July 10, 2023. Summer. Shuangqing City.
The heat outside felt less like weather and more like a punishment, the kind of oppressive, unmoving furnace air that made the entire city seem as though it had been shoved into a gigantic oven and forgotten there, while inside a cramped apartment on an upper floor, Li Daoxuan finally clicked the shutdown button on his computer with the solemn gravity of a man concluding a battle that nobody would ever thank him for.
He rubbed his temples hard, as if physical pressure might squeeze out the exhaustion lodged somewhere behind his eyes, then let himself collapse backward into his chair in a posture that could not accurately be described as sitting, because it resembled instead the slow disintegration of a human being into fabric and despair.
"Finally done."
Outside, the sky had already gone completely dark.
Today was his birthday.
He had intended to take the day off, maybe order something expensive enough to feel mildly irresponsible, maybe pretend for a few hours that he was not a freelance tool for other people's urgency, but the client's merciless message had arrived like a decree from an invisible emperor.
Finish it today.
So he had finished it today.
He stared at the ceiling for a long while, letting the silence press down on him, and in that quiet he asked himself a question that had been circling his mind more frequently as the years passed.
Is this life actually happiness?
The question did not demand an answer, because deep down he already suspected what the answer might be, and that suspicion was precisely why he did not wish to examine it too closely.
After lying there in defeated contemplation for quite some time, he finally forced himself upright and shuffled toward the door, because even a man in existential doubt still had to deal with basic logistics.
There, occupying the narrow space just inside the entrance like an oversized silent witness, sat a massive cardboard delivery box.
It had arrived that afternoon.
He had noticed it when returning briefly to grab a drink, but work had swallowed him whole again before curiosity could. On the side of the box, written in simple letters, were the words: Happy Birthday.
Nothing else.
No sender.
No company logo.
No explanation.
He frowned slightly.
Which friend had sent it?
After thinking for a while, he realized that the list of candidates was depressingly short. He did not exactly maintain a wide social circle. In fact, if one were being brutally honest, there was really only one person likely to do something like this.
"Old Cai?" he muttered.
Apart from Cai Xinzhi, who else would remember?
Now that the overtime battle was over, he finally had the chance to see what his lone birthday gift actually was.
The delivery box was enormous, nearly the size of a refrigerator. He struggled with the tape, tearing it open with more force than elegance, peeling back layers of cardboard until the contents revealed themselves.
Inside was a gigantic diorama box.
It was roughly three meters long and more than a meter tall and wide, so large that when he carefully dragged it into the living room and laid it flat on the floor, it dominated the space like a piece of theatrical scenery that had wandered into the wrong reality.
Through the glass panel on top, he could see an entire scene constructed within.
An ancient village.
Not the kind of ancient village one might expect from a decorative display meant to impress guests with delicate craftsmanship and poetic nostalgia, but a broken, crumbling place where the houses sagged as though tired of standing, thatched roofs hung in tatters, and yellow sand seemed to swallow everything in a perpetual sigh of desolation.
Li Daoxuan stared at it for a long moment.
Then he complained out loud.
"Other people get pavilions and waterfalls. Rock gardens. Scenic mountains. Why do I get a ruined village in the middle of nowhere?"
He leaned closer to the glass.
"Is this trying to comment on my aesthetic taste?"
Just as he was contemplating whether this was an elaborate joke at his expense, the wooden door of one of the dilapidated houses inside the village slowly creaked open.
He froze.
A tiny figure stepped out.
It was less than a centimeter tall.
Even at that minuscule scale, he could see that the figure had long flowing hair, marking it as a young girl. The detailing was astonishing. Her face was delicate, almost pretty, though her body was so thin it gave the uncomfortable impression of prolonged malnourishment.
He blinked.
The figure moved.
Not mechanically stiff.
Naturally.
"Electric toy?" he murmured.
