Episode 9 — The Cat Demon & the Golden Pill

The rescuer, wounded

Little Dragon Girl is seriously injured saving Bajie. The pattern of the series — she intervenes, she pays — finally presents her with a serious bill of her own. The girl who has pulled him out of every fire, sometimes literally, is now the one hurt in the act of saving him, and the palace has to reckon with a wounded youngest princess whose injuries were earned on behalf of the creature her father refused to help.

Her sister sees an opening in the wreckage. The Second Dragon Girl goes to the Dragon King with advice, and it is advice in her own register: make Little Dragon Girl agree to trade. The bargain the elder sister proposes is to exchange the Thousand-Year Ice for her feelings — to put a price, in the palace’s treasure, on the younger girl’s heart, and make her surrender one or the other. Even as counsel to a father, it is a spiteful little piece of statecraft: your daughter is hurt; now is the moment to make her choose between the treasure she stole and the love she stole it for.

The last of the ice

The ice itself comes to its purpose. With the last piece of the Thousand-Year Ice, the thing the Dragon King would not give and his daughter took anyway, the golden pill inside Bajie is finally dealt with at the root: Bajie digests the pill. Not suppresses its fire, not survives another flare — digests it, makes the demon’s lost treasure a part of himself, and gains great power from it.

Everything the cat demon has been hunting since the wedding night changes state in this moment. The pill is no longer a thing inside Bajie that could be extracted, returned or stolen back. It is Bajie now — his strength, in his body, under his command. The treasure hunt is over because the treasure has been eaten by its container.

Heaven settles its accounts

Taishang Laojun, Taibai’s superior, finally descends into the mess in person. He rescues Taibai — the child god the demon poisoned and meant to use as a lever against him — and with him those the cat demon poisoned, the Zhu household’s victims among them. The lever is taken out of the demon’s hands; the poisonings are undone; the superior cleans up after his subordinate’s catastrophe with the air of a man who has seen the report and is not surprised.

Then comes his judgment, and it is notably unsentimental. Taishang Laojun tells Taibai and Bajie to settle their grudge between themselves. Heaven will not referee what its own negligence created: the god who killed a scholar by accident and the pig who is living in the scholar’s body are to work out what they owe each other without an appeal court. It is the first honest piece of administration in the whole affair — an admission, from the top, that this one is beyond the rulebook.

The demon changes her plan

The cat demon receives the news of the digested pill, and her fury reorganises her strategy one final time. If the pill cannot be taken out of Bajie, then the power can still be had the other way. She decides to eat Bajie’s body — to consume the man whole and take the pill’s power by consuming its vessel.

The guide ends the episode there, and the threat deserves to be heard at full weight. Every danger Bajie has faced so far was about something he carried: the pill, the face, the borrowed name. This is the first plan that is simply about him — his body, eaten. The pig who began this story afraid of being roasted by his future mistress has come full circle to the same menu, at the hands of a far worse cook.

Thoughts

Nine episodes in, the story completes its first great movement and locks the second one into place. The pill arc is finished — digested, internalised, irreversible — and with it goes the demon’s last plan that left Bajie alive at the end of it. The new plan is predation, pure and simple. The episode also quietly finishes Taibai’s arc of disgrace: rescued by his superior, cured of the demon’s poison, and then told, in effect, that his case is closed and his debt is private now. Whatever he and Bajie are to each other from here — creator and creation, hunter and quarry, god and pig — heaven has formally washed its hands of deciding. What settles between them will be settled the way the child’s tears at a stranger pig’s corpse suggested: between themselves.

Next

Great power in a pig’s hands, a demon who wants to eat him, and the open road — Episode 10 begins the next movement.