Pilgrim, folding his hands towards the king, said again: "Old Monkey has one more matter to lay before you." The king returned the salute: "If the holy monk has anything to charge us with, we will follow it at once."

He has one more piece of business, and the king agrees to it before hearing it. 還 is hái again, still or in addition. This chapter has eight of the character and seven take that reading. 奉上 — to offer up — is the polite verb for laying a matter before a superior. Wukong has spent this chapter alternating between ordering kings about and observing court etiquette with great care, sometimes in the same sentence.

Pilgrim said: "This hill of his is called Hundred-Legs Mountain. Lately they say there are centipedes here that have become spirits and injure people in the dark of night, so that it is very awkward for travellers coming and going."

百腳 — hundred legs — is the ordinary colloquial word for a centipede, so the mountain is plainly named Centipede Hill. It is the third named place in this chapter whose name gives away what lives on it, after Fur-Point Mountain and the Jetavana grove. Three readings sit in the last clause: 行 as xíng in travellers, 甚 as shèn in very, and 為 as wéi in is. The chain gets the first two and misses the third.

"I have thought about centipedes, and only the cock can subdue them. Have a thousand of the very largest cockerels chosen and let loose about the hill, and rid it of these poisonous vermin. And change the name of this hill while you are about it, and grant a patent under his hand, which will serve as thanks to these monks for feeding the princess."

His solution is a folk remedy and it costs nothing. The cock and the centipede are traditional enemies in Chinese lore: the centipede is one of the five poisonous creatures of folk belief and the cock is the bird that eats it. Wukong's answer to a plague of monsters is a thousand chickens, which is either bathos or good sense and is probably both. 降 in 降伏 is xiáng, to subdue — the last of this chapter's four, against five that mean coming down. And note the second half of the request. He is using a centipede problem as the occasion to get the monastery paid.

The king was much pleased and agreed to it, and at once sent an officer into the city to fetch the cocks; and he changed the hill's name to Precious Splendour Mountain.

The name changes from Hundred-Legs to Precious Splendour, and the exchange is the chapter in miniature: something is called what it is, and then called what it has become. 為 in 名為 is wéi, the light verb. Six of this chapter's eleven take that reading and the chain misses all six. 寶華 — precious splendour — reuses the character that was frost's brightness in the hare's rhapsody and the moon's brightness in the night verse. This chapter has been turning that one word over all the way through.

He further ordered the Board of Works to lay in materials and rebuild it, and bestowed a title on it, to be called the Jetavana Almsgiving Monastery of Precious Splendour Mountain, Established by Imperial Command; and he made that old monk Monk-Official of the Requital of the Nation, hereditary in perpetuity, with a stipend of thirty-six dan granted him.

The old man who kept a girl safe for a year gets a hereditary office and a grain salary, which is how a Chinese state says thank you. 石 here is the grain measure and takes dàn, not the shí of stone. Thirty-six dàn a year is a modest but real official salary. It is the only site in the chapter that is not stone, and the chain reads it as stone. 著 is zhuó, ordering a department to a duty, and 重 in 重修 is chóng, to do again — not the zhòng of weight, which the chapter also uses.

The monks gave thanks for the favour and saw the carriage off back to court.

Nine characters to close the scene, and the monastery goes back to being a monastery with a new roof coming. 送駕 — seeing the carriage off — is the counterpart of the 接駕 they were told to prepare an hour ago. Those two words frame the whole episode at this monastery.