The Tang Monk exclaimed in alarm: "Wukong, this person has only just died — how has she turned into a pile of bones?"

The question is a real one, and it is the first genuinely open thing the elder has said in some while. She died a moment ago — how is she already old bones? He is asking, which means that for a moment he is listening.

Said Pilgrim, "She is a corpse-fiend with a lurking spirit, a walking dead thing that bewitches folk and ruins their root; struck dead by me, she has reverted to her true form.

僵尸 (jiāng shī) is the walking corpse of Chinese folklore: stiff-limbed, animated by a spirit that never left the body, and the direct ancestor of the hopping vampires of Hong Kong cinema. That is what she is, and it explains the bones — kill the thing properly and what remains is what was always underneath. 迷人敗本 is to bewitch people and ruin their vital root, the 本 being the stock of life-force one is born with. Note the reading: 相 in 本相 is xiàng, "form, appearance", not the xiāng, "mutually", found elsewhere.

"On her spine there is a line of writing, reading 'Lady White-Bone.'"

Here at last is the name, and it is written on her spine: 白骨夫人, Lady White-Bone. This is the 屍魔, the Corpse-Fiend of the chapter's title, identified for the first time — the narrator has withheld it through the whole episode. And this is the one place in the entire chapter where 行 is read háng, "a row, a line" of writing, against sixty-five instances of xíng, "to go". A small reading, sitting on the single most important object in the chapter.

Hearing this, the Tang Monk was, in fact, inclined to believe him.

倒也 carries a note of mild surprise: he was, after all, inclined to believe it. This is as close as the truth gets to landing. Four characters of belief, and they are about to be talked straight back out of him.

But there was no stopping Eight Rules, who slandered from the sidelines: "Master, his hand is heavy and his cudgel cruel — he's beaten a person to death, and only fears you'll recite the spell, so he's deliberately worked this change of shape to pull the wool over your eyes."

And Bajie runs the identical play he ran with the maggots. The true form is not a revelation, he says, it is Wukong's conjuring, thrown up to stop you reciting. 掩你的眼目 is to cover over your eyes — the same idea as the eye-screening trick he alleged the first time. It worked then. It works now. (Both instances of 那 point, nà; 重 is zhòng; the 兒 of 話兒 is the small tag.)

The Tang Monk, sure enough, was soft of ear, and believed him again, and forthwith began reciting anew.

耳軟 — soft-eared. It is still the ordinary Chinese for somebody who believes whoever spoke last, and the narrator sets it down as a plain diagnosis rather than an insult. That is the flaw, named outright. Not stupidity and not cruelty: an ear that gives way under whatever is pressed against it. And the recitation starts again at once.