"The princess understood what he meant by it, and by day she talked wildly and at random and begged a little tea and rice and ate it; and late at night, where there was nobody about, she would think of her father and mother and weep."

She worked out the plan and joined in. That is the sentence the whole chapter has been withholding. 識得 — to make out, to grasp — takes the full dé. This project flagged the phrase as missing from its tables at three separate chapter kickoffs and finally registered it at this one; it runs to eighteen sites in fifteen chapters and the reading was correct at all of them by luck of the chain. 思量 — to turn over in the mind — takes liáng. The project's standing rule for this character was written as though the reading depended on verse position, and this prose site is the one that proves it does not. Ruled by sense at this chapter instead.

"That old monk had come to the capital several times to make enquiries, and seeing the princess safe and well in the palace, he did not dare to speak out or make a report. And because he saw that my disciple had some magic powers about him, the old monk urged me a thousand times over and charged me to come here and look into it."

He came to the city to check, saw the princess alive on her balcony, and went home unable to say a word. That is the year the old monk has had. 千叮萬囑 — a thousand exhortations and ten thousand charges — is a set phrase for pressing something on somebody urgently and repeatedly. It is the sound of a man who has been carrying an impossible secret and has finally found somebody who might be able to act on it. The bind he was in is exact and horrible. If the princess in the palace is real, the girl in his back room is mad or an impostor. If he speaks and is wrong, he has accused a king's daughter of being false. So he says nothing for a year.

"I did not expect that she would turn out to be the Jade Hare of the Toad Palace playing the fiend, counterfeiting a true form and changing into the princess's likeness, and that she should have set her heart on breaking my primal yang. Happily my disciple made a show of his power and worked his magic and picked out the true from the false."

Tripitaka gives Wukong the credit in front of the court, which he does not always do. Four readings the bare chain gets wrong sit in this one sentence: 為 as wéi in playing the fiend, 模 as mú in the likeness, 要 as yào in setting her heart on it, and 假合 carrying the chapter's own title. 認出真假 is the fifth different phrase this chapter has used for sorting the false from the true, after the battle poem's, the palace's, the terrace's and the Grand Yin's.

"She has now been taken away by the Star Lord of the Grand Yin. Your worthy princess is at this moment in the Jetavana Almsgiving Monastery, playing the madwoman."

The speech ends where it needed to get to, and the last two characters are the ones that will make a king cry. 裝風 — putting on madness — has been the girl's whole strategy for a year, and Tripitaka reports it as a plain fact of her whereabouts. Nobody in the hall has yet worked out what it cost her. 賢公主 — your worthy princess — is a courtesy, and there is something careful in it. He has just told this man that his daughter has spent a year pretending to be insane in a locked room, and he chooses the most respectful possible word for her while doing it.