As time passed, Perturabo gradually, inevitably came to see through the frailty and dullness of mortals.
"Father, I don't understand."
One sweltering afternoon, Perturabo stood halfway up a slope. His brows were tightly furrowed as he looked down at several burly men in the village, chanting in rhythm as they braced their shoulders against heavy logs and struggled to repair a house.
"All they need is two sets of fixed pulleys and one set of movable pulleys, and they could save eighty percent of their effort. Yet it never even occurs to them." The Primarch's deep voice carried an arrogance born of his overwhelming intellectual superiority. "Why are they so stupid? Are their skulls filled with mud?"
Liu Zhipeng was chopping firewood in the yard. Hearing this, he lowered his axe and wiped his sweat with the towel draped over his shoulder. He did not rebuke Perturabo for his arrogance, but merely turned his head calmly.
"Wisdom can sometimes be a lonely island, my child. But don't overlook the real earth beneath your feet."
Not long afterward, Creek Valley Village suffered a drought unlike any seen in a hundred years.
For four consecutive months, the sky was like an iron pot scorched through by a raging fire, and not a single drop of rain fell. The stream dried up, its bed cracking into fragments of every size. Crops that had once flourished now crumbled into scorched yellow powder at a touch. The villagers knelt in despair on the burning ground, kowtowing and praying to gods that had never existed. Even the strongest man in the village collapsed beside the road from severe dehydration, his lips cracked, barely clinging to life.
Perturabo stood halfway up the mountain, coldly surveying the hell below. An equally cold calculation was unfolding in his