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.

The chapter opens by clearing away last chapter's wreckage. Wukong had felled Zhènyuánzǐ's ginseng-fruit tree in a tantrum, and the two chapters before this one were spent persuading Guanyin to bring it back to life. The Patriarch of the Earth-Immortals, master of Five-Villages Abbey, is now Wukong's sworn brother — 結為兄弟 — and he is enjoying the reconciliation far too much to let anyone leave: five or six days of banquets. 情投意合 (qíng tóu yì hé), feelings meeting and minds agreeing, is the stock phrase for two people who simply click. Two readings to fix in passing. The 為 of 結為 is the linking wéi, "to become", not the purposive wèi, "for the sake of". And the 子 that ends his name is the dignified zǐ of a master's title, as in Zhuāngzǐ, not the toneless zi that merely turns a word into an everyday noun.

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.

Tripitaka has eaten the fruit, and it shows. 草還丹 (cǎo huán dān), the Grass-Returning Cinnabar, is the elixir distilled from the ginseng-fruit itself, and the 還 in it is the alchemists' huán, "to restore, to return [to vigour]" — not the everyday hái, "still, yet". 脫胎換骨 (tuō tāi huàn gǔ) — shed the womb you were born in and swap out your bones — is Daoist shorthand for being remade from the inside. The poets borrowed it: Huáng Tíngjiān and his school used it for the kind of revision that leaves a line unrecognisable, and it is still what Chinese reaches for when somebody has genuinely turned their life around.

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.

A new body, the same old obsession. His resolve to fetch the scriptures is 重, heavy — and that is zhòng, "weighty", not chóng, "again, layered". 那裡肯淹留 is a rhetorical shrug: how would he be willing to linger? Meaning he would not. That questioning 那裡 is nǎ lǐ, not the pointing nà. 無已 (wú yǐ): there was no stopping him. Notice what the narrator has just done — praised the elder's single-mindedness without a word of qualification. Hold that thought. It is the same single-mindedness that will run Wukong down before the chapter is out.