Once everything was settled, the Village Chief waved his hand. "Hand out the rice! Everyone, eat your fill."
The forty-two miniature villagers lined up outside Gao Yiye's house to collect their rice.
Each person received ten grains of white rice, each as big as a millstone, enough to feed a family for quite a few days. Even getting the rice home was difficult. They had to set each grain on the ground and push it along, rolling it to save effort. It took a full ten trips to get all ten grains home.
After the other forty-one villagers had collected their shares, a large pile remained in Gao Yiye's house-probably several dozen grains. But no one dared say she had received too much. In the eyes of these uneducated, superstitious villagers, Gao Yiye now held the same status as a "Holy Maiden" in other religions.
A Holy Maiden was, of course, sacred and inviolable!
Every household began boiling water to cook rice.
The millstone-sized grains were too big to cook whole, so they first had to break them apart with a chisel. A dozen or so fragments would feed an entire family, young and old, but filling their bellies with nothing but white rice would have been far too extravagant. They cooked only enough to half-fill their stomachs, adding wild greens, tree bark, and grass roots to the pot. That way, one meal's worth of white rice could stretch into two.
Using his magnifying glass, Li Daoxuan peered through their windows at the mishmash simmering in their pots and shook his head. I already gave you food, so what on earth are you cooking? How can you get healthy eating like that? Aren't you taking thrift a little too far?
Should I just give them something extra?
He was about to put a piece of pork into the Scenery Box, but reconsidered. No, that wouldn't do. Giving such rich food straightaway to villagers who had been going hungry for so long might upset their stomachs and give them diarrhea. In their weakened state, a bout of diarrhea could very well kill them.
All right, all right. Take it slowly. Improve their diet a little at a time.
The food Li Daoxuan disdained was already a rare delicacy to the villagers of Gao Family Village. They happily finished cooking dinner, no longer needing to hide from their neighbors while they ate. Every household had the same food anyway, so they simply set their tables outside their doors.
Having to sneak around and hide whenever they ate had strained the villagers' relationships. Now that the atmosphere from before the famine had returned, the village grew much livelier.
"It's been so long since I've had rice this good." The Village Chief sat outside his house, shoveling rice into his mouth. "This Divine Rice smells wonderful. Much better than anything we grew ourselves. Just what you'd expect from a gift bestowed by the Heavenly Deity."
Gao Chuwu held a large bowl and ate with all his might. Young and powerfully built, he could eat more than anyone else. A dozen or so rice fragments fed an entire family, but he needed that many all by himself. He wolfed them down as though he hadn't eaten in several lifetimes, making it frighteningly easy to imagine him choking to death.
Gao Yiye sat alone on her doorstep in a daze, chewing slowly, taking ages over every mouthful. Tears streamed down her face as she ate. "Mother, if only you could have enjoyed this too."
Li Daoxuan was eating dinner as well. Today he had ordered a braised beef rice meal, which cost twenty-nine yuan including the delivery fee. A heaping bowl of rice came topped with braised beef and braised radish, along with a serving of pickled vegetables. The restaurant owner had even thrown in a small, three-hundred-milliliter bottle of cola.
Compared with what the little people were eating, his dinner beat theirs in every possible way.
He took a bite of beef, then glanced at the little people in the Scenery Box. For some reason, the braised beef rice meal he usually thought tasted awful seemed much tastier today.
After dinner, the sky gradually darkened, and the miniature villagers returned to their little houses to rest.
The entire Scenery Box became a "non-still image" again, with nothing much worth watching.
As for the bored commenters' suggestion of "peeping at the miniature women bathing," that was utter nonsense. The Scenery Box was clearly suffering a drought. The river had stopped flowing, the vegetation had withered, and the well barely supplied enough drinking water. They couldn't even irrigate their fields, let alone spare water for baths.
None of the little people in the village bathed. They even went to bed without changing their clothes.
