Siap Bang. Kita lanjut Chapter 2, full humanized, narasi panjang reflektif, dialog pendek dan tajam, tanpa em dash, tetap setia isi aslinya, tone ironis tipis dan dramatis.
Chapter 2: The Heavens Have Taken Notice
The year was 1627, the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, deep within the Great Ming Dynasty, in a place so small that history books would never bother to underline it: Gao Family Village, Chengcheng County, Shaanxi Province.
Summer again.
The heat was merciless, climbing toward forty degrees as if determined to burn the last trace of moisture out of the land, while Shaanxi, already abandoned by rain for years, lay stretched beneath a sky that offered only light but no mercy. Vegetation had long since withered into brittle dust. The earth had cracked open like old pottery. Yellow sand rolled endlessly across the horizon, swallowing fields, roads, and hope with equal indifference.
Gao Yiye had not eaten her fill in a very long time.
She was a child acquainted with misfortune early. Her father had died when she was still small enough to believe that adults were invincible, and from that moment onward it had been only her and her mother, clinging to one another like two thin reeds in a violent wind.
Poverty had shaped her faster than childhood ever could. She learned to rise before dawn, to carry water, to weed fields, to endure hunger without complaint. Together, mother and daughter survived by sheer stubbornness. Not comfortably. Not safely. Just barely.
But over the past two years, even that fragile balance had begun to crumble.
The drought worsened day by day. The small river beside the village shrank until it was nothing more than a scar in the earth. The well water became too precious for anything beyond drinking. Fields lay barren. Seeds had nowhere to take root.
Every day, Gao Yiye walked beyond the village in search of wild vegetables.
Later, even the wild vegetables disappeared.
Mother and daughter turned to stripping bark from trees. They dug up grass roots with bleeding fingers. They boiled whatever they could find, pretending it was food, pretending tomorrow might be better.
There was no visible path to life.
And as though fate were not satisfied with simply starving them, it sent bandits.
Gao Yiye collapsed over her mother's freshly slain body, her thin shoulders shaking as grief tore through her like a second blade.
The bandit who had killed her mother grinned.
The middle aged woman would feed his brothers for two or three days. If he chopped up the little girl too, that would be another few days' rations. In times like these, flesh was flesh.
He chuckled.
He raised his rusty saber.
He aimed at the back of the girl's neck.
And then the sky convulsed.
The clouds seemed to ripple, as if something enormous were pushing through them from above, and in the next instant a colossal hand burst forth, descending with terrifying speed toward the village below.
Gao Yiye felt the sunlight vanish.
She looked up.
What she saw would brand itself into her memory forever.
The gigantic hand stretched down from the heavens, vast and incomprehensible, and its index finger bent slightly.
Thwack.
The bandit flew.
He did not stumble. He did not fall.
He flew.
He shot backward from beside Gao Yiye, streaking across the air, soaring over rooftops and across the entire village like a red dragonfly flung by divine irritation. He traveled so far that he became a tiny speck before crashing onto the yellow sand beyond the village.
The impact shattered every bone in his body. His neck twisted grotesquely to one side. He did not move again.
From the sky came a faint rumble, like distant thunder rolling behind clouds, and a voice that seemed both near and impossibly far echoed with unmistakable anger.
"Despicable bandit."
Then the hand withdrew.
The clouds closed.
The sky returned to silence.
Gao Yiye forgot how to cry. She stared upward, her mind blank.
Not far away, another bandit shouted, "What just happened? Why did he fly like that?"
"I didn't see anything!"
"What hit him?"
"Was it the girl?"
They began to surround her.
Gao Yiye remained seated on the ground, clutching her mother's body. She did not attempt to flee. She did not attempt to resist. Her mind was trapped on a single impossibility.
The hand had been enormous.
How could they not have seen it?
The bandit leader stepped forward, face twisted in suspicion.
"Little girl. What did you do?"
Gao Yiye shook her head slowly.
"You won't speak?"
He raised his saber.
"I'll make you."
She lowered her gaze.
So this was how it would end.
Then the sky split again.
The colossal hand reappeared, moving with the same casual certainty as before. The index finger bent.
Thwack.
The bandit leader screamed as he was launched backward dozens of yards, crashing to the ground in a heap of broken bones and torn flesh. He died instantly.
The remaining bandits froze.
"What is happening?"
"Why did our leader fly like that?"
"It's her!"
"Sorcery!"
They shouted at Gao Yiye, their voices trembling with anger that barely concealed terror.
This time, Gao Yiye understood something they did not.
They could not see the hand.
Only she could.
She lifted her eyes toward the clouds.
Through a faint opening in the drifting white, she thought she glimpsed a face. A man's face, suspended in the sky like a god observing mortals from above.
Carefully, she lowered her mother's body to the ground.
Then she knelt.
She pressed her forehead to the earth.
"Tianzun," she whispered, voice shaking but clear, "please save us."
In his apartment, Li Daoxuan frowned deeply.
He had already flicked two of the plastic bandits, annoyed at himself for being emotionally invested in what was clearly just an elaborate toy. A grown man getting angry at figurines. Ridiculous.
Then he saw it.
The tiny girl inside the diorama looked up.
For a brief, impossible moment, he felt as if her gaze met his.
Her plastic eyes were not empty. They were filled with grief. With pleading.
She knelt.
She prostrated herself.
"Tianzun, please save us."
Li Daoxuan felt something in his chest tighten painfully.
"Life is already this hard," he muttered. "And you still murder them?"
He looked at the remaining bandits inside the box, a surge of anger rising in him that was embarrassingly real.
"You don't deserve to be human," he said coldly. "You don't even deserve to be plastic."
He raised his hand.
"All of you. Die."
He slammed his palm down onto the bandits.
From the bandits' perspective, the world ended without warning.
They had just watched their leader fly into the distance. They had just seen the girl kneel and cry out to Heaven.
Then the sky roared.
Wind howled across the village, whipping yellow sand into a furious storm, though when they looked upward they saw nothing descending.
Then it came.
Crush.
One bandit flattened instantly, pressed into the earth by an invisible, incomprehensible force. His body burst into a grotesque mass.
"What happened?"
"How did he die?"
Crush.
Another was smashed into pulp.
Crush.
Another.
The air filled with screams.
They ran in all directions, but there was no escape. One after another, they were struck by the unseen weight from above, crushed into bloody stains upon the sand.
Crush.
Crush.
Crush.
Until none remained.
The yellow earth of Gao Family Village was stained red.
The wind slowly calmed.
Gao Yiye gathered her mother's body once more into her arms, tears flowing silently down her hollow cheeks.
"Mother," she whispered, voice trembling with awe and grief, "the Heavens have taken notice."
"They have avenged you."