Heaven finally opened its eyes

AD 1627, Tianqi Seventh Year, Great Ming, Shaanxi, Chengcheng County, Gao Family Village.

Summer. Blistering heat. The outdoor temperature approached 40 degrees Celsius.

Shaanxi had gone years without rain. Plants withered and scorched, and yellow sand stretched endlessly.

Gao Yiye had not eaten her fill in a very long time.

She was an unfortunate child who had lost her father at an early age, leaving her and her mother to depend on each other. Their impoverished life had taught Gao Yiye to be sensible from childhood, and she helped her mother with all sorts of farmwork. Working together, mother and daughter had managed to scrape by.

Over the past two years, however, their lives had grown increasingly difficult.

As the drought worsened day by day, the little river beside the village had dried up. The wells held barely enough water for drinking, let alone irrigating the fields. Not a single grain could be grown.

Gao Yiye had no choice but to leave the village every day to dig up wild greens to eat.

Later, even the wild greens withered. Mother and daughter could only strip bark and dig up grass roots. They had reached the point of struggling merely to stay alive, with no way forward in sight.

Yet when God closed a door on you, he would weld your windows shut while he was at it.

Life was already this hard, and somehow bandits still came to rob them.

Gao Yiye threw herself onto the body of her mother, who had just been hacked to death, and wailed.

A cruel smile spread across the bandit's face. The middle-aged woman he had just killed would feed his brothers for two or three days. Chop up this little girl too, and that would be another two or three days of rations. Heh heh heh.

He raised his rusty blade and swung it down at the back of the girl's neck.

Just then...

The winds and clouds in the sky shifted!

An enormous hand suddenly reached out of the clouds, descending swiftly until, in a flash, it was beside the bandit and Gao Yiye.

Sensing something block the sunlight, Gao Yiye looked up in astonishment.

Then she witnessed a sight she would never forget for the rest of her life.

The enormous hand emerging from the clouds curled its index finger above her. With a snap, it flicked the bandit away as his blade swung down.

He flew fast, and he flew far. Launched from beside Gao Yiye, he streaked across the sky and over the entire village, flying on and on like a red dragonfly against the blue sky. Only when he reached the yellow sands beyond the village did he fall with a thud. Every bone in his body shattered on impact, his neck twisted to one side. He could not have been more dead.

A faint rumble of wind and thunder came from the sky, and an imposing, furious voice cursed, "Damn bandits."

Then the hand whisked back into the clouds and vanished.

Gao Yiye even forgot to cry. She stared blankly up at the sky.

"What just happened?" another bandit shouted nearby. "Why did he suddenly go flying? He flew so far!"

Another bandit cried, "I don't know either! All I saw was him suddenly flying away."

"Damn it, did something hit him? How did he fly that far?"

"Did this little girl do it?"

All the remaining bandits closed in around Gao Yiye.

Gao Yiye sat on the ground, sorrowfully cradling her mother's body, her eyes vacant as she watched the dozens of bandits approaching. She neither thought of fleeing nor resisting. She simply could not understand. Such an enormous hand appeared and flicked that bandit away. Couldn't they see it? Why do they think I did it? How could I possibly do something like that?

The bandit leader demanded viciously, "Little girl, what did you just do?"

Gao Yiye shook her head blankly.

"Won't talk?" the bandit leader snarled. "I've got plenty of ways to make you talk."

He took a large step forward and raised the rusty blade in his hand.

Gao Yiye waited sorrowfully for death...

But just then, an enormous hand shot out of the clouds again. With exactly the same motion as before, it curled a finger and flicked. The bandit leader screamed and flew backward more than a hundred feet, hitting the ground hard. Every bone in his body broke. He could not have been more dead.

The other bandits recoiled in shock. "What happened?"

"Why did the boss suddenly fly backward and die?"

"It was that little girl again!"

"Sorcery! It must be sorcery!"

"You... what sorcery did you use?"

The furious men shouted at Gao Yiye in a chaotic chorus, their voices filled with anger, panic, and fear.

This time, Gao Yiye understood. None of them can see that enormous hand. Only I can.

She looked up toward the clouds and saw, faintly through a gap, a man's face suspended in the sky, like a god gazing down upon the mortal world.

She laid down her mother's body and knelt toward the sky. "Heavenly Deity, please save us."

Li Daoxuan's brow furrowed deeply.

He had intervened twice to help the little plastic girl, flicking apart two little bandits in succession. He was inwardly berating himself for being immature-a living person actually losing his temper with plastic toys-when he suddenly saw the little plastic girl glance up at the sky. In that instant, he even felt their eyes meet.

The plastic girl's gaze was complex, brimming with emotion!

She sank gracefully to her knees, bowing her head to Li Daoxuan as she pleaded, "Heavenly Deity, please save us."

Li Daoxuan felt the little figure strike the softest place in his heart.

"Life is already so hard. Why did you have to murder them so cruelly?" Li Daoxuan vented the frustration in his chest at the remaining little bandits. "You don't deserve to be human. You don't even deserve to be plastic people. Die, all of you!"

He slapped his palm down at the little bandits inside the Scenery Box!

The bandits looked utterly bewildered, with no idea what was happening.

They had just watched their leader fly away, far into the distance, and land stone dead. Then they saw the girl prostrate herself on the ground, apparently begging Heaven to save her.

The very next instant, a rumble of wind and thunder suddenly sounded overhead. Something seemed to be falling from the sky at great speed, driving an incomparably powerful gust before it. The yellow sand on the ground swirled into a raging sandstorm, yet when they looked up, they could see nothing.

Smack!

A bandit was suddenly crushed flat.

Something heavy had pressed down on his head and flattened his entire body into a human pancake. Flat as could be, he became a mass of mangled flesh, blood spilling all over the ground.

The bandits beside him were scared out of their wits and shrieked, "What happened?"

"How did he die?"

"What's going on?"

Smack!

Another bandit became a meat pancake, plastered firmly to the ground.

Smack!

Another bandit...

Smack!

Smack!

An invisible crushing weight kept flattening the bandits into meat pancakes, one after another.

The surviving bandits fled in every direction in panic, but it did fuck-all to help. Smack, smack, smack... one after another, one after another, every last bandit became a meat pancake, their blood staining the village's sandy ground red.

Gao Yiye gathered her mother's body into her arms again and sobbed, "Mother, Heaven finally opened its eyes. It avenged you."