heard the whole thing — the boy in the tree, the failed family claim, the fire that drank the rain, the near-drowning — and she did not lecture this time, because he had come without being forced to, and had come without pretending it was anything but what it was, and there was nothing left to teach him about asking.
She did make him watch a small humbling first, because she is not above it. Wukong, impatient, borrowed her vase to carry the sea-water himself and could not lift it — the little vase held an entire ocean and weighed like one, and the Great Sage strained at it and could not raise it an inch, and Guanyin lifted it with two fingers and set it on her palm, and let the lesson sit: the water that beats the fire is not a matter of strength, and never was, which is why his strength never touched the problem.
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