"I'm here." Xue Yuanli immediately stepped out and bowed his head.
"You go to Chang'an with that Korean man." Li Ganshun said with a sigh. "Take fifty camels, a hundred good horses, and select some gold items. Oh, and the white parrot that can chant Buddhist scriptures sent from the Western Regions. I heard that the young official of Zhao Song is also a Buddhist. Bring it to him to see... Be humble when you get there, and if necessary, promise to release the Hengshan barbarian cavalry and open the horse market... And if the Song people ask for the Dingbian Army camps that I personally took after Jingkang, I can give them to them!"
"Brother!" Hearing this, Cha Ge, who was in his forties, couldn't help but step out again. "This is aiding the enemy."
"It's just a stopgap measure!" Li Ganshun was a little annoyed. "Of course I know that the Great Bai Gao Kingdom and the Great Song Dynasty will never be at peace, but when facing hundreds of thousands of elite troops, we have to bow our heads."
Xue Yuanli bowed his head even more, and Cha Ge remained silent.
"As for the Jurchens, we cannot take Yan'an, but we must make it clear that we have no intention of opposing the Great Jin. Not only that, when the Great Jin and the Great Song really come to a showdown, the Great Bai Gao Kingdom will only support the Jin and will never have second thoughts..." Li Ganshun suppressed his frown and called out another person. "Bali Zuren... You are my Chief Censor, go and tell the Jurchens."
A Tangut civil official immediately stepped out and responded carefully.
"That's all, let's go! Prince Jin, follow me to the harem to talk!" After Li Ganshun gave this order, he felt a little impatient, and simply stood up and walked back, with only Prince Jin Cha Ge following closely behind him.
And everyone knew that the next step would be to send more troops to Hengshan, and since more troops were to be sent to Hengshan, Prince Jin would definitely lead the troops. The king took Prince Jin to the harem for a private discussion, which left both the civil and military officials speechless.
However, when Li Ganshun and his brother Cha Ge went to the harem, they did not directly discuss the matter of sending aid. Instead, they called several witches and sorcerers in the harem and asked them to burn mugwort and smoke lamb scapulas in front of the two brothers. Of course, they had to dance and cast magic on the lamb scapulas... The process was long and boring, but the two brothers said nothing and just stared at the lamb scapula in the middle of the witches and sorcerers.
After a long time, with a shout from the nearest witch, like a bolt from the blue, the dry sheep scapula finally cracked. Seeing this, the two most noble men of the Great White Gao Kingdom stood up and hurried forward, ready to take a closer look at the shape of the crack.
It turns out that according to the Xixia people's devout belief in witchcraft, this practice is called "zhibojiao". The good or bad luck is determined by looking at the cracks left by the smoke on the sheep's shoulder blade, and two cracks must be burned before it can be used... Among them, the first crack is the main crack, and the second crack on the main crack is called the guest crack, both of which are extremely important.
According to experience, once the main seam appears, the guest seam will appear immediately.
Sure enough, not long after Li Ganshun and Cha Ge arrived, they could see with the naked eye that a thinner guest seam soon appeared above the main seam. At this point, the witches and sorcerers all stopped. The witch with the loudest voice in the lead even wrapped the charred sheep shoulder bone with dry wormwood and prepared to present it to King Cha Ge of Jin, intending to let Cha Ge hold it for the king to see.
However, Li Ganshun, the ruler of Western Xia who always respected Han etiquette, could not wait at all and snatched the sheep bone directly, and took advantage of the afternoon sun coming from the direction of Helan Mountain in the west to look at the pattern... However, Li Ganshun, who usually had a high level of observation of "burning and scorching", was stunned at the first sight.
There was no other reason. Although the witches and sorcerers stopped as soon as the guest pattern appeared, they did not expect that the residual heat from the roasting took effect, or that Li Ganshun took it too quickly and used too much force... On this main seam, three guest seams, two long and one short, had appeared in succession, and each seam was unexpectedly longer and larger than the main seam, with the seams woven horizontally from left to right, which was really surprising.
"This 'Zhi Bo Jiao' is useless." Brother Cha saw that his brother looked unhappy and quickly interrupted to comfort him. "Let's make 'Sheng Ba Jiao' tomorrow..."
Shengbajiao is the second most popular form of divination in Western Xia. It mainly involves killing a sheep through a series of steps, then taking out the intestines from the sheep's stomach and making inferences based on the distribution of food and feces in the intestines.
"How could it be useless? This kind of thing should be seen from the first time..." Li Ganshun threw the lamb scapula on the ground helplessly and shook his head. "It's just that God's will made this divination beyond my knowledge, which shows how difficult it is this time."
"Just defend Hengshan." Cha Ge hurriedly advised again. "We have been fighting the Song people for a hundred years, and whoever attacks will suffer... We defend Hengshan, no matter how arrogant the Song people are, they will retreat after a while. Besides, I felt from the beginning that the Song people were just bluffing."
"You don't understand!" Li Ganshun looked down at the sheep scapula on the ground, and sat on his knees without caring about his black hands. "Our Great Baigao country has been established for a hundred years, but it is still a small country after all... For example, Li Liangfu lost more than 10,000 people in Yinshan before, and the country has not recovered until now. But what about the Song people? They lost millions of people in those years, but they were able to fight back? The Song Dynasty lost the entire Hebei and Hedong, and hundreds of state troops, but it was still so sharp. If we lose Hengshan, we will be in danger of extinction. So, even if the Song people are bluffing, what does it matter? Can we really ignore it?"
Cha Ge was also a little embarrassed.
"Now I am afraid that the emperor of the Song Dynasty is too young and will force us to fight with us. When the three kingdoms around Hengshan fight, we will be forced to send out our entire army to protect ourselves. When the Jin people see us sending out troops, they will deliberately stay across the river and intentionally consume us... This will be difficult." Li Ganshun gave up staring at the sheep scapula, stood up again, looked up at the vaguely visible Helan Mountain in the west, and shook his head more and more. "At the court meeting today, Xue Yuanli gave you and saved my face... He did not mention the disasters of Tianyou and Yongan."
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