Year 1627 AD. The seventh year of the Tianqi Reign. Great Ming Dynasty. Shaanxi Province. Chengcheng County. Gaojia Village.
It was summer, and the outdoor temperature pressed close to forty degrees.
Shaanxi had gone years without rain. Grass and trees had withered and scorched. Yellow sand stretched endlessly in every direction.
Gao Yiye had not eaten a full meal in a very long time.
She was a child born under an unlucky star. Her father died when she was too young to understand death, leaving her and her mother to cling to each other for survival. Poverty forced maturity upon them early, and Yiye helped with every farm chore imaginable, working alongside her mother to scrape by on the edge of existence.
But these past two years, even that fragile balance had shattered.
As the drought intensified day by day, the small river beside the village dried up into a cracked scar. The well water remained solely for drinking, since there was not enough left to irrigate the fields. The soil yielded nothing. Not a single grain of wheat could grow.
Gao Yiye had no choice but to leave the village every day to dig wild vegetables.
Eventually, even those withered and died.
Mother and daughter resorted to stripping bark from trees and digging up bitter grass roots. They were no longer living. They were merely struggling to breathe, staring into an abyss with no visible path forward.
And yet, as if fate were not cruel enough, it decided to kick them while they were down. Or like people often said, when God closes a door for you, He also casually welds your window shut.
Life was already so hard, yet bandits still came to rob them.
Gao Yiye collapsed over her mother's fresh corpse, screaming until her voice broke. Tears streamed down her dirty face, mixing with the dust of the dying village.
Standing over them was a bandit, his face twisted into a grotesque, predatory grin.
That woman will feed the brothers for two or three days, he thought, eyeing the corpse with cold calculation. If I chop up this little girl too, that is another few days' worth of meat. Hehe.
In times like these, human flesh was still flesh, right? Just another resource.
He raised his rusty saber, aiming directly at the back of Yiye's neck.
At that precise moment, the sky convulsed.
Clouds churned violently overhead. From within the swirling grey masses, a colossal hand descended, moving with terrifying speed toward the earth below.
Gao Yiye felt something block the sunlight and looked up in shock.
Then she witnessed a scene she would never forget for the rest of her life.
The giant hand reaching out from the clouds bent its index finger above her and flicked.
SMACK!
With a sound like cracking thunder, the bandit who had been about to kill her was launched into the air.
He flew fast and far. He took off from beside Gao Yiye, cut across the sky, flew over the entire village, soaring like a red dragonfly in the blue sky, until he reached the yellow sand outside the village. Then he crashed down with a thud. Every bone in his body shattered. His neck twisted to one side. He was dead beyond any doubt.
From the clouds came a low rumble, accompanied by a voice that sounded both majestic and furious, echoing like divine judgment.
"Despicable bandits."
Then the hand withdrew into the clouds and disappeared.
Gao Yiye forgot how to cry. She stared blankly upward, her mind unable to process what had just occurred.
"Fuck, what happened?" Another bandit nearby shouted, panic rising in his throat. "Why did Brother Liu suddenly fly away? How far did he go?"
Another bandit called out, "I don't know either. I just saw him suddenly fly out."
"Damn it, what hit him? How did he fly so far?"
"Was it this little girl?"
The remaining bandits gathered around Gao Yiye.
She sat on the ground, sorrowfully holding her mother's corpse. Her gaze was blank as she looked at the dozens of bandits surrounding her. She did not think of running. She did not think of resisting. She only did not understand. Such a huge hand had appeared and flicked the bandit away. Could they not see it? Why suspect her? I am just a starving girl. How could I possibly do such a thing?
The bandit leader asked fiercely, "Bitch, what did you do just now?"
Gao Yiye shook her head blankly.
"Not talking?" The bandit leader raged. "Fine, I have plenty of ways to make you talk. Don't blame me then."
He took a big step forward and raised the rusty blade in his hand.
Gao Yiye waited for death in sorrow.
But just then, from the clouds, another giant hand reached out. It made the exact same motion as before, bending its finger and flicking.
SMACK!
The bandit leader screamed and flew backward more than ten zhang, dozens of meters. He landed heavily. His bones broke throughout his body. He was dead beyond any doubt.
The bandits froze in absolute terror.
"What sorcery is this?"
"Damn, our leader... he flew backwards and died!"
"It's her! It must be her!"
"Witchcraft! Definitely witchcraft!"
"You... what demon magic are you using?"
The group flew into a rage and shouted wildly at Gao Yiye, their cries filled with anger, panic, and fear.
This time, Gao Yiye understood.
They cannot see the hand.
Only I can see it.
She lifted her head toward the sky. Through a gap in the dispersing clouds, she glimpsed something faint, a man's face suspended high above, looking down at the mortal world like a deity observing ants.
Slowly, gently, she lowered her mother's body to the ground.
Then, she knelt.
She pressed her forehead against the hot, dusty earth, bowing deeply toward the sky.
"Tianzun..." she said, her voice trembling but clear. "Please save us."
---
Back in his apartment, Li Daoxuan frowned deeply.
He had intervened twice now, flicking away two plastic bandits. Internally, he was cursing himself for being so immature. A grown man getting angry at toy figurines? Pathetic.
But then, he saw it.
The tiny girl inside the diorama looked up.
For a split second, Li Daoxuan felt a chill run down his spine. It was not just imagination. He felt as though their eyes met. Hers were filled with complex emotion: grief, hope, and desperate plea.
She bowed. She begged.
"Tianzun, please save us."
Something in Li Daoxuan's chest tightened painfully. The absurdity of treating them as toys vanished. The raw humanity of her suffering pierced through the glass.
"Life is already this hard for you," he muttered, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl. "And you still choose cruelty? You murder innocents for sport?"
He glared at the remaining bandit figures surrounding the kneeling girl. Anger surged within him, irrational and fierce.
"You don't deserve to be called human. You don't even deserve to be plastic."
His patience snapped.
"All of you. Die."
Instead of flicking them one by one, Li Daoxuan raised his entire hand.
He brought his palm down toward the diorama box.
From the perspective of the bandits, the apocalypse arrived without warning.
They had just watched their leader vanish into the sky. They had just seen the girl kneel and pray to heaven.
Then, the atmosphere changed.
A massive shadow blotted out the sun. Wind roared, whipping the yellow sand into a frenzy, creating a vortex that blinded them. But when they looked up, terrified, they saw nothing descending. Just darkness.
And then, SMACK.
An invisible, crushing weight slammed down from the sky.
One bandit near the front was flattened instantly. Pressed into the earth by a force equivalent to a mountain falling on him. His body exploded outward, becoming a smear of blood and bone paste against the dirt.
"What...?"
"How did he die?"
SMACK.
Another bandit was crushed into a human pancake, sticking firmly to the ground.
SMACK.
Another.
SMACK.
SMACK.
SMACK.
The unseen pressure continued, methodically erasing them one by one. There was no escape. No shield could withstand the weight of a human palm scaled up to this size.
Within seconds, no sound remained in Gaojia Village.
The yellow earth was stained crimson. Every last bandit lay dead, reduced to pulp beneath the invisible footprint of a god.
Gao Yiye opened her eyes. She saw the carnage. The monsters were gone.
She gathered her mother's body into her arms once more.
"Hiks... hiks... Mother..." Tears streamed down her face, not just from grief, but from overwhelming awe.
She looked up at the clearing sky.
"The Heavens have opened their eyes."
" He has avenged you.."