Sangji and two attendants were pasting talisman papers beside the livestock shed.
"Will these really work?" Sangji's wife asked from beside him, half doubtful.
"They will!" Sangji said firmly. "Only today did I see what truly boundless supernatural powers were. He was an extremely young, exceptionally exalted Lama-"
"-you might not believe it, but when I handed him the straw mat from beneath the cow, he predicted the cow's coloring and even described the terrain and mountains west of the village."
Sangji's wife said in some disbelief, "Could he have worked it out because there was cow hair on the straw mat?"
"Then how could he have known the lay of the land in our Shali Village?"
"Perhaps he's been here before," Sangji's wife said after some thought.
His wife's words made Sangji hesitate, and he covered his face for a moment. If she was right, that Lama might have known through analysis and guesswork.
If that was the case, the talisman papers he had given him might be no help either.
Sangji abruptly looked up and told an attendant, "Go beneath the great red rock at the foot of the western mountain and see whether there are any yak remains."
The attendant accepted the order, mounted a horse, and rode off.
Sangji's wife said, "Sangji, your younger brother Sangzhu is here."
"What's he here for!" Sangji detested this younger brother, who always idled his days away. "Tell him to get lost," he said irritably.
While alive, the brothers' parents had doted on their younger son, so they had given him the family's larger Manor. But Sangzhu had proved a disappointment, taking up gambling and losing the entire Manor.
Whenever Sangzhu ran out of money, he would come to his elder brother's home to sponge off him. Sangji therefore loathed