The Grand Yin believed what he said, pointed her hand at the fiend and cried: "You cursed beast — will you not return to your proper nature and come along?" The Jade Hare gave a roll and showed her original body.

One command and the disguise ends. No fight, no spell — her employer points at her and tells her to stop. 歸正 — returning to correctness, coming back to what is proper — is the second half of this chapter's title. The heading promises a true yin returned to correctness, and the phrase appears here as a plain instruction from a superior to a runaway servant. 打個滾 — gave a roll — is wonderfully ordinary. Every transformation in this book turns on a physical action, a shake or a roll or a leap, and the one that undoes an entire year of imposture is a rabbit turning over.

Truly it was a case of:

The fifth and last formula cue of the chapter, and it introduces the only rhapsody in the book about this creature.

A cleft lip and pointed teeth, long ears and a thin scatter of whiskers.

Eight characters, and the reader who has not yet worked it out finally has to. ⚠ 長 is cháng, long — not the zhǎng of seniority that the same character takes seven times in this chapter for 長老, the elder. The ears are the giveaway and the machinery reads them as venerable. A cleft lip, long ears, sparse whiskers. The rhapsody does not say the word hare and does not need to.

Curled up, a single lump of fur like jade; stretching her feet, over a thousand hills her hooves seem to fly.

The couplet gives her both states — the ball of fur at rest and the animal at full stretch — in one line each. 蹄若飛 uses the word for a hoof, which a hare does not have. Chinese verse reaches for the general word for a running animal's foot, and the effect is to make her sound faster and larger than she is. Fur like jade is the first of the poem's four different ways of saying white, and there will be a fifth in the closing image.

A straight nose and a soft muzzle drooping, outdoing frost's own brightness smoothed with powder; / a pair of eyes shining red, putting to shame a touch of rouge on snow.

The comparisons are cosmetic, and deliberately so: frost and powder, rouge and snow. The rhapsody is describing an animal in the vocabulary reserved for a beautiful woman, which is exactly what has been standing in the palace for a year. 胭脂 is rouge, the red cosmetic. Red eyes in white fur is the plainest possible description of an albino rabbit, and the poem turns it into a spot of colour on snow. ⚠ 華 in 霜華 is the brightness or flower of a thing. It is the same character that names the Palace of Splendour in this chapter's closing pages, and there it is a place.

Lying flat on the ground, a soft white heap of plain silk; / stretching out her back, a shining white frame of silver threads.

Two more whites, in two more textures. The poem has now compared her to jade, frost, powder, snow, undyed silk and silver wire. 白穰穰 and 白鐸鐸 are doubled sound-and-texture words that Chinese uses freely and English has almost no equipment for. The first is soft and heaped; the second is bright and taut. Both are simply white plus a noise. ⚠ 一 takes yì before the heap and yí before the frame, because the tone of the word after it differs. That shift happens by itself now; before this chapter the machinery applied it too early to see the change.

How many times has she sipped the last of the clear dew as the jasper sky grew light, / pounding the drug of long life with her marvellous jade pestle?

The closing couplet puts her back on the moon and hands the reader the image every Chinese child grows up with. ⚠ 長 is cháng again, in 長生 — long life. The chapter has twelve of this character and only three take that reading; two of them are in this one rhapsody, eighty characters apart. The hare in the moon pounding the elixir is one of the oldest images in the language, older than the story of Chang'e stealing it. People still point out its outline in the markings of the full moon. The rhapsody ends by making the demon of this chapter into that picture.