Episode 22 — Sun Wukong & the Medicine King

A new cast of powers

The third movement of the story opens with new faces, and the guide introduces them as a group: Sun Wukong — the Monkey King himself, the most famous troublemaker in the mythology; the Medicine King, Ding Tian Yao Wang; and the Medicine King’s disciple, Xiao Jun. A pig-man who has just spent two arcs inside other legends should know what it means when this legend walks in. The story is about to be about monkeys.

The lovesick patient

Bajie’s condition is unchanged by the saving of the world: he is lovesick for Chang’e, who is back on the Moon where she belongs, and his love has nowhere to go. Little Dragon Girl — still at his side, after the knot, the quarrels, the spilled water and the accusation — takes him to the Medicine King. Read that errand carefully. The girl who loves him escorts the man she loves to a doctor, to be cured of loving somebody else. Her devotion has reached the stage where it will pay any price denominated in her own dignity, and the story keeps presenting her with the invoices.

At the Medicine King’s, his disciple Xiao Jun sees Little Dragon Girl — and falls for her at first sight. The triangle machinery starts up instantly, in a new location, with new personnel: the doctor’s apprentice, smitten on sight with the dragon girl who is nursing the pig-man who is pining for the Moon.

Kidnapped to the mountain

Then Sun Wukong appears, and does what Sun Wukong does. He drags Bajie and Little Dragon Girl off to Flower-Fruit Mountain — no consultation, no appeal — and sets Bajie to cleaning. The Monkey King’s hospitality is conscription: the hero of the last two arcs, the creature who digested a golden pill and defeated a cat demon, is put to work with a broom in the monkey kingdom, while heaven’s most wanted fugitive organises his mountain.

The laboratory

The episode’s darkness arrives as a revelation about the mountain’s other resident. The Medicine King has been experimenting on the monkeys of Flower-Fruit Mountain. The healer is a vivisector; his medicine is built on the mountain’s own population. Xiao Jun, his disciple, has been quietly sabotaging the work from inside — secretly freeing some of the experimental monkeys. And the experiments have left their specific ruin behind: young monkeys who drank the Medicine King’s forgetfulness potion have lost their memories.

The guide lays the pieces without underlining them, so let the recap do it: a doctor who experiments on his patients’ people; an apprentice whose conscience works in secret against his own master; a generation of young monkeys walking the mountain with their pasts dissolved by a potion. Flower-Fruit Mountain, the freest place in the mythology, has a laboratory in it — and the Monkey King, one suspects, has not yet been told what has been done to his subjects in his own kingdom.

Thoughts

The new arc inverts the old one’s geometry. The Chang’e story was about distance — earth and Moon, husband and wife, a goddess stranded and a baker asleep. This one opens with proximity and rot: a healer inside the mountain, poisoning the mountain’s young, while the mountain’s king is away being a legend. Xiao Jun is the episode’s quiet hinge — the disciple who frees the monkeys in secret is the same young man who just fell for Little Dragon Girl at first sight, and the story has a pattern for people like him: the ones who act against their own house out of conscience tend to pay for it in person. As for Bajie with his broom: the show loves demoting him at the start of every arc, and there is a logic to it. He is the audience’s measuring stick. However powerful the new players are — and a Medicine King with a laboratory is a different order of menace from a cat demon — the story will keep asking what it all looks like from the height of the pig with the broom.

Next

Ladders to heaven, an old monkey released, and a disciple’s body turned into a weapon of five poisons — Episode 23.