Now the attendants, bound so tightly that it cut them to the quick, were weeping piteously. The swarthy fellow asked: "Where did these three come from?" The Monster King said: "They delivered themselves to my very door." The Recluse said with a laugh: "Might they serve to entertain your guests?" The Monster King said: "By all means, by all means." The Mountain Lord said: "Do not use them all up. Eat two, and it will do to keep the one." The Monster King assented, and at once called to his underlings to disembowel the two attendants and cut out their hearts, and to hack their carcasses to pieces. The heads and the hearts and livers he offered up to his two guests; the four limbs he ate himself; and the rest of the flesh and bone he shared out among the several fiends. There came only a sound of crunching and gnawing, truly as of tigers devouring lambs — and in a moment they were eaten clean away. The elder was very nearly frightened to death. This, then, was the first ordeal of his setting-out from Chang'an.

The Mountain Lord's suggestion — eat two, keep one — is what saves Xuanzang, and neither he nor the reader is told why for another two scenes. 這才是初出長安第一場苦難, "this was the first ordeal since setting out from Chang'an," is the storyteller stepping forward to number the calamity. It is a promise as much as a summary: the pilgrim is fated to a long tally of these, and the counting starts here.

In the midst of his terror and dismay, little by little the east grew light. The two monsters, when the day at last dawned, dispersed, saying together: "We have imposed grievously on you today; another day we shall repay your kindness in full." And with that they withdrew in a body.

容日竭誠奉酬 — "another day we shall repay you in full." The guests keep up the polite formula on their way out of a cannibal supper, which is the blackest touch in the scene.