The chapter ends on a cliff, as they all do, and the cliff is real: the person being marched to the palace is the Great Sage, but the man left behind in the posting house wearing a monkey's face is Tripitaka, and there are still three thousand soldiers in the street.

What the chapter has actually done is smaller and stranger than its ending suggests. It began with a kingdom that had quietly renamed itself after the children it was about to kill, and it ends with those children asleep in the hills outside the walls, fed, watched over and unharmed. Nobody in the city knows. The one deed that mattered was done at the third watch by beings nobody saw, and the couplet just before this line calls it a disaster.