Episode 38 — The Earth-Shaking Bride Snatching

The vow

Bajie and Little Dragon Girl vow to find the fourth spring, and they search the sea for it. This is the couple’s last campaign together and they wage it as what they finally are: partners, in the open, with the truth between them settled and the whole cast of four seas understanding at last why they are running. Find the spring, and the East Sea lives without her marriage. Find the spring, and the lovers live too.

The secret

Pressed by Bajie, the East Sea Dragon King finally reveals what the search has been circling since the paper crane first flew. Little Dragon Girl herself is the fourth spring.

The guide names the secret’s keepers, and the list is its own tragedy: the Dragon Mother knew. The Second Dragon Princess knew. The king who pretended madness to arrange a marriage that would spare his realm — and spare, though he could never say it, his daughter the knowledge of what she was — knew. The fourth spring the seas have been treating over, conspiring over, hunting with a stolen needle, is the youngest princess of the East Sea. She is the water her people are dying for. She has been the answer to every question in the final arc, walking around in the shape of the girl who hauls water, cries rain, and loves a pig.

The refusal and the reckoning

Bajie’s answer is instant: take her away. Run. Let the sea look after itself; the girl is not a resource; the girl is her. It is the position he has held since the guard-duty days — the beloved’s life outranks every claim the world files against it.

She thinks of the countless lives of the East Sea. That is the whole of her counter-argument, and it is unanswerable in the terms the story has built: her body is a spring; her people’s survival is a hydrological fact about her; the choice is between her life as a woman and their lives as a sea. Every rescue she ever performed was practice for this arithmetic. She has been spending herself for others since she was a child by a seashore; the finale only raises the denomination to everything.

The South Sea’s gift, refused by fate

One door remains, and the South Sea tries to open it. The South Sea’s eldest princess and the crown prince bring the South Sea spring to share — the treaty’s water, offered now without the marriage, freely, by the very family she was to marry into. It is the conspiracy’s defeat made generous: the water given, not traded.

It fails. The South Sea’s spring cannot do what is needed. The guide gives the failure plainly and closes the last exit: no borrowed water, no treaty water, no needle-found water will serve. There is exactly one spring that can save the East Sea, and she is standing in the room deciding.

The transformation

Little Dragon Girl, knowing now what she is, spends a happy time with Bajie first. The guide grants them that — a last stretch of ordinary joy, together, with nothing pending and nothing disguised, the couple the story spent thirty-eight episodes assembling, allowed to simply be one for a while.

Then she transforms herself into the spring.

The series ends there, on its own terms and at full price: the East Sea is saved, and the lovers are separated by her sacrifice. The pig who became a man for love of life loses the woman who taught him its value to the arithmetic she never once refused. She does not die in a battle or a palace coup. She becomes water — the rain she cried over a drought town, the flood that saved a mountain, finally and completely, for everyone, forever. The fourth spring flows in the East Sea, and it is her.

Thoughts

The finale reveals that the entire series was the biography of a spring. Every one of her gifts was the same gift at different scales — tears for a town, a flood for a mountain, herself for a sea — and the story’s cruellest consistency is that the world kept accepting them and asking for the next size up. Bajie’s refusal is the audience’s refusal, and the episode honours it by giving him the happy interval first: the story does not pretend her choice is painless or his objection selfish. It simply lets her arithmetic stand, because it is the arithmetic she has used in every episode, and a character is what she repeatedly does. He became human by offering his life for the pigs of one town and being spared. She completes the rhyme by offering hers for a sea, and not being spared. The title promised a pig in bright spring sunshine. It never mentioned the spring was a person, or that the sunshine was what it would cost him to stand in it.

Next

Series complete. Sunny Pig (春光灿烂猪八戒, 2000), 38 episodes, ends with the East Sea saved and its spring flowing — the story of Zhu Bajie and Little Dragon Girl, closed.