The chapter ends on its cliffhanger, the Great Immortal's hand closing on Wukong just as the monkey offers himself to the oil. The unresolved standoff—an implacable Patriarch of the Earthly Immortals holding a trickster he cannot harm—carries into Chapter 26, where the quarrel over the ginseng tree will be settled not by force but by a remedy sought from Guanyin. The storyteller's set formula, 且聽下回分解, hands the reader on to that resolution.