If it was, it was incredibly advanced. The movements were fluid, almost alive. He felt a flicker of admiration for Cai Xinzhi's generosity, because something like this could not have been cheap.
The tiny girl carried a bamboo basket even smaller than she was, walked out of the village, and stepped into the vast expanse of sandy yellow ground beyond. She knelt and began digging.
He squinted.
Too small.
He hurriedly searched through his drawers until he found a magnifying glass, returned to the diorama, and peered through it.
Only then did he see clearly.
She had dug up a grass root.
The girl moved frantically across the sandy ground, sometimes scraping up another root, sometimes picking up a withered branch and peeling bark from it, occasionally finding a few precious green leaves and placing them into her basket with an expression of careful satisfaction, as if each scrap were a treasure granted by reluctant earth.
She eventually returned to the village, entered her tiny hut, and before long a thin trail of smoke rose from its miniature chimney.
Li Daoxuan angled the magnifying glass toward the small window.
Inside, he saw the girl and a middle aged woman sitting together, holding chipped bowls and performing the unmistakable motions of eating.
"Bark and roots," he murmured.
Understanding dawned.
This diorama must be depicting a famine year in some historical dynasty, a grim portrayal of commoners' suffering meant to remind him that modern comfort was not something to take for granted.
It was, admittedly, a rather intense birthday gift.
Feeling unexpectedly moved, he pulled out his phone and dialed Cai Xinzhi.
"Old Cai," he said as soon as the call connected, "this birthday gift of yours is impressive. Very educational. I like it. Thanks."
On the other end came a confused voice.
"What gift? Wait. Is it your birthday today?"
Li Daoxuan stiffened.
"…What?"
Before he could process that response, a strange noise erupted from inside the diorama box.
He lowered his phone slowly and turned.
Outside the village, a crowd of tiny figures had appeared from nowhere, rushing forward in a chaotic swarm. They wore tattered clothing and carried rusty blades, spears, and crude weapons. Some even held pot lids as shields. Others wore makeshift wooden armor strapped to their thin bodies.
Bandits.
They stormed into the village, shouting.
At first the sound was faint and jumbled, like the whispering of insects, but Li Daoxuan quickly shut the doors and windows of his apartment, blocking out the hum of the modern world until he could make out their words.
"Villagers! Bring out your grain! Hand it over now! If you refuse, I'll kill you all!"
The village doors remained tightly shut.
Through the glass, he saw the girl and the middle aged woman huddled together inside their hut, trembling.
"This is absurdly realistic," he muttered.
The bandits began kicking doors open, dragging out tiny villagers. The villagers wailed.
"We have no food!"
"Even if you kill us, we have nothing!"
A bandit raised his blade and brought it down on a villager's neck.
A spray of red liquid burst forth.
The villager fell.
Li Daoxuan inhaled sharply.
He was oddly relieved that these were only figures. If this had been real history, it would have been unbearable.
One bandit strode to the door of the girl's hut and kicked it open.
Inside, the girl's voice rang out for the first time.
"Great King, please spare us. We truly have nothing. Look. We eat grass roots. It's all grass roots."
Her voice was delicate, soft, painfully weak.
The bandit spat.
"Useless trash. If you have no grain, I'll chop you up and eat your flesh."
The girl screamed.
The middle aged woman rushed forward and shielded her daughter.
"Spare her!"
The blade flashed.
Red liquid sprayed.
The woman collapsed.
The girl threw herself onto her mother's body, sobbing.
The bandit raised his knife again.
At that moment, something in Li Daoxuan snapped.
Without thinking, he tore open the lid of the diorama box, reached his hand inside, bent his index finger, and flicked.
"Smack."
The bandit shot through the air like a projectile, flying from the center of the village to the sandy ground outside. It landed heavily, its tiny neck twisted at an unnatural angle, and lay motionless.
Li Daoxuan stared at his finger.
"…Oops."
He peered closer.
"I think I broke the mechanism."