Episode 8 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

A sister’s spite

The Dragon Palace has more than one princess, and the other one now makes her entrance felt. The Second Dragon Girl — the guide calls her narrow-minded — acts out of spite toward her younger sister, and her chosen weapon is Little Dragon Girl’s own charge. She seduces Bajie.

The seduction lands exactly where such a trap always lands on him. Bajie, whose humanity is conditional on appetites he has never once managed to govern, responds — and his face turns back into a pig’s face. The Second Princess’s malice required nothing cleverer than offering Bajie the chance to be Bajie. His disgrace in the palace is self-inflicted, with an assist from a sister who wanted her sibling’s favourite shamed.

The pill turns on him

Worse follows. The golden pill inside Bajie flares up again, and this time the fire leaves him in unbearable pain. The pill was never a treasure sitting quietly in him; it is a power his body was not built to hold, and it keeps presenting its bill.

Little Dragon Girl does what she always does: she pleads for him. She begs her father, the Dragon King, to save him — and the Dragon King refuses. The old monarch will not spend the palace’s mercy on this creature, whatever his daughter says. Her benefactor, her cause, her nine years of searching: none of it moves her father.

The stolen ice

So she stops asking. Little Dragon Girl tricks the Dragon King into handing over one of the East Sea’s treasures — the Thousand-Year Ice, ancient ice with the cold to answer the pill’s fire. Working around her father’s refusal with a daughter’s cunning, she gets the treasure out of his hands and uses it on Bajie herself.

And it works. She saves Bajie again. The count is worth making, because the story keeps making it: the demon who wants to eat him, the god who made him by accident, the father who refuses him — and against all of them, one dragon girl who lies to a king for him, steals treasure for him, and puts out the fire in him with her own hands.

The child walks into the trap

While the palace drama plays out, Little Taibai makes the error the episode will close on. Unaware that Miaomiao is possessed — that the face belongs to the cat demon — the child god asks her for help. He is a powerless child looking for an ally, and he has walked up to the one creature in the story who collects the vulnerable.

The demon poisons him. And her plan for the little god is colder than the poisoning itself: she means to use Taibai as a lever against Taishang Laojun. The child who used to be heaven’s official is now a hostage in the making, a piece the demon intends to trade against the very superior who discovered Taibai’s negligence. She could not have designed a better instrument — the compromised god, in child form, in her hands.

Thoughts

The episode organises itself around two rescues that never happen and one that does. The Dragon King refuses; Taibai’s appeal to “Miaomiao” rescues nothing and endangers everything; and the only effective act of mercy in the whole episode is a theft — a daughter tricking her father out of a treasure he would not give. The show keeps making the same argument from different angles: rank and authority keep failing (a king, a god, a superior in heaven), and love keeps succeeding by irregular means. Second Dragon Girl deserves a note too. Her spite is petty, almost small — and it very nearly kills Bajie, because the pill does not care why his face changed. In this story the minor malices do as much damage as the great ones.

Next

An injured dragon girl, the last of the ice, a demon who changes her menu — and Taishang Laojun settles heaven’s accounts — Episode 9.