The passage reaches back nine chapters. The Boy of Good Wealth bowing here is the same demon child whose Samādhi Fire beat Wukong at the Fire-Cloud Cave, and who was subdued only when Guanyin trapped him with her golden bands and kept him as an attendant. His courtesy now — 早晚不離左右，專侍蓮臺之下, never far from her side, waiting beneath the lotus dais — is the settled form of a violence the reader remembers vividly, and the novel lets the change stand as quiet proof of the Bodhisattva's method. Her enemies become her staff.

Wukong's reply is characteristically unsentimental. 你那時節魔孽迷心，今朝得成正果 — back then you were bewitched, today you have won through — sounds generous until the sting arrives: 才知老孫是好人也, and only now do you realise old Sun was a good man. He is settling an old score under cover of congratulating someone, which is exactly how he settled with Bajie at the start of the chapter.

The scene is a short interlude, and it works by lifting the register — out of the demon's mud-walled mansion and into the ordered court of the Southern Sea — immediately before Guanyin appears in a form that overturns every bit of that order.