The formula is a fossil of live performance. 且聽下回分解 — listen to the next instalment for the explanation — belongs to the storyteller's platform, where the break was a real one and the audience had to come back the following day to find out; and the hundred-chapter novel keeps it at every seam, long after there was any platform to stand on. It is the last of the storyteller's stock phrases this chapter uses, after 話說 at the opening, 卻說 at each change of scene, 不題 for a thread being dropped, and 你看他 when the audience is to be pointed at something.

Chapter 52 closes the Golden Helm arc, and it closes it in the only way the arc allowed. Nothing thrown at the ring survived it: the cudgel, six celestial weapons, an entire fire-armoury, eighteen grains of the Buddha's golden sand. What could not be taken could not hurt him either — the Water Earl's flood ran off him without costing the Water Earl a thing. The answer, when it came, was not a stronger weapon but a piece of information — who owns the animal — and it was not delivered to Wukong's face by the Tathāgata but hinted, conditionally, through two arhats held back at the gate. Wukong had said the word 金剛套 himself, in a boast, twenty-one passages earlier. The chapter's comedy and its argument turn out to be the same thing: the Great Sage's strength was never the quantity that mattered, and the last blow he strikes is a slap.