Rain Falls Through the Long Night

To be honest, by Yin Yunze's standards, after the relentless bombardment of modern special effects, this rudimentary setup made for a garbage performance with almost nothing worth mentioning apart from Sun Qin's efforts.

As the one directing it all, Yin Yunze found it so awkward he wanted to dig his toes into the ground.

And yet these utterly crude effects, which barely even qualified as special effects, left every villager rooted to the spot.

When the products of technology spanning several eras descended upon the ancients, it was a higher-dimensional strike.

Besides, even if Sun Qin's movements were clumsy and stiff, and she stumbled through the dance, the villagers had barely seen a proper dance before. With the lighting and music enhancing her performance, Sun Qin was already more magnificent than anything they could have imagined.

After waiting a moment and hearing none of the jeers he had imagined, Yin Yunze finally breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing that everyone's attention had been drawn to Sun Qin's dance, he began using the Illusion Technique to support her.

The reason Yin Yunze had chosen to use such crude lighting and music rather than the more effective Illusion Technique was entirely because moving a rainstorm to this world required an enormous amount of the Power of Incense Offerings.

Using the Illusion Technique alongside Sun Qin's performance to fool everyone would consume not only a considerable amount of incense offerings, but also a tremendous amount of effort.

To ensure nothing went wrong with the important business, Yin Yunze could only save what he could on these little details.

The effect of the Illusion Technique Yin Yunze was using now, however, was very simple.

Yin Yunze merely drew a bank of dark clouds across everyone's vision, covering the moon and stars above their heads.

In fact, calling them dark clouds was giving this Illusion Technique too much credit. After all, Yin Yunze could create the layers of dark clouds.

More precisely, Yin Yunze had merely drawn a sheet of black cloth between the crowd and the sky. Only because it was nighttime, and the black cloth blocked the moonlight, had no one spotted the flaw.

As for special effects like lightning and thunder, Yin Yunze dismissed the idea as soon as he thought of it. Things were hard enough already, so why give himself more work?

As the moonlight disappeared, the people below also noticed the change in the sky.

"The moonlight's gone!"

"Clouds! Such a huge bank of clouds!"

"It really worked! We've prayed for rain!"

As the crowd whooped and cheered, what Yin Yunze felt most directly was their Incense of Faith, which had begun to grow rapidly.

In the space of a few breaths, it had increased by almost as much as it usually did in an entire day.

At that moment, the dance came to an end.

Sun Qin was breathing a little heavily, but she had not forgotten her part. She shouted, "The Dragon Lord summons clouds to nourish Clear Creek, the Fox Immortal manifests divine power and sends the rain pouring down! Let the people never forget the hardship of drought; kowtow in thanks to the gods, and your hearts shall know! Kneel! Pray for rain!"

With Yin Yunze's help, Sun Qin's doggerel, neither one thing nor the other, rang in everyone's ears.

Sun Qin was the first to kneel on the wooden platform. Immediately afterward, everyone dropped to their knees in a rustle.

At that moment, there was no scheming against one another. Everyone's thoughts were utterly pure: they hoped for the rain, more than half a year overdue, to fall.

Sun Qin, too, was a little nervous as she looked up at the sky.

Although she trusted Yin Yunze and had already helped him test small-scale rainfall several times,

now that the moment had arrived, Sun Qin still could not suppress her nervousness.

After all, an entire village was waiting eagerly below the platform.

If she botched this, Sun Qin would probably have a hard time finding a foothold in Clear Creek Village ever again.

And just as before, Yin Yunze did not disappoint Sun Qin this time either.

The next moment, Sun Qin heard raindrops striking her mask. Then, without warning, the drops grew dense, falling on everyone present.

"It's raining! It's really raining!"

"Lord Fox Immortal really can bring rain!"

"At last, there's water!"

Although this world was entering summer, the weather had not yet truly turned hot.

And after dark, the temperature began to drop.

As the icy rain from the real world fell on them, everyone, young and old, men and women alike, could not help shivering.

Even so, at that moment, no one thought of fetching rain gear or running under a roof for shelter.

Everyone welcomed this rain, the first in more than half a year, with great excitement. In the downpour, even the elders who were usually stern and unsmiling spun and leaped to release their joy.

But while everyone rejoiced, they also kept Sun Qin's instructions firmly in mind, praying for rain in their hearts without stopping for a moment.

Sun Qin had warned them from the start that if they stopped praying to Yin Yunze midway, the rain would stop as well. How long the rain lasted depended entirely on how long they could keep praying.

Thus, however excited and happy they were, no one became so carried away that they forgot to pray.

Watching the scene, Yin Yunze was also very happy.

Yin Yunze could feel that, as the rain fell, every villager in Clear Creek Village had taken a direct step up in their level of faith in him. In that instant, most of them reached roughly the same level as Sun Qin and Zhao Wan had before.

The radar map marking believers with points of light was now covered in lights the size of soybeans.

And because they were gathered together, the lights were so dense that they seemed to form a curtain of light.

In turn, a veritable ocean of Incense of Faith compared with before was pouring toward Yin Yunze in an endless stream.

What made Yin Yunze less than happy was that he could not claim the slightest bit of this vast quantity of Incense of Faith. Not only that, he also had to hand over everything he had saved up before.

Every last bit of Incense of Faith Yin Yunze had on hand now had to be devoted to transporting rainwater from the real world.

The rain seemed to have arrived with great force, but at first it could actually cover only an area of about a dozen meters around the wooden platform.

That was just barely enough to encompass all the villagers present. Only as the villagers' Incense of Faith increased could Yin Yunze spread it outward, step by step.

This process, which could only be described as moving at a turtle's pace, took Yin Yunze almost another half hour.

At last, Yin Yunze barely managed to bring all of Clear Creek Village within the rain's reach. At the same time, he brought the income and expenditure of Incense of Faith to a relatively steady rate.

But after all that work, seeing the whole of Clear Creek Village shrouded in a curtain of rain gave Yin Yunze a trace of accomplishment amid his exhaustion.

After spending a month, Yin Yunze had finally fulfilled his original promise.

He had said he would bring rain to Clear Creek Village, and so he would bring rain to Clear Creek Village.

Never mind how Yin Yunze had done it. Just say whether or not this was rain!

At the same time, Yin Yunze was quietly relieved that he had not been lazy. Instead, he had wisely gone to these deserted mountain woods at night as the site for transporting the rainwater.

If he had done it in the city, rainwater disappearing over such a large area would probably have caused quite a sensation!

What followed required no more effort from Yin Yunze. He only needed to maintain a dynamic balance between the rainwater and the villagers' Incense of Faith.

But whether fortunately or unfortunately, the rain lasted longer than Yin Yunze had imagined, and the villagers' longing for it far exceeded his expectations as well. The rain fell for an entire night.

Even though Yin Yunze had slept in advance during the day to prepare himself, after working through the night, he still found his eyelids beginning to droop.

When the sun in the real world broke across the sky, the rain, which Yin Yunze had come to find an ordeal, finally stopped.

Of course, even if it had not stopped, Yin Yunze was not going to continue.

For one thing, he was truly too tired to go on. For another, rainwater disappearing over an area the size of a village would be far too easy to notice in daylight.

When that happened, Yin Yunze, alone in these mountain woods, would instead look far too suspicious.

As the rain stopped, the villagers who had celebrated all night felt their excitement fade, and exhaustion set in.

"The rain has stopped, and the rite is complete! Everyone, come before me!"

As the rain stopped, Sun Qin reappeared on the wooden platform at just the right moment and announced the end of the rain.