The chapter closes on the storyteller's standard cliffhanger formula, deferring the question the whole episode has raised — how the drowned king is to be revived — to the chapter following. The 世德堂本 rounds off each chapter with this same couplet-like tag (畢竟…且聽下回分解), a residue of the oral-performance tradition from which the novel descends.

The suspended question is a real one. Wukong has just argued, persuasively, that a man three years dead cannot be revived by ordinary means, and has been compelled by the fillet-spell to attempt it anyway. The next chapter must therefore find an extraordinary means — the journey to Heaven for Laozi's elixir — and the difficulty Bajie shrewdly built into his revenge (no recourse to the underworld) is precisely what forces that celestial errand. The formula's 'no knowing' is, for once, the genuine narrative predicament.