Inside his gourd the Great Sage found it black as pitch. He butted his head upward, but there was no budging it — and it was stopped up very tight indeed. Only then, in a fret of the heart, he said: “That time on the mountain, when I met those two little imps, they told me: gourd or vase, once a man is bottled inside, in one hour and three quarters he melts into pus. Might it not melt me?”

渾然烏黑 hún rán wū hēi, black as pitch, all of a piece. 那裡頂得動 nǎ lǐ dǐng de dòng, no shifting it — the rhetorical nǎ with the can-do de. 塞得甚緊 sāi de shèn jǐn, stopped up very tight, the intensifier 甚 read shèn. And the arithmetic of his own dissolution: 就化為膿了 jiù huà wéi nóng le, melts into pus — 為 read wéi, to become. He is doing the sum on information the imps gave him themselves, back when he was the one running the con.

Then a second thought came to him: “It's nothing — it can't melt me. Five hundred years ago, when Old Monkey made his great uproar in Heaven, I was set by Lord Lao Zi in the Eight-Trigrams Furnace and refined nine-and-forty days, tempered into a heart and liver of gold, lungs and bowels of silver, a head of bronze and back of iron, fiery eyes and golden pupils — how could an hour and three quarters melt me? I'll just go along in and see what he's up to.”

化不得我 huà bù de wǒ and 化得我 huà de wǒ are the same construction negated and not, both on the can-do de. What follows is the novel's own backstory recited as reassurance: 八卦爐中 bā guà lú zhōng, in the Eight-Trigrams Furnace, 中 read zhōng; 銅頭鐵背 tóng tóu tiě bèi, bronze head and iron back, 背 read bèi, the noun. The furnace was meant to destroy him and instead it fireproofed him, and 火眼金睛 — fiery eyes and golden pupils — is still the phrase Chinese uses for someone who cannot be fooled.