The dust still hung thick in the air, choking the sunlight.
Gradually, as the haze began to clear, a figure emerged from the cloud of debris. Wushang Mingwang's corpse lay sprawled beside an enormous handprint. The earth beneath it had been crushed inward, leaving a deep impression where the divine blow had landed.
From atop the village walls, the sight was no longer simply terrifying. It was overwhelming, the kind of sight that demanded reverence.
The original forty-two residents of Gaojia Village had witnessed this miracle once before. But seeing it again did nothing to make it ordinary. If anything, the second display struck them even harder.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
One after another, they dropped to their knees. Their foreheads pressed against the dry earth, as though their legs had suddenly forgotten how to support them.
Then the newcomers followed. The Bai family's tenants and guards, who had only just witnessed Tianzun's might, began kneeling as well. Whatever pride they had brought with them crumbled.
Master Bai, meanwhile, remained rooted to the spot.
He had spent his entire life cultivating dignity, wearing it like armor. Yet watching his own servants bow before the divine figure as though their lives depended on it made that armor feel rather flimsy. He glanced to the side and saw Shan Shi'er and his wife kneeling among the common folk, their heads lowered.
A low murmur rose from the crowd, spreading until it seemed to vibrate through the very ground beneath their feet.
"Tianzun is mighty!"
At that moment, the curtain of the main carriage suddenly fluttered open. Master Bai's wife and son climbed out. They took one look at the scene, then immediately threw themselves to the ground. They didn't even spare a thought for the mud staining their fine silk robes.
Master Bai looked around.
In the entire Gaojia Village, he was now the only person still standing.
That was an awkward position to be in, to say the least.
Think carefully, he told himself. This is no demon, nor some fraudulent idol. Tianzun is a genuine immortal.
Besides, the immortal had just manifested his power in front of everyone. And his name sounded properly Taoist.
During the late Ming Dynasty, Taoist robes had become something of a fashion statement among scholars. Taoism was respectable, even fashionable. Kneeling before a Taoist deity was hardly an act of heresy. One might even call it an expression of refined cultural taste.
After finding himself a perfectly respectable justification, Master Bai finally bent his knees.
He sank to the ground and joined the others.
"Tianzun is mighty!"
High above, in the so-called heavens, Li Daoxuan watched the sea of people bowing before him.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He raised a finger, intending to tell them to stand, when a strange sensation suddenly stirred in his chest.
It felt like a subtle resonance.
Then he saw it.
Tiny specks of light began separating from the bodies of the kneeling villagers. They floated upward like fireflies emerging from their hiding places, drifting toward the glass walls of the diorama box.
One person. Then another. And another.
Nearly three hundred people, each contributing a tiny mote of light.
The specks gathered at the corners of the box, swirling together before merging into its frame.
FLASH!
A brilliant golden radiance burst from the enclosure, so bright that Li Daoxuan instinctively raised a hand to shield his eyes.
When the light finally faded, he lowered his arm and stared at the box in disbelief.
Five new buttons had appeared along one corner of the frame. Each bore a directional label: East, South, West, North, and Center.
Beneath them, a line of crisp white text slowly appeared.
[Salvation Index: 325]
A familiar excitement washed over Li Daoxuan.
It was the unmistakable thrill of a gamer who had just unlocked a hidden mechanic, discovered a secret menu, or stumbled across a cheat code the developers had somehow forgotten to mention.
"You're kidding me," he murmured. "Is this really what I think it is?"
He reached out and pressed East.
The miniature world shifted.
Gaojia Village slid toward the left side of his vision, while the empty space to the right filled with previously unseen terrain. Hills and winding paths appeared, expanding the visible landscape.
He pressed East again.
The village moved even farther left, revealing another stretch of land.
Li Daoxuan's eyes lit up. He immediately switched to North and began pressing the button with growing enthusiasm.
The village drifted southward. The northern landscape gradually came into view, revealing a small hillside dotted with skeletal trees. Their trunks had been stripped almost bare, leaving behind the unmistakable signs of a population struggling to survive.
It was Zheng Daniu's wood-chopping hill.
A place he hadn't been able to see before was now sitting right there in front of him.
