The abduction is accomplished in the space of a single sentence, and its swiftness is the point. All the elaborate machinery of the preceding passages — the demon's cries, the disguise, the sob-story, the weighing, the smashing — resolves, under cover of the whirlwind, into the one outcome the demon wanted from the first: the Tang Monk seized and carried off, 無蹤無影 ("without trace or shadow"), to an unknown quarter. Even Wukong, who alone understood the wind for what it was and sprang at once to give chase, is too late; the demon had 騁風頭, "ridden the wind's crest," and was already gone.

This is the chapter's structural climax and its title fulfilled: 嬰兒戲化禪心亂 — "the Baby, playing at transformation, throws the Chan-mind into chaos." The Chan-mind (禪心) is Tripitaka, and he has now been not merely disturbed but abducted, the pilgrimage's whole purpose suspended at a stroke. The second line of the couplet, 猿馬刀圭木母空 ("Ape and Horse, the Sword-Crucible and Wood-Mother, come to naught"), names the consequence in the alchemical register: with the Master gone, the compound self the poem of Passage 21 had diagrammed — mind-monkey, will-horse, wood-mother, and all — is left 空, emptied, its work undone. Batch 5 ends at the nadir. The remaining passages of the chapter turn to the aftermath: the disciples picking themselves up in the stilled air, the discovery of the Master's disappearance, and the first steps of the search that will carry the story into the Fire-Cloud Cave.