The old fiend came out through his gate and cried in a stern, high voice, "Which of you is Sun Xingzhe?"

出得門來 puts 得 between a verb and its direction, where it reads de. The nice detail is 那個是孫行者: 那 is the questioning nǎ, "which one," not the pointing nà. The fiend has come out to fight a famous enemy and cannot tell which of the figures in front of him it is.

The Pilgrim, the tiger-fiend's hide trodden underfoot and the as-you-will iron rod held in his hand, answered, "Your Grandpa Sun is here.

Look at what he is standing on. 屣 (xǐ) is a verb — to wear a thing like a slipper, to tread on it — and 著 is the ongoing-action zhe: the Pilgrim asks for his master back while standing on the flayed skin of the officer he killed last chapter. 孫外公, "Grandpa Sun," is his standing way of insulting someone by promoting himself into their family tree.

Send out my master!" The fiend looked him over carefully, and saw that the Pilgrim was mean and stunted of body, gaunt of face, and not a full four chǐ in height.

鄙猥 and 羸瘦 are both bookish words, oddly stately for "runty and scrawny." 四尺 stays as chǐ: a Ming chǐ ran to about thirty-two centimetres, so the Pilgrim comes in a little under four feet.

He laughed and said, "A pity! A pity! I had taken you for some champion no man could throw over. You are nothing but a sickly ghost, a skull and no more."

扳 reads bān here, "to haul over," not the pān (the same word as 攀) it took in chapter 17's 奉扳清賞. And because 倒 is corrected to dǎo — a third-tone word — the 不 in front of it stays bù rather than shifting to bú. 骷髏的病鬼: a sick ghost with a skull for a body.

The Pilgrim laughed. "You son of mine, you have no eye in your head at all. Your Grandpa may be small, but if you will strike me one blow on the crown with the butt of that trident, I shall grow three chǐ."

The Pilgrim's comeback is to adopt him downward. 兒子 reads ér zǐ — a fixed word, and pure abuse in this mouth. 忒 (tè) is the vernacular "far too," and 沒眼色 means to lack the eye for a situation, to read a room badly. 長 here is zhǎng, "to grow." Note what he actually proposes: hit me on the head and watch what happens.

"Harden your head, then," said the fiend, "and take a stroke of my shaft." The Great Sage stood wholly unafraid.

硬著頭 takes 著 as zhe, a condition held in place — "keep your head hard." And listen to the fiend's pronoun: 吾 is stiff and literary, the word of an officer rather than a beast. He talks like a man with a commission.

The fiend did strike, one blow. The Pilgrim bent his waist in a bow, and grew a good three chǐ, so that he stood a zhàng in height.

Two 長 in one line with two different readings, which is why this site needs a positional fixspec: 足長了三尺 is zhǎng, "grew," and 一丈長短 is cháng, "length." The measures stay in Chinese — ten chǐ make one zhàng, so he has gone from just under four feet to roughly ten.

In alarm the fiend held his trident still and shouted, "Sun Xingzhe! Why do you bring this body-guarding trick of transformation and play it off before my gate?

慌得 takes de: the fiend was alarmed into holding his weapon still. 法兒 ends in the little er suffix. And here is the misreading the whole chapter runs on — he calls it 護身的變化法, a defensive shape-changing trick. It is nothing of the kind. It is a joke at his expense.

No empty flourishes! Come forward, and let the two of us try our arts."

虛頭 is vernacular for an empty show, a bit of business meant to impress. 見見手段 doubles the verb, which softens a challenge into something more like an invitation: let us have a look at each other's skill.

The Pilgrim laughed. "My son, the common saying has it: he who spares does not raise his hand; he who raises his hand does not spare.

The saying is 留情不舉手，舉手不留情 — spare a man and you do not raise your hand; raise your hand and you do not spare. It is a balanced couplet, but it is spoken inside dialogue with no announcement, and by the rule taken at chapter 18 an unannounced couplet stays prose and carries no verse flag.

