Episode 7 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

Down to the Dragon Palace

Little Dragon Girl takes Bajie with her to the Dragon Palace under the sea. Her purpose is the one that has driven her since she entered the human world: she means to save her benefactor. She still carries the belief that the man beside her is the scholar who rescued her, and the palace — her home, with all its resources — is where she intends to protect him.

The visit has its comedy, mostly at the palace’s expense: Bajie’s encounters with the East Sea Dragon King are played for laughs, a pig in a man’s body presented at the court of an ancient sea monarch who has his own strong ideas about how things are done. Underneath the comedy, though, the palace is where the truth finally catches up with Bajie himself.

What Bajie learns

Here, at last, Bajie understands who Little Dragon Girl is. She is the little dragon — the small creature Zhu Fengchun rescued down by the sea nine years earlier. The girl who has been tracking him, saving him, arguing heaven and earth on his behalf, is repaying a debt from before either of them was grown.

Consider what that does to him. The love and loyalty she pours out are addressed, in her mind, to Zhu Fengchun. Bajie now knows the debt is real and that its creditor has found her man — except the man is dead, and the being receiving her devotion is the pig who used to sleep in the yard. He knows who she is. She still does not truly know who he is, her grandmother-delivered truth from the wedding-night chaos not yet taken hold. The knowledge in this episode runs entirely one way, and it runs toward the one least able to bear it.

The dead pig

Back in the human world, the official machinery produces its own grim farce. Officials catch a dead pig and mistake it for Bajie — the fugitive pig-man, as far as the authorities are concerned, is a carcass. The error is understandable; the world believes a pig is missing, and here is a pig. What the officials cannot know is that the pig they want is walking around in a scholar’s body at the bottom of the East Sea.

The cat demon’s reaction strips the comedy down to appetite. Offered the situation, she does not want the reward that would come with the corpse. She asks for the corpse itself. Her interest in Bajie has never been about the bounty or the man; the golden pill is what she is after, and if the pill is inside a dead pig, then a dead pig is what she will take. A corpse, to her, is simply the pill in its container.

The child’s tears

The most surprising grief belongs to Little Taibai. The child god believes the dead pig really is Bajie — believes his quarry, his charge, his accidental creation is gone — and he weeps. Sincerely. The guide stresses the sincerity, and it matters: this is the god whose carelessness killed the real Fengchun and built Bajie out of the wreckage, who has spent episodes trying to trap the creature he made. Faced with the creature’s supposed death, what comes out is not relief at a closed file. It is tears. The companionship that began when Bajie carried him along on the flight has gone deeper than the little god’s duty ever did.

Thoughts

The episode runs three mistaken identities in parallel and lets each one expose a heart. The officials mistake a carcass for a criminal. The demon mistakes it for a container — her request for the corpse instead of the reward is the purest statement of her character in the series so far; she does not even pretend to want anything else. And Taibai mistakes it for a death he caused, twice over, and cries like the child he now is. Against all three errors stands the one real revelation, given to Bajie alone: the dragon girl is the rescued dragon. Everyone in this story is now connected to everyone else by a debt. The only question left is who will have to pay, and in what coin.

Next

A jealous sister, a borrowed treasure of ice, and a child god walks into the demon’s hands — Episode 8.