
He spoke: "Gao Yiye, tell everyone to stand ready. I'm sending down weapons."
Gao Yiye froze, then exploded with joy, shouting, "Everyone, attention! Tianzun is bestowing weapons upon us!"
The entire population of Gaojia Village—over a hundred souls—instantly straightened, eyes shining with fanatical awe.The young men abandoned Bai-xiucai mid-lecture, which nearly caused him to cough blood from outrage.
Teaching you little brats how to defend the city and you ignore me the moment the sky burps?He'd heard countless village shamans claim "the heavens will send divine weapons," usually followed by rusty cleavers retrieved from a warehouse.He fully expected the same scam.
But then someone shouted, "It's coming! Look!"
A murmur swept the crowd.
"Kneel to Tianzun!"
The Gaojia villagers instantly prostrated themselves. Bai-xiucai's group, who had never encountered anything like this, stared up slack-jawed.
Above them, a small cloud—no bigger than seventy feet up—billowed strangely. Something massive descended from within.
Green.Square.With… a giant ladle?
Bai-xiucai blinked like a man trying to solve a riddle written by a drunk poet. The object floated down gently, impossibly, defying all natural law.
A divine sign…?
When the contraption settled onto the ground, he finally saw it clearly: two feet long, two feet wide, square base, and a long arm holding a spoon-like sling.
"A… trebuchet?" he whispered.
He recognized it instantly, but no one else did.To the villagers, it was simply a god-forged mystery box.
Gao Yiye bellowed, "Listen well! This sacred gift is called a trebuchet. Place a stone in the spoon, pull the mechanism beside it, and it will launch the rock!"
Everyone stared blankly.
Li Daoxuan delicately placed a pebble into the spoon—what looked to him like a pill the size of a sesame ball—but to the villagers, it was a floating boulder placed into position by invisible divine hands.
They gasped.
Gao Yiye shouted, "Li Da! Tianzun commands you—stand beside the mechanism with your hammer!"
Li Da obeyed, hefting a hammer heavier than his hopes and dreams.
"Strike!" Gao Yiye roared.
Li Da slammed the bracket.
THUNK.
The boulder soared high, arcing gracefully across the entire village before crashing into the earth at the far edge.
For a breathless heartbeat, silence.
Then an eruption of cheers:
"Immortal weapon!""Divine magic!""A treasure of the heavens!"
Bai-xiucai sniffed disdainfully—though his eyes kept drifting upward."Hmph. Ignorant lot. A trebuchet on the battlefield is normally this powerful."
Pause.
"…But the one falling out of a cloud is… unusually authentic."