Bajie's argument shifts and it becomes rather good. He stops asking for mercy and starts offering the clerk an efficiency: wait a day, and you can collect the whole party at once. He is proposing to bundle four deaths into one journey, on the grounds that it saves the officer a trip.

The phrase he ends on is a shopkeeper's — to close the account, to settle up. Bajie has taken the underworld's own bureaucratic logic and pushed it one step further than the summoner did, and it is genuinely the cleverest thing he says in the chapter.

But look what he is actually predicting. This monster means to fetch my master and the rest as well. He is right; the demons have already agreed on it, and Wukong has not worked it out. The most frightened character in the scene has made the most accurate forecast in it, and the brother listening from his ear does not take the hint.