The story tells how Tripitaka and his disciples, at daybreak the next morning, made ready to press on; but Master Zhenyuan, having sworn brotherhood with Pilgrim, found the two of them so wholly of one mind that he would by no means release them, and laid on feast upon feast, so that they lingered five or six days in all.

鎮元子 (Zhènyuánzǐ), the Patriarch of the Earth-Immortals, is master of Five-Villages Abbey, whose ginseng-fruit tree Wukong had destroyed and then, with Guanyin's help, restored across the two preceding chapters; the sworn brotherhood (結為兄弟) seals their reconciliation. 情投意合 (qíng tóu yì hé) — "feelings meeting, minds agreeing" — is a fixed phrase for perfect congeniality. Here 結為 takes the copular 為 (wéi) ("to become"), not the purposive 為 (wèi); and the name-suffix 子 (zǐ) of 鎮元子 is the honorific noun-reading, not the toneless suffix 子 (zi).

Ever since the elder had swallowed the Grass-Returning Cinnabar, it was as though he had sloughed off his mortal womb-form and exchanged his very bones: his spirit was bright, his body hale.

草還丹 (cǎo huán dān), the "Grass-Returning Cinnabar," is the elixir distilled from the ginseng-fruit; the graph 還 (huán) carries its alchemical force of "restoring, returning [to vigour]," not the colloquial 還 (hái) "still, yet." 脫胎換骨 (tuō tāi huàn gǔ) — "to shed the womb and swap one's bones" — is Daoist idiom for a total inner transformation, later borrowed by the poets Huang Tingjian and others as a term for radical revision.

Yet his heart was set with such weight upon fetching the scriptures that he would hardly tarry; and so, there being no dissuading him, he set out once more.

取經心重 — his resolve to fetch the scriptures is "heavy," i.e. earnest and pressing; 重 (zhòng) is the stative "weighty," not 重 (chóng) "again, layered." 那裡肯 (nǎ lǐ kěn) is rhetorical — "how would he be willing?" = "he would by no means" — so 那裡 reads nǎ (interrogative) rather than the deictic nà. 無已 (wú yǐ): "there being no stopping [him]."