Your Grandpa's hand is a heavy one. I fear you will not bear this single stroke of my rod."

手兒重重的: the 兒 is the little er suffix, and the doubled 重 is zhòng zhòng, "heavy" — not chóng, "again." 捱 (ái) is to take a blow and stay standing.

The fiend would hear no argument. He whirled the steel trident about and thrust straight at the Pilgrim's breast;

那容分說 — 那 is once more the rhetorical nǎ: how should he allow any argument? The ； is the author's own, and it marks the hinge of the sentence, the fiend's thrust on one side and the Pilgrim's parry on the other.

and the Great Sage — for the practised man is never hurried, and the hurried man is never practised — brought his iron rod round, used the posture called Black Dragon Sweeping the Ground, knocked the trident aside, and struck again at his head.

Two more sayings in one breath. 會家不忙，忙家不會 reverses itself word for word — the skilled man is never hurried, the hurried man is never skilled — and the mirror-trick cannot quite be kept in English. It belongs to the register of the fighting manual, which is also where 烏龍掠地勢 comes from: a named posture, the rod swept low along the ground the way a black dragon skims the earth.

There at the mouth of the Yellow Wind Cave the two of them fought; and it was a fine slaughter:

好殺, "a fine slaughter," is the standing announcement for a battle-poem, and like the other announcements in this chapter it stays in the prose segment.

The fiend-king in his fury; the Great Sage in his might.

The poem opens on a four-and-four line that the next two units will unpack clause by clause — a standard move in the battle set-piece, stating the pair before enlarging on each half.

The fiend-king in his fury would take the Pilgrim to answer for his Vanguard;

The ； at the close marks the first half of a matched pair, kept split as its own verse unit under the chapter 17 ruling. 抵 is "to answer for, to make good": a life owed against a life.

the Great Sage in his might would seize the sprite and save the elder.

長老, "the elder," is Sanzang, with 長 read zhǎng. 精靈 is a slighting word for the fiend — a sprite, something minor.

Trident comes, rod parries; rod goes, trident meets it.

Four characters, two verbs in each direction, and the entire back-and-forth of a duel fits into eight syllables.

The one, Grand Marshal who holds the mountain; / the other, the Handsome Monkey King who guards the Law.

都總帥 — here 都 reads dū, the prefix of high military rank, "Commander-in-Chief," not the everyday adverb dōu. The line sets the fiend's title against the Pilgrim's and makes them equals.

At first they fought amid the dust; / afterwards each rose into the middle air.

還 is hái, "still, as yet." Fights in this novel always escalate from the dust to the middle air; from here the poem stops watching the men and starts watching the weapons.

The tempered steel trident, its points bright and keen;

The ； at the end marks this as the opening half of the poem's second matched pair, and it is again kept split, each half standing as a verse unit in its own right. 點鋼 is steel that has been tempered.

the as-you-will rod, its shaft black and its bands yellow.

箍黃 — the golden bands at either end of the rod, which is where it gets its name, 金箍棒, the gold-banded cudgel.

Whom it pierces, his soul goes home to the shades; / whom it strikes, he shall surely see King Yama.

Both 著 here are zháo, the reading for a thing that lands: the target is hit, the goal is reached. 閻王 is Yama, who judges the dead — and note the joke of scale, that a rod-stroke is being described by naming the paperwork that follows it.

All rests upon a quick hand and a quick eye; / all requires a stout arm and a strong frame.

And immediately the other reading: 全憑著 takes zhe, a condition relied on, against the zháo of the line before. Two adjacent lines, two readings of one character — which is precisely why every 著 in this project carries an explicit ruling rather than a guess.

Both cast off life and forgot death in the fight; / and who could tell which would come off whole, and which would take the wound?

Both 那個 are the questioning nǎ. The poem ends where these poems almost always end: on a question the narrator makes a show of not answering.