Episode 4 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

A rescue from the sea

Little Dragon Girl arrives in time to save Bajie, and she is not the only one converging on him. Taibai Jinxing, travelling with mountain gods, also finds him — heaven’s negligent hunter and the dragon girl reaching the same fugitive from opposite directions, one out of duty and damage control, the other out of a nine-year-old debt of gratitude she still does not fully understand.

What Bajie does not yet grasp is how much danger is actually organised around him. The thing that makes him valuable is not the body he borrowed. It is what is inside it.

The demon counts her losses

The cat demon, still wearing Miaomiao, has moved against the people around Bajie: she seduces and poisons the steward Lao Zhong, bending the household’s own servant into her instrument. And in the course of her plotting she works out a fact that reorganises her entire strategy. The golden pill she lost is not lost at all. It is inside Bajie.

That one realisation turns the wedding from a property scheme into a recovery operation. The demon does not need to hunt the pill through the world; she needs only to get through the wedding and reclaim it from the groom on the wedding night. Her plan is set: marry him, and take back what is hers.

Two plans for one night

Bajie, oblivious to the pill’s importance, has a wedding-night plan of his own, and it runs in exactly the opposite direction. He means to humiliate the bride that night — payback aimed at Miaomiao and her household for the wrongs done to his friends, the circle around the real Zhu Fengchun whose life he is now living. Where the demon sees a reclamation, the groom sees revenge, and neither of them has the faintest idea what the other is actually bringing to the marriage bed.

The one person who can see the collision coming is Taibai Jinxing. Reading what the wedding night now threatens to become — a demon reclaiming her pill from inside his own accidental creation — the god hurries to stop the wedding altogether. Heaven caused this mess by negligence; heaven now has to sprint to prevent its worst outcome.

The recognition

He does not stop it in time, and the ceremony goes ahead — and it is in the middle of the wedding itself that the episode’s real event happens. Watching the groom, standing where a bride’s family and a scheming household can see only Zhu Fengchun, Little Dragon Girl finally understands.

The man in front of her is her benefactor. This is the one who saved her life by the sea nine years ago — or at least, this is his face, his name, his life being lived in front of her. The guide gives her the recognition here, at the wedding of the man she crossed the world to find, at the precise moment he becomes someone else’s husband. What she does not yet know is the truth underneath the face: that the benefactor she recognises is dead, and the soul looking back at her is his pig. The recognition is complete and completely wrong at the same time, and it lands in the middle of a ceremony that a demon, a god and a vengeful groom are all planning to use for their own ends.

Thoughts

The episode is a machine of crossed purposes, and every gear in it is a secret. The demon hunts the pill; Bajie hunts humiliation; Taibai hunts damage control; and Little Dragon Girl, the only one acting from a clean motive, draws the wrong conclusion from true evidence — the face really is Fengchun’s. That is the cruelest of the story’s devices so far: her recognition is sincere, earned over nine years, and aimed at a man who no longer exists. The wedding night now has three separate ambushes scheduled for it, and the only person walking into it happy is the one who knows the least.

Next

The wedding night: a broken precept, a pig’s face, a runaway groom, and a god shrunk to a child — Episode 5.