The two gods reported: "Great Sage, this mountain is called Fur-Point Mountain."

The name is the answer, and neither Wukong nor the gods appear to notice. 毛穎 means fur-tip or fur-point, and it is one of the most famous nicknames in Chinese letters. Han Yu wrote a mock official biography of the writing brush and called it Master Fur-Point; and because the finest brushes are made from rabbit hair, the joke of that essay is that its hero is a hare, conscripted, promoted and finally discarded when worn out. So the mountain is called Hare Mountain in the politest possible way. The demon who has fled into it is the Jade Hare of the moon. The clue has been sitting in the place name all along, and it is aimed squarely at the sort of reader who knows their Tang prose.

"In this mountain there are only three warrens of hares. From high antiquity down to this day there have never been any fiends here — it is a blessed spot of the five rings."

The gods say hares out loud and it still does not land. 甚 in 沒甚妖精 is shèn, the bare interrogative used inside a negative — no demons of any sort. The chapter uses this character seven times across three different jobs. 五環之福地 is a Daoist way of calling a place auspicious: a blessed spot within the five encircling zones. The gods are giving the mountain a clean bill of health, which is true — the trouble here is a visitor, not a resident.

"If the Great Sage is looking for a fiend, there are plenty of them further along the road to the Western Heaven."

A perfectly serious and rather weary piece of advice: you have come to the wrong mountain, try the road west. 要 here is yào, to want. The chapter has six of this character and this is one of five the machinery reads correctly; the sixth, in the battle poem, needed a ruling. There is a hundred chapters of experience compressed into that sentence. The gods of this pleasant, blameless hill have watched pilgrims and monsters go past on the western road for centuries.

Pilgrim said: "Old Monkey has got as far as the country of India in the Western Heaven. That king had a princess who was carried off by a fiend and dumped in the wilds, and the fiend then changed herself into the princess's likeness, made a fool of the king, put up a coloured tower and threw an embroidered ball from it, meaning to take a consort."

He explains himself, at length, to two minor gods. He would not have done this in chapter five. 模樣 reads mú yàng — the everyday word for the look of a thing. This is the second of the chapter's three and the machinery gets all three wrong. The tower and the ball are the standard folk device for choosing a husband: the girl throws from a height and whoever the ball strikes is the match. It is how the previous chapter began and it is why a monk on his way to India is now somebody's fiancé.