Episode 17 — Two Suns: Hou Yi & Chang’e

Water from the forest

Little Dragon Girl’s thoughts are all on Bajie — the knot in her red thread has done nothing to her side of the bond. She sees that he cannot draw water, in a town drying under two suns, and she goes herself into the great forest to borrow water for him. The girl who cried rain for this town now hauls water through a forest for one man, by hand, because the man is thirsty and cannot manage it.

He receives it the way the knot has arranged for him to receive everything from her. Bajie, deep in his love for Chang’e, is unmoved — and then, worse than unmoved, careless: he accidentally spills the water she worked so hard to bring back. The guide’s pairing is brutal in its simplicity. Her labour, his indifference, the water in the dirt. Whatever she carries to him now lands on ground his edited heart has made barren, and the accident is not really an accident of hands. It is the knot, spilling.

The kidnapping

While Bajie accompanies Chang’e to treat the little rabbit — the “rabbit” who is Wu Gang, being nursed by the goddess and her bodyguard in a charade all three of them are inside differently — Master Wu strikes. He kidnaps Chang’e, and comes within a breath of assaulting her.

The rescue arrives from the last quarter anyone watching would choose: Wu Gang saves her. The suitor in the rabbit’s skin intervenes, plays the hero, and receives exactly the payment the whole performance was designed to earn. Chang’e is very grateful to him.

She does not know — the guide underlines the not-knowing — that Wu Gang is allied with Master Wu. The kidnapper and the rescuer are partners. The danger was staged by the same hand that relieved it, so that gratitude would flow where Wu Gang has been trying to dig a channel for it since he poisoned a rabbit at the Moon Palace. Her thanks, honestly felt and honestly earned by the apparent facts, is paid into a fraud.

The wrong accusation

The episode closes with the knot’s work completed by a fresh misunderstanding. Bajie comes to believe that Little Dragon Girl killed Chang’e’s little rabbit — and quarrels with her over it.

Unpack the layers, because the episode has built them carefully. The “rabbit” is not dead and was never a rabbit: it is Wu Gang, who poisoned the real one. The accused girl is the one person in the story who has harmed nothing and saved everyone, repeatedly. And the accuser is the man whose heart has been tied into a knot precisely so that accusations like this one would find him ready. Bajie faces the girl who hauled his water through a forest, and charges her with killing a pet that is currently alive, well, and guilty of half the crimes in the arc. She cannot defend herself against any of it, because every fact that would clear her is a fact she does not have.

Thoughts

This is the Second Princess’s knot paying its full dividend. Her sabotage was never only that Bajie would ignore Little Dragon Girl; it is that he would misjudge her — that the edited heart would supply the suspicion on its own, so the machinery of fate would keep wounding her without anyone’s hand visibly on it. Set the episode’s two rescues side by side and the show’s morality is diagrammed. Little Dragon Girl’s real rescue — water, hauled at cost, for a man who spills it — is repaid with contempt. Wu Gang’s fake rescue — a partner’s staged kidnapping — is repaid with a goddess’s gratitude. In this arc, the appearance of the act is what gets rewarded, every time; the substance is what gets spilled in the dirt. The dragon girl is now working in the shop, accused in the quarrel, and knotted out of the man’s heart, and she is still, in every scene the guide gives her, thinking only of him.

Next

The arc turns toward its crisis: the archer must wake, the suns must fall, and heaven’s stranded goddess must learn what the Queen Mother ordered — Episodes 18 and beyond.