Wukong resorts to sorcery where persuasion has failed. The 卯酉星法 — the "Mao-You Star Method," named for the eastern and western watches of the celestial cycle — together with the 移山縮地之法 ("method of moving mountains and shrinking the land") is a spatial trick: he means to bend the road itself so that the party and the crying child are set at opposite compass-points and can never meet. It is a characteristically ingenious solution, sidestepping the whole contest of wills by removing the demon from the Master's path rather than arguing the Master past the demon.

The cover story — that he must fall behind a few steps to relieve himself — is a small comic touch, but the maneuver itself marks how far Wukong will go to protect the Master from his own compassion without ever explaining why. This is the recurring bind of the sequence: Wukong sees clearly, acts decisively, and cannot make his reasons legible to Tripitaka in the moment. The spell works, for now; the demon is left stranded on the wrong side of the peak. But the reader already senses the limit of such tricks against an enemy who can simply shed his bonds and fly, and the next passage will show the demon doing exactly that — undoing Wukong's clever geography by taking to the air.