Episode 2 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

The wedding day rescue

It is Zhu Fengchun’s wedding day — the marriage to Miaomiao that her mother and Lao Zhong have engineered for the family property. But before the ceremony can close around him, word reaches Fengchun that his pig is in trouble in the woods, and the scholar does the most Zhu Fengchun thing imaginable: he runs out on his own wedding to save his pet. Whatever else the day was supposed to be about, the pig comes first, exactly as the pig would have hoped.

In the woods, Fengchun stumbles into somebody else’s battle. Taibai Jinxing is there, in the middle of his hunt, trapping the nine-lived cat demon. The god needs help to finish the fight, and the help on offer is a small animal. Taibai makes the pig a bargain: assist him against the demon, and there will be a reward.

The bargain goes wrong

The fight that follows changes everything, and none of it according to plan. In the struggle with the cat demon, Taibai Jinxing — a god, acting in haste — accidentally kills Zhu Fengchun. The scholar who ran into the woods to save his pig dies in the woods instead, struck down by the very god whose side he had wandered into.

A god cannot simply leave that lying there. Taibai has a dead mortal on his hands, a promise of a reward outstanding to the pig, and a wedding waiting back at the house for a groom who no longer exists. His solution is to settle every debt with one move. He puts the pig’s spirit into Zhu Fengchun’s body. The pig wakes up human: standing in the shape of the master it loved, able to speak, able to walk back into the Zhu household and take up the life that has just been vacated.

The pig is now a man, and he gets a man’s name to go with the borrowed body: Bajie.

The terms of being human

This is not a gift without a price tag. Bajie’s humanity lasts only one day at a time, and it comes with a rulebook: he must observe eight precepts. Break one, and the disguise fails in the most humiliating way available — his face turns back into a pig’s face, snout and all, in front of whoever happens to be looking. The pig who spent the whole of last episode trying not to be eaten is now a man on probation, one lapse away from being exposed as exactly what he is.

And hanging over the arrangement is the wish the guide makes plain: Bajie does not want this for a day. He wants to stay human forever. Every choice he makes from here on is pulled between the rules that keep him human and the desires that make him want to be.

The bride is not the bride

While Bajie walks home in a dead man’s face, the wedding plot takes its own dark turn. Miaomiao has been out searching for her missing groom. She finds the aftermath of the fight instead — and the wounded cat demon finds her. The demon, hurt and needing shelter, possesses Miaomiao’s body and walks back into the Zhu household inside it.

So the household now contains two impostors moving toward a wedding neither of them chose. The groom is a pig in a scholar’s body, racing a one-day clock and eight rules he is bound to break. The bride is a nine-lived cat demon wearing the cousin’s face, hiding in the one house where a god’s trap has just failed. And the only being who could explain any of it is the god who caused it — who has already left the scene of his own accident.

Thoughts

The premise detonates in a single episode, and it is worth pausing on how bleak the joke underneath it is. Zhu Fengchun is genuinely dead — the kind scholar whose only crime was loving his pig more than his wedding. The series will play Bajie’s borrowed life for comedy from here, but it never quite hides the fact that the man at the centre of the story is occupying a stolen life, on a daily lease, under rules designed by the god whose mistake killed the real owner. The possession of Miaomiao doubles the device neatly: two fakes, one wedding, and nobody in the house is who the household thinks they are.

Next

A pig’s face at the worst possible moments, a weakening god goes looking for medicine, and Little Dragon Girl closes in — Episode 3.