Episode 1 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

A scholar and his pig

Zhu Fengchun is a kind-hearted young scholar with a scatterbrained streak, and his closest companion in the world is not a person at all. It is his little pig — a clever, expressive animal that understands him better than most of the humans around him do. The bond matters, because almost everything that happens in this opening episode, and quite a lot of what happens across the whole series, grows out of the friendship between the absent-minded scholar and the pig who adores him.

Fengchun’s household, meanwhile, is being quietly circled. His cousin Miaomiao, together with her mother and the family steward Lao Zhong, has designs on the Zhu family property, and the chosen route to it is marriage: if Miaomiao marries Fengchun, the property effectively falls under their control. The scheming is entirely one-sided. Fengchun himself suspects nothing, and his heart is not available for the arrangement anyway.

The girl from the sea

Nine years earlier, down by the sea, the young Fengchun rescued a little dragon girl. He has never forgotten her. That childhood rescue is the fixed point of his inner life — the person he still thinks of while the adults around him plan his wedding to somebody else for money.

What Fengchun does not know is that the dragon girl remembers too, and that she has now come up into the human world to find the boy who saved her. This is Little Dragon Girl — Xiaolongnu — grown up and searching for her rescuer in earnest. On her way she crosses paths with Miaomiao, which means the girl Fengchun dreams about and the cousin being positioned to marry him have met before either of them understands who the other is. The episode sets the two side by side without forcing the recognition yet: the true love searching from the heart, and the false marriage being assembled for the property.

A god comes down, badly

Heaven has its own errand running in parallel. Taibai Jinxing — the white-haired celestial official — descends to the mortal world to hunt a dangerous creature: the nine-lived cat demon. His arrival is anything but majestic. The guide describes his descent as clumsy, and that is the tone the series will keep for him throughout: a genuine god with genuine power, whose dignity rarely survives contact with the mortal world, and whose mission will shortly collide with the Zhu household in the worst possible way.

So by the end of the first episode, three separate lines are on the board. A marriage plot is closing around a scholar who loves someone else. A dragon girl is walking the human world looking for him. And a god is hunting a cat demon through the same neighbourhood — with the cat demon’s pursuer about to need, of all creatures, a pig.

Meanwhile, the pig has a problem

The episode’s closing movement belongs to the pig itself. The little animal can count, after its own fashion, and it understands exactly what the wedding will mean for it: once Miaomiao is mistress of the house, a pet pig is livestock, and livestock gets roasted and eaten. Its survival plan is to make itself indispensable first. A pig that merely lives in the yard can be eaten; a pig that works cannot. So the pig sets out to learn the most useful trade it can think of — it will guard the house, like a dog.

The effort is sincere and the results are not. Guard duty defeats the pig completely, and the episode ends with the animal worn out from its shift, still only a pig, still in danger, and still devoted to the master who has no idea how much trouble is gathering around them both. The transformation everyone remembers from this story has not happened yet. That is next episode’s business — and it begins, as everything in this household is about to, with the wedding.

Thoughts

The premiere is mostly careful setup, and it knows where its heart is: whatever the marriage plot and the demon hunt are doing, the emotional centre is a boy and his pig, and a dragon girl who crossed worlds to repay a rescue. The episode also establishes the series’ comic bargain — heaven’s representative is hopeless, the mortal villainy is domestic and greedy, and the most clear-eyed character in the house has four legs. The pig’s guard-duty failure is a small joke with a real stake under it: it is trying to earn the right to stay alive, and it cannot. Everything Taibai Jinxing does next will land on exactly that desperation.

Next

A wedding day, a rescue in the woods, and a god who makes the worst trade of his career — Episode 2 turns the pig into Zhu Bajie.