Episode 31 — Three Teases of Sun Wukong

The killing on the mountain

Returning to Flower-Fruit Mountain, Little Dragon Girl meets Wu Du — the Five Poisons, the monster the Medicine King built — and kills him. By mistake. Without knowing who he is.

Hold every part of that sentence, because the episode is built out of them. The monster is Xiao Jun: the disciple who fell for her at first sight at his master’s clinic, who freed the experimental monkeys in secret, whose body his own master converted into poison and aimed at the world. She kills the creature in front of her, not knowing the creature was ever the young man. The Medicine King’s cruellest piece of engineering completes itself here — he built a weapon out of a kind person, and arranged for the kind person’s death to arrive at the hands of the woman he loved, who will never even know she owed him recognition.

The dying words

Xiao Jun’s dying words move her. The guide does not separate the man from the monster at the end; something of the disciple survives to speak, and what he says reaches her. And the guilt arrives with the understanding — she has killed, in ignorance, a being whose last words were worth being moved by. Seeking release from that guilt, Little Dragon Girl decides to leave Bajie for good.

Note her logic, because it is hers: not rejection of him — she knows the whole truth now and the leaving is not the truth’s doing — but penance. The girl who has paid for everything in this story with her own substance reaches for the largest payment in her purse: the love she has carried for thirty episodes. She will give up Bajie to balance a death she caused unknowing.

The confession

It fails against the thing she has never yet faced: Bajie, in love with her, openly. Bajie has fallen deeply in love with her — the thread, the clinic, the losses have done their work — and this time he does not hide it. His sincerity moves her. The man who dared not tell her, who let her leave once rather than speak, speaks now, and speaks truly.

And she realises the thing the whole series has been arranging: he is also her true love. Not the scholar she sought — the scholar is mourned, and the mirror closed that account — but this one: the pig who became a man, who lied by omission and paid in shame, who carried her goddess rival to safety and stole an axe for his brother and spilled her water and saved her life. The guide’s word is also — he is her true love too, in addition to, and after, the benefactor. The two loves are not in competition anymore. The story lets her have both, in sequence, honestly.

Forgetfulness water

The episode closes with Bajie’s own act of mercy toward the other prisoner of the story. He gives Wukong the Medicine King’s forgetfulness water. And the King, drinking it, forgets — down to a single shining remainder: he remembers only that he is the Great Sage Equal to Heaven. The ledger of three deceptions, the stable, the arrests, the sealed mountain, the whole account of injuries that ended with never see me again — dissolved. What the Medicine King brewed to ruin young monkeys becomes, in Bajie’s hands, the only available absolution for his brother: not an argument, not an apology accepted, but the slate wiped to the King’s own name and title, the one fact about himself he would have chosen to keep.

Thoughts

The episode is the series’ most morally serious hour, and it spends its weight on the difference between guilt and debt. Little Dragon Girl’s penance is noble in form and wrong in target — the death of Xiao Jun was authored by the Medicine King, and her innocence of his identity is part of his design, yet she invoices herself because hers was the hand. Bajie’s confession answers her the way the show believes these things are answered: not by balancing the ledger but by telling the truth inside it. And the forgetfulness water completes the pattern with a genuinely troubling mercy. Bajie gives his brother the villain’s own drug. It works — the King is freed from a grievance Bajie could never have argued him out of. But it is the same water that emptied the young monkeys’ minds, and the episode lets both facts stand: the absolution is real, and it is made of poison. This story has never once offered a clean instrument for a good end.

Next

Together at last, a village haunted by the Nian beast, and the beast is a dragon king gone mad — Episode 32.