Episode 15 — Two Suns: Hou Yi & Chang’e

The bodyguard commission

Taibai Jinxing gives Bajie a job, and sweetens it the way heaven sweetens everything: with a promotion. Bajie is charged with protecting Chang’e during her time on earth, and if he succeeds, there is a heavenly post in it for him. Bajie accepts happily — he would guard her for free, which is exactly why the promise works on him — and takes up his watch over her in secret.

The arrangement is heaven using the right tool for once, though not for heaven’s stated reasons. The official mission is the archer. The secret annex is the Queen Mother’s: Chang’e is not to return. And the bodyguard is a man in love with the woman he is guarding, working for the god who is also in love with her, under orders neither of them has been told in full.

The rescue that lands

Master Wu is still working the town’s fear from behind the scenes, and his trouble-making reaches Chang’e. Bajie intervenes in time to save her — the secret bodyguard stepping out of the shadows at the moment it counts. The rescue earns him her gratitude: real, warm, personally given. For a man in love with the goddess of the Moon, her thanks is not a small coin. It is the largest payment his secret devotion has ever received, and he banks it exactly the way a man in his position should not.

The gold pig plaque

Love immediately starts spending him. To please Chang’e, Bajie wants to buy her a beautiful dress — and to pay for it, he plans to pawn the gold pig plaque left behind by Zhu Fengchun. Consider what that plaque is: a keepsake of the dead scholar, the man whose body Bajie lived in, whose grandmother still keeps his house, whose life Bajie inherited. The new man proposes to trade the dead man’s gold for a dress for another man’s wife. The guide gives the intention plainly, and the intention alone is the episode’s measure of how far gone he is. Nothing in his borrowed life is sacred enough to be safe from this love — not even the relic of the man he replaced.

The enchanted wine

Wu Gang’s enchanted wine now does its delayed work. Chang’e drinks it by mistake — the wine of the suitor who poisoned her rabbit and stole its shape — and under its influence, talking with Bajie, she takes him for Hou Yi.

The moment lands on Bajie like a trap closing. The woman he loves is looking at him with her husband’s name in her heart. To be received by her at last — but as the wrong man. To hold her attention, her softness, the love meant for the archer — by fraud of the wine, not by any truth of his own. The guide calls it what it is: a dilemma. And heaven’s old penalty chooses this exact moment to reassert itself in the new dispensation — Bajie is left with a pig face again, the snout returning in the arms of the misunderstanding, as if his own body were voting against the impersonation.

Thoughts

The wine scene is the arc in miniature, and it rhymes with everything the series has built. Bajie began his human life inside another man’s identity — innocently, by a god’s accident, and he has been paying for it ever since. Now love offers him a second borrowed identity, this one chosen by his own silence if he lets it stand: Hou Yi, in the eyes of Hou Yi’s wife. The pig face that erupts is the story’s conscience made visible. His body literally will not let him be taken for the archer. There is also a darker accountant’s note: the wine was Wu Gang’s, brewed for Wu Gang’s own impersonation scheme. The frauds are compounding — the fake rabbit’s weapon now manufactures a fake husband — and the only person in the whole arrangement who has deceived no one is the woman at its centre, who trusts her pet, trusts her bodyguard, and trusts the face the wine shows her.

Next

A love knot tied to impossible, bath water in the flatbreads, and Little Dragon Girl hired at the shop that forgot her — Episode 16.