The well was in the palace garden, under a stone slab, under a plantain tree, and lifted all of it aside like a man taking the lid off a pot.
The king was at the bottom, three years down, and the water of that well had a property the book mentions and then uses: it preserved. The was whole, unspoiled, exactly as he had been the moment the false wizard pushed him in, as if the three years had happened to everyone in the kingdom except him. Wukong brought the body up on a cloud and laid it on the ground in the moonlight, and it was a dead king, perfect and cold, and no more a king than a portrait.
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