Now when one attains an immortal's body, its spirit-transformations are without limit.

The narrator steps out to explain the mechanism. 得仙體 is having gained an immortal's body; 無方 is without bounds or fixed rule.

What none knew was that this Monkey King, ever since he completed the Way, had on his body eighty-four thousand hairs, every one of which could transform, answering to things just as his heart willed.

The number is worth pausing over. Eighty-four thousand is a Buddhist round figure of long standing — the count of the dharma-gates, of the afflictions that bind living beings, of the pores of the body. Here it is the tally of hairs on a monkey, every one of them able to become something else, 應物隨心, answering to circumstance as the heart directs. A very solemn number doing duty for a battlefield trick. 了道 takes 了 as liǎo, to complete. (不知 keeps bù.)

Those little monkeys were sharp-eyed and nimble: when the blade came it could not strike them, when the spear thrust it could not wound them.

眼乖 is sharp-eyed, quick to see — 乖 here meaning clever, not the modern "well-behaved." 砍不著 takes 著 as zháo, to connect, to land. Blade and spear both find nothing. (Both 不 keep bù.)

You should have seen them — leaping fore and aft, swarming up, surrounding the Demon King: some hugging, some tugging, some diving at his crotch, some grabbing his legs, kicking and pulling his hair, gouging his eyes, tweaking his nose, hoisting and jostling him, until they had beaten him into one tangled heap.

One of the great comic sentences in the novel, and it works by sheer accumulation: hugging, tugging, diving between his legs, grabbing his feet, kicking, hair-pulling (挦 xián), eye-gouging (摳 kōu), nose-tweaking, hoisting and jostling. The construction 抱的抱，扯的扯 — "the hugging ones hugged, the tugging ones tugged" — is how Chinese renders a crowd all doing different things at once. And the result is 一個攢盤, a "clustered platter," everything heaped into one tangle. (一個 is yí gè.)

Then this Wukong went and seized the demon's own sabre, parted the little monkeys, and with one stroke at the crown of his head cut him into two pieces.

And then, without a word of transition, the farce stops. He takes the demon's own sabre, parts his clones, and brings it down on the crown of the head: 砍為兩段, cut into two pieces. This is Wukong's first kill, and it is dispatched in nineteen characters. (一下 is yí xià.)

Leading the host, he charged into the cave and wiped out every demon, great and small.

盡皆剿滅, every one exterminated (剿 jiǎo). No quarter, and no comment from the narrator.

Then he gave his fur a shake and drew it back onto his body — but he saw some that could not be drawn back: these were the little monkeys the Demon King had carried off from the Water-Curtain Cave.

A lovely piece of storytelling. He shakes the fur back onto his body — and some of the little monkeys will not go. They will not go because they are not hairs: they are the real children the demon carried off, standing in the middle of his clone army, indistinguishable from it until the magic sorts them out. (一抖 is yì dǒu; 收不上身 takes bú.)

Wukong asked: "And how came you here?"

汝等 is the archaic "you" — he slips into formal register with his own children, having spent twenty years in a school.

There were some thirty to fifty of them, and all said through tears: "After the Great King went off to seek immortality, these two years he harried us, and carried us all off.

Thirty to fifty of them, all in tears. 爭吵 here means harried rather than quarrelled, and 攝 (shè) is to seize and carry off. Note the arithmetic: two years of this, out of the twenty he was away.

Isn't that the household stuff of our cave? The stone basins and stone bowls — this creature carried them all off too."

And what they point at is not their own captivity but the crockery. 石盆、石碗, the stone basins and bowls of the Water-Curtain Cave — the same furnishings the monkeys found waiting for them when they first swam through the waterfall in the previous chapter. (那不是 takes bú.)

Wukong said: "Since they are our household goods, carry them all outside."

And he takes the point at once and issues an order about the washing-up. This is what a king does.

Thereupon he set a fire in the cave and burned the Water-Viscera Cave to a crisp, until all was reduced to ash.

燒得枯乾, burned dry; 盡歸了一體, all reduced to a single mass. He burns the Water-Viscera Cave to the ground — and if the commentators are right about what "water-viscera" stands for, the image has a second floor to it. (一體 is yì tǐ.)

To them all he said: "Come back home with me."

Five words, and the rescue is finished.

The monkeys said: "Great King, when we came, we only heard the wind whistling past our ears and floated weightless to this place — we don't even know the way; how can we get home now?"

虛飄飄 — floating, weightless, nothing underneath. They were carried here by magic with their eyes shut, so they have no idea where "here" is or how to get back. A practical problem, and a rather sad one. (不識 keeps bù.)

Wukong said: "This is just a bit of magic he worked — what's hard about that? Now that one of my apertures is open, a hundred are open; I can work it too. Close your eyes, all of you, and don't be afraid."

一竅通，百竅通 comes back — the proverb the narrator used of him when he learned the transformations, now in his own mouth, tossed off as the reason nothing is difficult any more. And the last thing he says before flying them home is 休怕, don't be afraid. (一竅 is yí qiào.)