Episode 10 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

Caught

The cat demon’s new plan — eat Bajie and take the pill’s power with his body — gets its first attempt. She captures him. The groom she married for a property scheme and hunted for a pill is now simply prey in her hands, held to be killed and consumed.

Back at the Zhu household, her older work is surfacing. Everyone in the house has been poisoned by her except one person — Miaomiao’s mother, the very woman who built the marriage plot with her. And the exception has begun to notice. Miaomiao’s mother is starting to suspect: the one unpoisoned person in a poisoned house, watching the daughter who came home wrong, doing the arithmetic nobody else in the family has lived long enough unpoisoned to do. The demon’s cover is developing its first crack, and it is in her own accomplice.

The great escape

Bajie’s escape from the demon is the series at its most cheerfully undignified. Held among little pigs, he eats radishes with them — a great many radishes — and then leads them out with the power the episode is famous for: a divine fart of overwhelming force. The digested golden pill has given him great power, and this is what he does with it. Heaven’s treasure, the demon’s obsession, the power a nine-lived cat demon would kill a household for — deployed as flatulence, in the service of rescuing pigs.

The joke has a shadow, though. The cat demon, thwarted, escalates to collective punishment: she threatens to kill every pig in town to flush him out. Bajie’s escape has put a price on the entire species, in his own town, and he hears about it.

Heaven explains itself

Taishang Laojun now reveals what has been underneath the whole story. Bajie is not an accident heaven is tolerating. He is a pig with a special destiny, and Taishang Laojun’s duty is to help him become human. The negligent god, the borrowed body, the daily rules — all of it sits inside a purpose heaven had for this animal from the start. Bajie was meant for this.

Armed with a destiny and faced with a death threat against every pig in town, Bajie makes the decision the destiny presumably predicted. He chooses to sacrifice himself — to give himself up so the town’s pigs live. The animal who once tried to save his own skin by learning guard duty now offers the skin itself for his whole kind.

The fight, and the verdict

It does not come to the sacrifice, because he does not go alone. With little Taibai beside him — the god-child and the pig-man, the grudge Taishang Laojun ordered them to settle between themselves being settled in the field instead — Bajie fights the cat demon, and together they defeat her. The nine-lived hunter who has driven the entire story is beaten by the two beings she poisoned, hunted and tried to eat.

Victory restores what the bathhouse explosion took. Taibai regains his powers — the god is whole again, with his authority back. And his first instinct with that authority is the old rulebook: he wants to turn Bajie back into a pig. Return the animal to animal form, close the file, restore the order of things.

He cannot. Bajie is now truly human. The destiny Taishang Laojun described has completed itself — the borrowed body, the precepts, the digestion of the pill have done their work, and the pig is a man in fact and not on lease. The one-day terms, the snout penalties, the daily probation: over. Taibai can no more unmake him than he can unkill the scholar. The episode ends with the series’ founding problem formally solved, and its hero standing human in his own right for the first time.

Thoughts

This is the hinge of the whole series, and it is quietly radical. Bajie’s humanity is not granted by heaven in the end — Taibai, heaven’s agent, reaches for the undo button and finds it gone. It is ratified by facts Bajie himself created: he carried the body honourably, he digested the pill, and at the decisive moment he offered his life for the pigs of the town — the least powerful creatures in the story, his own abandoned people. The series argues that he became human not when a god put him in a man’s shape but when he acted like the best kind of man while still thinking like a pig who protects his own. The fart jokes and the philosophy are the same show; that has always been its charm. The cat demon’s defeat closes the first movement — but a story that has just made its hero fully human has only given him more to lose.

Next

Two suns rise, a flatbread seller turns out to be a legendary archer, and heaven needs a hero it cannot find — Episode 11.