Looking west to the Jade Pool, the Queen Mother descended; purple qi came from the east, filling Han Pass

Mahākāla was Sanskrit for "Great Black," a wisdom protector revered in Tibetan Buddhism and the foremost of all Dharma protectors. Though fierce of countenance, he harbored profound compassion within and manifested incomparable might without. In the herders' eyes, he was a guardian deity.

The thangkas many herders liked to hang in their homes depicted Mahākāla. To them, this Buddhist wisdom protector could bless them, safeguard their property, relieve their hardship and poverty, and fulfill all the good wishes of sentient beings.

By subduing that wild yak, Chen Jue had protected this herding family's property. And to the family, his feat of physically holding off a thousand-jin wild yak made him seem like a deity endowed with boundless supernatural strength. That was why they had respectfully called him a living "Mahākāla."

Hearing their respectful address, Chen Jue waved to them and set off on foot into the mountains with the wild yak beside him.

December's bitter winds cut to the bone. The scenery in the Qilian Mountains was half gray-black, half snowy white.

The weeds buried beneath the snow had dried out and blackened. They were crumbling into mud, becoming soil and returning to the earth. Such was nature: following the seasonal rhythms of all things, life continued without end, its cycles beginning anew.

As stated in "Sima Qian's Self-Introduction" in Records of the Grand Historian: "Spring brings birth, summer brings growth, autumn brings harvest, and winter brings storage. This is the great guiding principle of Heaven's Way."

Yet Chen Jue and the wild yak beside him strolled into that uninhabited world of ice and snow against the wind and flurries, as though advancing into adversity and stepping into that cycle themselves.

From a thin covering of gray grit and gravel to increasingly deep snow, the man and yak left