The story goes that the Great Sage led the horse and shouldered the load, searching the whole mountainside and calling for his master, when all at once he saw Zhu Bajie come pounding up in a fury and say, "Brother, what are you shouting about?"

The chapter opens with Wukong doing two jobs at once — leading the horse and carrying the luggage, which are Sha Monk's work and Bajie's work, not his. That detail alone tells you the party has come apart before a word is spoken. In 牽著, to lead by a rope, the second character 著 is zhe, which holds an action open while something else goes on around it; 挑著, to shoulder, works the same way. The load is 擔, dàn — the thing carried on the pole, a noun. Read as a verb the same character would sound different and mean the carrying rather than the burden. And 跑將來 slips a bleached 將, jiāng, between the verb and its direction. It carries no meaning of its own at all — it is the "up and" of "up and ran over".

Pilgrim said, "The master has vanished. Have you seen him?"

Four words in and the worst has already happened. 可曾 asks whether something has ever happened, and the second character 曾 is céng, the have-you-ever marker. Left alone the machinery reads it as the surname Zeng instead, which would turn a frantic question into a name — a small reminder that a character with two lives will pick the wrong one if nobody stops it.