A wild funeral and a storm presage an attempt on Li Kao's life by a man disguised as a gambler. Number Ten Ox dumps the body in a canal. A footnote remarks that volumes two through five of the "Memoirs of Number Ten Ox" were seized and burnt by the Imperial Censors. Later in the Wineshop of One-eyed Wong, a low dive where classes mix, they encounter Lady Hou, a poet whose poems have been "attributed" to Yang Wan-Li. She attempts to murder a bureaucrat, but is knocked out by Wong. The trembling abbot of a humble monastery in the Valley of Sorrows approaches and asks them to investigate the killing of a monk and the theft of a strange manuscript from its library. He also says that The Laughing Prince, who has been dead for about 750 years, has arisen from his grave.