The transformation is described with a deliberate, step-by-step concreteness that heightens its cruelty: the demon does not merely take a child's shape but stages a complete tableau of a victim — naked, bound hand and foot with real cord, hung high in a pine, and crying without pause. Every element is chosen to trip the Master's compassion, and the narrator's flat, procedural recital of the steps (搖身一變, 將麻繩綑了手足, 高吊在那松樹梢頭) lets the reader see the machinery of the deception being assembled even as Tripitaka will see only its finished effect.

This is the chapter-title's 嬰兒戲化 ("the Baby, playing at transformation") made literal, and it sets in motion the arc's central irony. The 嬰兒 of the title is at once this false child — the demon's disguise — and, on the allegorical register the whole Red Boy sequence sustains, the inner-alchemical "infant" (嬰兒 as the nascent immortal embryo, a technical term of internal-alchemy). The demon's false innocence is thus set against the true spiritual infancy the pilgrimage is meant to cultivate; the bound child in the pine is a counterfeit of the very thing the journey seeks. The reader, having just watched the disguise assembled, now waits to see whether the Master's mercy will spring the trap.