The golden curtain of mist that had carried Diamond Axe Kid drifting over mountain after mountain slowly unraveled, and the world below came into view. Beneath him spread a forest unlike any ordinary jungle—dense and strange, its ridgelines folding over one another like the spine of a sleeping dragon. From the peaks, columns of smoke and shimmering heat rose in steady streams, as though a volcano were moments from blowing its top. Yet all around those same peaks, the trees were bursting with blossoms and fruit the color of red glass beads. A warm breeze swept across his face carrying the scent of something sacred and mysterious—incense, maybe, or something older—marking this place as the borderland between the mortal world and the first tier of the Celestial Realm.
Diamond Axe Kid touched down soft as a feather, his chubby little feet landing on polished obsidian gravel. He tugged at his red wrapped trousers and rubbed his round belly, which had started making its opinions very loudly known.
GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GROOOWL!
"Whoa…" the boy with the topknot muttered, shading his eyes against the blazing light. His bright eyes darted left and right like a startled fawn's. "This forest is hot as a charcoal kiln. Walked all this way, ate every last rice dumpling in my bag, and now my stomach's roaring louder than thunder. Is there anybody around here who'd let me beg a bowl of hot rice?"
He hadn't taken two steps to explore when a commotion erupted from a wide stone clearing beneath a great dipterocarp tree just ahead. A crowd of villagers—men and women in patched indigo sarongs and shoulder-draped cloth—were prostrating themselves on the gravel, foreheads to the ground, looking absolutely terrified, like they'd seen a ghost in broad daylight.
At the center of the clearing, a figure hovered about four and a half feet off the ground. His body glowed with a faint golden light. He wore a tall, glittering crown and a gold bracelet set with jewels on his right arm. From the look of his regalia, he was no ordinary person—he was a minor celestial, a guardian of the first gate of the Celestial Realm, who had apparently snuck away from his post to come down to the mortal world. But his face was twisted with arrogance, his eyes glazed with self-importance and greed, and he was jabbing his finger at the villagers in a voice like a whip crack.
"You ignorant forest peasants! The Fire Demon Lord sleeping in the cave of the Great Peak Forest is about to wake up and breathe fire down on your village until there's nothing left but ash! Only I—a guardian deity of the Celestial Realm—can protect you!" The celestial straightened his glittering crown for effect. "If you want me to cast my divine ward over this place, bring me the five-colored sacred fruits and the gold offerings you've dug from the cave mines—right now! Whoever brings the most, I'll bless with abundant harvests. Whoever comes empty-handed, I'll curse with hellfire that burns your whole family to nothing!"
"Please, Your Divinity, have mercy on us," a village woman begged, clutching a wailing infant, tears streaming down her hollow cheeks. "This year the forest dried up, the streams ran out, there's barely enough rice to fill a pot. Whatever valuables we had, the village headman already took. All I have left is this hand-woven cloth I made to trade for food to keep us alive. Please accept it in place of gold."
"You think this rough scrap of cloth is fit to touch my divine skin?! You lowly humans—if your faith doesn't measure up, how dare you ignore a celestial command!" The deity flicked his wrist and sent the hand-woven cloth spinning up into the treetops, like a bully drunk on borrowed glory.
Diamond Axe Kid waddled right into the middle of the stone clearing. He made a show of stumbling into the shadow of the hovering deity and craned his neck to stare up at the pointy crown with wide, innocent eyes—then called out with the guileless curiosity of a divine child who had questions.
"Oh wow! Hey there, Mister Celestial! Up in the Heavens, Lord Indra always told me that a truly virtuous deity is full of divine grace—face bright and clear as moonlight through banana leaves, heart overflowing with compassion, always helping those in need. Isn't that right? So how come you look all tense and gloomy, like somebody carrying a load of wet firewood? And you just snatched that poor lady's cloth right out of her hands. Did you… borrow somebody else's crown and sneak down here to play dress-up?"
The entire clearing went dead silent. Every eye locked onto the boy with the topknot in his bright red wrapped trousers. The power-hungry deity's eyebrow twitched. He glared down at the kid, his golden aura flickering with fury and embarrassment.
