The chapter's title-promise is fulfilled for the first of three times. Deprived of his head by Wukong's yellow dog, Tiger-Power cannot do what Wukong did — call the head back or grow a new one — and instead of blood there gushes a burst of red light, the drained life-force of a false immortal. He falls, and reverts: 一隻無頭的黃毛虎, a headless yellow tiger, the beast-shape beneath the priestly robe.

The couplet run into the narrative names the doctrinal point directly: 空有喚雨呼風法，怎比長生果正仙 — the rain-and-wind sorcery the Daoists commanded was real enough to win a contest, but empty of the 長生, the true immortality, it counterfeited. The reading turns on the graph 長, here cháng ("long life") rather than the zhǎng ("grow") that runs through the ordeal-scenes: the beast could not grow a head because it never possessed the eternity that would have let it. The animal-reveal, a recurring device in the novel's demon-episodes, here carries the full weight of the chapter's argument against heterodox power.