An egg forms at the top of a lonely rock on the mountain Hua-kuo Shan; there, in the words of the one witness wired to this address, it is "fructified by the breath of the wind" and "gave birth to a stone monkey" — the opening of Myths & Legends of China, the 1922 compilation, in its chapter on how the monkey became a god. That newborn is "Sun Hou-tzu, the Monkey Fairy", and he grows into a rebel who eats the peaches of immortality, storms the halls of heaven, and cannot be killed by sword, iron, fire, or lightning.

The record’s business at this address is the object that finally brings him down. When the monkey slips the net spread across the sky and Êrh-lang, "nephew of Yü Huang", gives chase, it is not a blade that ends the fight but a thrown ornament. Lao Chün "hurled his magic ring on to the head of the fugitive", who stumbles; then "the celestial dog, T'ien Kou" falls on him and "bit him in the calf", and the monkey is "surrounded on all sides, was seized and chained". A ring, not an edge — the small closed circle does what whole armies of heaven could not.

The wider catalog crowds this magic ring with company: Irish, English, Icelandic, Arabian, Sumatran and African hands all reach for such rings across the shelf. Yet only the Chinese witness is wired to served text today, and the rest wait unread. When the ring is the one thing that fells the unkillable, does its power live in the circle itself, or only in the hand willing to throw it?