Li Daoxuan turned his attention away from the Scenery Box and stretched luxuriously. This damned box-once he started staring at it, an entire day could slip away before he knew it.
He opened his phone and pulled up the photo he had taken that afternoon (readers who have forgotten can refer to Chapter 8). Then he opened the History and Military Forum he frequented and posted anonymously: "Everyone, take a look at this photo. The village in it is called Gao Family Village. The girl is Gao Yiye, and the young man is Gao Chuwu. There are also five bailiffs. What comes to mind when you look at it?"
Reply 1: "Those bailiffs' outfits look like something worn by Ming Dynasty yamen runners."
Reply 2: "Gao Yiye and Gao Chuwu sound very much like Ming Dynasty names, too."
Reply 3: "Exactly. I could tell at a glance that this should be the Ming Dynasty. Unfortunately, I can't tell what year."
Reply 4: "This Scenery Box is really well made. The little people are so lifelike, and it faithfully recreates the way yamen runners oppressed innocent civilians during the Ming Dynasty. Where did you buy it? I want one too."
Reply 5: "That little figure called Gao Yiye is pretty cute. I want to peep at her bathing."
Li Daoxuan replied, "Fucking idiot. Why does it always come back to peeping at women bathing?"
There was no reasoning with this bunch of ridiculous people. Li Daoxuan closed the forum, but those few replies had still given him a rough idea of what he was dealing with.
The Ming Dynasty?
Could my box actually be looking down on the Ming Dynasty?
How could that be possible?
Forget it. Time for bed.
July 13, 2023. Summer. Shuangqing City.
At seven in the morning, the temperature had already climbed to thirty-three degrees.
By noon, wouldn't the sun be hot enough to kill someone?
Li Daoxuan groggily climbed out of bed, his first glance going straight to the Scenery Box beside him.
The box had started out by the door, then moved to the living room. Before going to sleep last night, he had simply moved it beside his bed, next to his computer, so he could see it the moment he woke.
Everything inside the box looked fine. The little people were all awake.
Gao Chuwu and several young villagers were eating breakfast-a proper, filling breakfast. They were heading to the County Seat today to "invite" the Secretary over, so they needed full stomachs to get the job done. The Village Chief stood beside them, giving careful instructions.
As for the other villagers, they were carrying bamboo baskets and getting ready to go out in search of wild greens.
Li Daoxuan didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Every day, these little people look for wild greens, tree bark, and grass roots. Is there never any variety?
All right, try to understand. They're already doing everything they can just to stay alive. How could they have the energy to think about anything else?
Time to feed them today. As long as I give them food every day, their anxiety about survival will naturally ease. Only then will they have room to think about other things.
Li Daoxuan opened the refrigerator and peeled a leaf off the napa cabbage he had bought yesterday. It was a large leaf, at least forty-something centimeters long and more than ten centimeters wide. Returning to the Scenery Box, he gently placed it in front of Gao Yiye.
Gao Yiye was carrying her bamboo basket, about to head out of the settlement to search for wild greens, when an enormous hand suddenly reached down from the sky and set a gigantic cabbage leaf before her.
At a glance, Gao Yiye saw that the cabbage leaf was thirty zhang long and ten zhang wide...
P.S. Attentive readers have probably already noticed that real-world objects become two hundred times larger after entering Great Ming through the Scenery Box. Chapter 1 already stated that the little people were less than one centimeter tall. A person measuring 160 centimeters in height was only 0.8 centimeters tall inside the Scenery Box, giving a scale of 1:200. An egg five centimeters long would become ten meters long after entering the box. A cabbage leaf forty-five centimeters long would become ninety meters long, or thirty zhang. When an object's dimensions increase proportionally, its mass increases geometrically. This is a real headache for someone like me who studied the humanities. Every time I calculate the size and weight of the food, I get it wrong, so there will often be bugs. Please bear with me, dear readers.
Before you continue