"You little brat! Who do you think you are, talking back to someone who dwells in the celestial palace?!" the deity bellowed. "I am a guardian of the Celestial Gate! My word is divine truth! No mortal has any right to question me!"
"I don't have a dad, Mister Celestial," the kid said cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "The Celestial Jewel Fairy sent me down, and I brought this Diamond Axe along for the ride. Sage Fireye always told me: the more rank and power a person has, the more they're supposed to be a shelter for others—not go around mistaking a millstone for a lotus, using people's fear of disaster to bully the poor into submission just to feed their own ego. Doesn't that make you a fake deity with a thick face and a hollow heart?"
"Why you mouthy little—! How dare you use a hermit's teachings to cut me down!" The deity's face shifted from gold to boiled-shrimp red. He jabbed a finger at his two wind-soldier attendants. "Seize that child and chain him up and throw him off the volcano cliff right now! I'll show him what a real deity's power feels like!"
The two wind soldiers—bodies made of spinning gusts—lunged at the boy instantly. But Diamond Axe Kid, quick on his feet as a sparrow in a tailwind, sprang into a triple forward roll through the air and slipped away without breaking a sweat. His small frame floated up, snatched the hand-woven cloth down from the treetop, and returned it gently to the village woman—then spun around with a grin.
"Come and get me if you can, Mister Windbag Soldiers!"
FWOOSH! BOOM!
The wind soldiers overshot and crashed into each other, dissolving into a gust that sent dry leaves spinning everywhere. The great deity, seeing things going badly and his dignity crumbling in front of the whole village, gathered his celestial power and hurled a bolt of imitation golden lightning straight at the kid.
But at that exact moment, the ground beneath the stone clearing split open in a deep crack. A stench of rotten fire exploded upward—
KABOOM!
—and the Fire Demon Lord, the true terror of this region, erupted from the earth, awakened by the dark sorcery of a shadow force called the Demon of Ignorance. Its body was enormous, its skin like churning lava, its eyes blazing with living flame. It wasn't here for offerings. It was here to devour the souls of everyone present and feed its power of ignorance.
"RAAAGH! Human and fake deity alike—become fuel for my fire!" The Fire Demon Lord's roar shook the air as it unleashed a sea of flames across the clearing.
"HELP! I don't want to die! My crown is going to burn!" The deity who had been so high and mighty a moment ago now had his courage completely evaporated. His divine glow snuffed out. He tried to fly back up to the sky but caught a spray of fire that sent his wings shaking. He crawled across the ground in a sorry heap, not a shred of his great celestial dignity left.
Diamond Axe Kid took in the disaster unfolding around him—the roaring flames, the villagers' terrified cries—and the mischievous grin faded from his face. The bright light in his eyes shifted into something quieter: sorrow, and a resolve as solid as iron. He could feel the pain of innocent people caught between a raging demon and a bully who'd abused his power.
"These folks are suffering because someone big and important got too full of himself," the boy murmured softly. Then the resolve blazed up inside him. "I'm not going to let this evil fire burn away anyone else's hope."
Without another second's hesitation, Diamond Axe Kid reached back and drew the sacred Diamond Axe. He swept it in a wide arc, and the blade—carved with flowing vine patterns—blazed with a light as brilliant as a thousand stars colliding. A clean, pure white radiance burst from the axe head and surged forward, smothering the churning lava flames and turning them to cold, still stone in the blink of an eye, like clear cool water washing the scorch marks from the earth.
"The Diamond Axe's righteous radiance—extinguish the fire of greed and ignorance!" Diamond Axe Kid cried out, leaping high into the air, axe raised, ready to bring it down and end the battle of the Fire Lord's Forest once and for all!
--- *Lesson of the chapter: Power, status, and rank gained or used to bully those who cannot fight back are nothing but illusions without substance. When true disaster arrives, all that is false crumbles in an instant. Only genuine goodness and a heart that thinks of others can serve as real protection.*