The man said, “Within my kingdom the granaries stood empty, the money and grain wholly exhausted.

The king answers the charge of misrule by describing a treasury that has already been emptied trying. 倉廩 cāng lǐn are the state granaries; 盡絕 is "utterly gone"; 國中 takes the plain locative zhōng.

The two ranks of civil and military officers had their stipends suspended, and I, the solitary one, took no meat even at my table.

Two clauses of seven characters each, balanced against one another — the same measured shape the narrator used for the king's tears a moment ago, here inside his own speech as he reaches the part he is proud of. He stopped the salaries and he gave up meat. 俸祿 fèng lù is official stipend; 葷 hūn covers meat and the pungent vegetables a fasting Buddhist also avoids; 寡人 guǎ rén, "the solitary one," is a ruler's formal self-deprecation, roughly "I, who lack virtue."

In imitation of King Yu taming the floods, I shared sweet and bitter alike with my myriad people; I bathed and fasted, and burned incense in prayer by day and by night.

He reaches for the highest precedent available. 禹王, King Yu, is the sage-ruler who tamed the floods and famously passed his own door three times without going in — the byword for a sovereign who shares his people's hardship. 倣效 is "in imitation of"; 齋戒 zhāi jiè is to fast and abstain before an act of worship.

So it went for three years, until it was dry indeed — the rivers withered, the wells run dry.

Three years of it, and the land simply stops. 河枯井涸 hé kū jǐng hé — rivers withered, wells run dry — is four characters doing what a paragraph would. 乾得 has 乾 as gān, dry, not qián, the trigram, and the linking de that carries a verb through to its outcome.

Just when all was at its most perilous, of a sudden there came from Mount Zhongnan a Quanzhen adept, who could summon wind and call up rain, and turn stone to gold at a touch.

Enter the villain, at the precise moment of maximum need. A 全真 quán zhēn is an adept of the Complete Perfection school, the great monastic order of later Daoism — a real and respectable institution, which is exactly why the disguise works. His advertised powers are the two that a bankrupt, rainless kingdom would pay anything for: 呼風喚雨 (summon wind and call rain, still current for someone who can make things happen at will) and 點石成金 (turn stone to gold). Note the mountain: this edition writes 鍾南山 where the standard name is 終南.

He first met my many civil and military officers, and afterwards had audience with me; I straightway invited him to mount the altar and pray, and truly there was a response: no sooner had his command-tablet cracked than in an instant the great rain came pouring down.

The demonstration is pure theatre and it works. The 令牌 lìng pái is a Daoist command-tablet, cracked down on the altar to issue an order to the spirit bureaucracy — the ritual equivalent of a gavel. 有應 has 應 as yìng, a response given, not yīng, ought; 滂沱 pāng tuó is torrential.

I had hoped only for three chǐ of rain to suffice; but he said that after so long a drought it would not soak deep enough, and let fall two cùn more.

The showman's flourish, and the line that gives him away. Asked for three 尺 of rain, he throws in two 寸 extra and explains why they were needed. A chǐ is a Chinese foot-length and a cùn a tenth of it, here measuring depth of rainfall — not converted to English measures, because the point is the Chinese unit itself.

Seeing him so devoted to righteousness, I made him my sworn friend with the eight bows, and addressed him as a brother.”

And there is the fatal move. 八拜為交 bā bài wéi jiāo is to become sworn brothers with the eight bows — a formal, binding tie that gave the adept the run of the palace and, in due course, an unguarded walk to the well. 為 is wéi, to become; 尚義 is to hold righteousness dear, which is what the king thought he was rewarding.