The chapter ends, as every chapter of the novel does, on the storyteller's hook: 且聽下回分解, "listen to the next installment for the telling." The open question it poses — in what year and month the monkey's calamity will be fulfilled — is the very question the poems have just answered in principle (when the Tang monk comes) but left open in fact. The reader is held in exactly the suspense the imprisoned monkey endures: a fixed sentence of unknown length.

Structurally, this short prose tag is the single exception to the chapter's embedded-verse pattern, in which verse always runs to a passage's end. Here the closing couplet of the preceding verdict-poem (且待唐朝出聖僧) is followed by this prose formula — the conventional frame reasserting itself over the lyric, the storyteller stepping back from the cosmic verdict to the humble business of keeping his audience for the next session. With this, the great Havoc-in-Heaven cycle (Chapters 1–7) closes, and the novel turns toward the pilgrimage it has spent seven chapters preparing.