Chapter 557: A Wild Meteor Falls On An Ordinary Day
And yet, as the world so often arranged things, what followed ran contrary to all expectation.
For a time after this, Han Yi's life in Zhu Village was smooth and untroubled.
He wanted for neither food nor clothing. In his leisure hours, he drew upon the Xuan Bird Feather within his dantian to absorb the heavenly providence drifting through the world.
When the village came under attack from monsters of neighboring villages, he made quiet use of his authority over heavenly providence—summoning wind and rain, stirring up sand and stone—helping to repel several waves of enemies.
His standing in Zhu Village grew accordingly. The village monsters constructed a tall stone building as his residence and assigned him ten hulking guards for his personal protection. They even wished to present him with the most sacred maiden in all of Zhu Village.
One look at her cat-headed, human-bodied form sent a wave of revulsion through Han Yi. He firmly declined.
Just as he was beginning to settle into the long-term role of "Divine Child," an incident occurred.
One night, he jolted awake for no apparent reason.
The surroundings were utterly silent, yet a profound unease gripped him, and his heart hammered without cause.
He rose quietly to investigate... and went cold with horror. His ten personal guards, who should have been at their posts through the night, had vanished without a trace.
Something was badly wrong. He didn't stop to gather his belongings. He simply ran.
That was when he discovered that while he had slept, nearly a hundred masked soldiers in black had completely surrounded his dwelling.
By the weak, flickering light spilling from within, Han Yi could just make out that these soldiers' bestial characteristics were more prominent than those of the Zhu Village folk.
They were still humanoid, but their limbs were thick with power, their hands warped into forms closer to a demonic beast's claws.
They were here for him. There was no question.
A sense of imminent danger crashed over him. Gritting his teeth, Han Yi mobilized every scrap of heavenly providence he had absorbed during his time here.
Just as the soldiers were sweeping the area for his trail, a streak of blazing light split the sky, illuminating the night in an instant.
A massive fireball came hurtling down directly toward Zhu Village.
The black-clad soldiers froze, stunned.
The sleeping villagers jolted awake in panic, staring helplessly up at the apocalyptic sight unfolding above their heads.
Han Yi, having sensed the complete depletion of the heavenly providence he had painstakingly accumulated, had already hidden himself in a corner beneath a sturdy, massive rock.
He had believed the meteorite he summoned with all his strength would surely crush the black-clad soldiers to death.
Yet no one could have anticipated what happened next.
Faced with certain death, one figure among the soldiers let out a heaven-shaking roar.
His body swelled to several times its previous size in an instant. He launched himself from the ground with tremendous force and shot into the air, charging directly at the blazing meteorite.
Boom!
In a violent explosion, the figure slammed back to earth even faster than he had risen, bloody and mangled, barely recognizable as a whole form.
But the meteorite's trajectory had shifted, if only by a fraction.
It now hurtled straight toward te center of Zhu Village, where the dwellings were most densely packed.
Kaboom!
The earth shook. In an instant, Zhu Village was reduced nearly to ruins, the air filled with unending cries of anguish and despair.
The black-clad soldiers had dodged the meteor's direct impact, but they could not escape the devastation of its landing. They too suffered heavy casualties.
Han Yi, having braced himself in advance with a sliver of residual heavenly providence as a shield, came through largely unscathed.
He knew this place was no longer safe. Taking advantage of the darkness and chaos, he slipped out of Zhu Village alone.
Only after putting more than ten li between himself and the village did he begin to let his guard down.
Then he felt the rush of wind at his back. He threw himself aside in a panic, but a fraction too slow. An invisible blade of wind carved a deep gash across him.
Gritting his teeth against the searing pain, Han Yi spun to face his attacker.
He recognized the face immediately. It was Si, the High Priest of Zhu Village.
Han Yi put on a show of furious indignation, demanding an explanation. In truth, he was quietly and frantically drawing upon heavenly providence, searching for any opening that might let him survive this.
Perhaps believing Han Yi was already cornered with nowhere to run, Si did not press the attack. Instead, his face twisted with resentment as he laid bare the motive behind his ambush.
It turned out that ever since Han Yi had begun performing miracle after miracle, Si, once the most revered figure in the village, had gradually found himself with nothing left to do.
It wasn't hard to understand.
A priest's primary role was to serve as the villagers' intermediary with the divine: conveying prayers upward and proclaiming any edicts received in return.
But with Han Yi present, a being who could perform miracle after miracle and who was close to a god made flesh, why would anyone bother with a distant go-between when the divine itself walked among them?
Stripped of his role as interpreter of heaven's will, Si lost everything that had once defined him. Every scrap of honor and status he had accumulated was swallowed up by Han Yi.
He watched Han Yi move into the grand palace. He watched the villagers drop to their knees in fearful reverence whenever Han Yi stepped outside.
Jealousy took root in his heart like a slow poison.
Han Yi had proven to possess godlike power. Even so, the thought of deicide planted itself in Si's mind and would not leave.
But no one in Zhu Village would ever support such a thing. So he looked elsewhere.
Kang Village lay a little over ten li away, and it was considerably more prosperous and powerful than Zhu Village. The bestial traits of its inhabitants were also noticeably more pronounced.
Yet the two villages had never come into serious conflict. The wilderness was vast, its resources seemingly without end, and whatever small disputes arose between them were usually resolved through negotiation.
Si's covert visit changed all of that.
He went to the Kang Village chieftain and revealed that a deity had descended upon Zhu Village. More than that, he warned that under the deity's protection, the Zhu Village chieftain's ambitions had begun to swell.
The man intended to use the deity's power to sweep through the land and crown himself Emperor of the Wilderness, a campaign that would inevitably be drenched in blood.
Unwilling to stand by while so many lives were lost, Si had come in secret, hoping to persuade Kang Village to eliminate Han Yi, the root of this whole deception carried out in a deity's name.
After much persuasion, the Kang Village chieftain came to agree: allowing a descended deity to remain in Zhu Village's hands was far too dangerous to permit.
And so, after more than ten days of planning, with Si feeding them information from within, Kang Village made its move. The chieftain led a force of roughly a hundred elite warriors, quietly surrounding Han Yi's chambers under the cover of darkness.
Si had warned him of the descended deity's power to call down wind and rain. But the chieftain was supremely confident. His warriors had carved their way through mountains of corpses and seas of blood. They did not fear blades or swords. What were wind and rain to men like them?
Then the sky rained meteors, and the chieftain's understanding of the world was shattered entirely.