"The view actually moves!" Li Daoxuan exclaimed, laughing. "The map has expanded!"
Everything suddenly made sense.
Whoever had given him this mysterious box wanted him to save the people of the late Ming Dynasty. And apparently, the reward for doing so was a larger world to explore.
At first, saving a hundred villagers hadn't been enough to trigger the expansion. But after repelling the bandits and protecting Master Bai's caravan, the Salvation Index had finally crossed whatever threshold the system required.
In other words, he had unlocked the ability to explore previously hidden territory.
Li Daoxuan continued pressing North, eager to see what else lay beyond the village. Unfortunately, after a while, the view refused to move any farther.
He tried again, but nothing happened.
"Already hit the limit?"
He pressed Center instead.
The entire view snapped back into place, with Gaojia Village positioned neatly in the middle of the box.
Curious, Li Daoxuan grabbed a ruler and measured the distance on the screen. Taking the diorama's scale of 1:200 into account, he estimated that the newly accessible area extended roughly 500 meters in each cardinal direction.
It wasn't an enormous expansion, but the important discovery wasn't the extra land itself. It was the mechanism behind it.
As long as the Salvation Index continued to rise, the world inside the box would keep expanding.
Li Daoxuan immediately opened a notepad file on his computer and began recording his findings.
Notes:
· Center Point: Gaojia Village. The visible radius is determined by the Salvation Index.
· Navigation: Directional buttons move the viewing area. The scale remains fixed at 1:200.
After finishing his notes, he leaned back in his chair and stretched until his spine gave a satisfying series of cracks.
His excitement was still bubbling, but fatigue was beginning to catch up with him.
Originally, this had just been a hobby. He could watch over a few miniature humans, occasionally lend them a hand, and enjoy the strange experience of raising a civilization inside a box. It was entertaining, harmless, and came with no particular obligations.
But this Salvation Index was a different matter.
It dangled a carrot in front of him.
Save more people, unlock more territory.
Before long, the whole thing could turn into an endless grind, with him optimizing every rescue operation just to squeeze out another handful of points. Compassion, of all things, was being turned into a progression system.
Li Daoxuan sighed and rubbed his temples.
"I'm not letting this become another job."
He glanced at the blinking cursor on his screen, then made up his mind.
"I'll save whoever I feel like saving. If the map expands, that's great. If it doesn't, so be it. No need to stress over it."
With that settled, he turned his attention back to the box.
Down below, the villagers' initial awe had begun to fade, and the practical business of surviving had resumed.
They were already cleaning up the battlefield.
The dead bandits had to be dealt with, and in a famine-stricken world, wasting anything was practically a crime. The villagers stripped the clothes from the corpses, not out of cruelty, but simple necessity. Every scrap of fabric had its use. Weapons were gathered and sorted, while the copper coins found in the dead men's pockets were divided among the lucky ones who happened to discover them.
As for the naked bodies, they were dragged to a hillside, thrown into a shallow pit, and covered with soil.
No funeral rites or prayers. Just a hurried burial.
Thanks to Li Daoxuan's intervention, the villagers had suffered remarkably few casualties. Considering the size of the attacking force, the outcome was nothing short of miraculous.
There was, however, one exception.
A guard had slipped while pouring boiling oil down from the wall. Some of the scalding liquid had splashed onto his leg.
He was sitting on the ground now, his trouser leg rolled up. The injured skin had turned red and swollen, with several angry-looking blisters forming across the surface. He groaned in pain, tears cutting through the dust on his face.
The villagers had gathered around him, pouring bucket after bucket of cold water over the burn.
It offered a little relief, but not much.
They had no medicine, no ointment, not even a proper salve to treat the wound.
Li Daoxuan frowned as he watched.
Then he opened the drawer of his desk.
His fingers brushed past pens, charging cables, and assorted odds and ends before finally finding what he wanted.
A tube of Qianglie Brand Burn Ointment.
Industrial-strength, inexpensive, and surprisingly effective.
He squeezed a tiny dab onto his fingertip. To his eyes, it was barely a speck, smaller than a sesame seed.
But to the people inside the box, that little bit of ointment might as well have been a gift from heaven.
Li Daoxuan carefully lowered his hand toward the miniature world...