The chapter ends on the storyteller's stock formula, 且聽下回分解, "pray hear the next chapter explain it" — the oral-performance signature the novel inherits from the vernacular tale-telling tradition, closing each chapter on a note of suspense. Here the formula does more than mark an ending; the word 反復, "reversals," quietly promises that the parting just witnessed is not the last word.

That hint is well founded. The rupture of this chapter — one of the most famous partings in the novel — is real but temporary: within a few chapters the master, captured and helpless, will be forced to send Bajie to beg Wukong back, and the disciple whose sight was punished as murder will return to save the very man who cast him out. The closing line's promise of 反復 looks ahead to exactly that restoration.

So the episode of the White-Bone Demon ends not in resolution but in a poised suspension — the demon truly dead, the party sundered, the Great Sage weeping his way home — and the whole weight of the chapter's tragedy resting on a bond the narrator assures us will, in time, be mended. It is the pattern of the whole pilgrimage in miniature: trial, rupture, and the hard, repeated work of reunion.