Episode 13 — Two Suns: Hou Yi & Chang’e

Rain, requested

Erniu’s danger — a town being frightened by Master Wu into demanding his sacrifice — sends Bajie to the East Sea to pray for rain. Rain would answer the two suns with heaven’s mercy and undercut the charlatan’s whole market in fear. Bajie goes to the Dragon Palace, to the people who owe him nothing and the girl who owes him everything, to ask for weather.

The Second Dragon Princess is waiting for exactly such a visit. She sets a trap — and the trap is not physical. She sows discord, working on Bajie until he misunderstands Little Dragon Girl: her acts reframed, her loyalty recast, until the man who came to ask a favour is poisoned against the one person in the palace who would have given him anything. Bajie leaves the Dragon Palace furious — at Little Dragon Girl.

The rain she cried

Here is the episode’s quiet devastation. Little Dragon Girl, heartbroken, cries — and her tears are rain. The rain Bajie prayed for falls on the town, and it falls because the girl he just stormed out on is weeping over him. He never learns it. He believes the gods helped him: heaven answered his prayer, the palace relented, something up there was kind. The truth — that the mercy came from the heart he had just been tricked into suspecting — stays entirely on her side of the story.

Suitors for the dragon girl

The palace, meanwhile, moves on its own track. A disciple of Yue Lao, the god of marriage, arrives with a formal request: the South Sea Dragon Prince seeks Little Dragon Girl’s hand. Her marriage is now an item of inter-palace diplomacy, proposed by the proper channels, at the exact moment the girl’s heart is breaking over a pig-man who thinks the gods, not she, sent the rain. The machinery of a suitable marriage begins closing around her the way the machinery of the Zhu wedding once closed around Fengchun — and with the same indifference to where her heart actually is.

Two missions at the Moon

Heaven’s own arrangements are no cleaner. On the Jade Emperor’s orders, Taibai Jinxing goes to the Moon Palace to persuade Chang’e to descend to earth and awaken Hou Yi’s spirit, so the extra sun can be shot down. That is the official mission. What actually happens to the envoy is unofficial: Taibai sees Chang’e, and secretly falls for her beauty. The god sent to fetch the archer’s wife down to her husband comes back compromised by his own heart.

And then the Queen Mother makes it worse. She secretly summons Taibai and gives him an order that serves no one but herself: when Chang’e descends, he is to arrange things so that Chang’e stays on earth forever. The goddess of the Moon must not come back. Heaven’s rescue plan for the world now contains a private annex, written by its queen, for her own benefit — the wife is to wake the archer, save the sky, and then be stranded below, permanently, because the Queen Mother wishes it.

Thoughts

Every kindness in this episode is misrouted. Bajie prays for rain and receives it from the girl he is angry at, and thanks the wrong heaven for it. Little Dragon Girl gives the town its miracle and receives a marriage proposal from a stranger’s prince for her trouble. Taibai is sent to reunite a legendary couple and falls for the wife en route; his queen then orders him to make the reunion permanent in the worst direction — not the couple restored to heaven, but the wife exiled to earth. The show’s moral physics are consistent: the systems (palaces, courts, marriage brokers) process people toward arrangements; only individuals ever aim at each other. The Second Princess, notably, causes the episode’s central wound without lifting a weapon — she merely edits what Bajie believes. In a story built on borrowed bodies and mistaken faces, she has found the cheapest disguise of all: a misunderstanding.

Next

Chang’e descends with a spy in her arms, a goddess at a flatbread stall, and an archer who only knows his dough — Episode 14.