The Pilgrim leapt across the torrent, came to the gate, and called: ‘Open up!’

Back across the torrent, back to the gate, and the same two words as the first time. Wukong's approach to a locked door has not developed.

Those little imps went again to report: ‘Sun the Pilgrim has come again.’

The imps go in with the same report. The repetition is doing work: this is the second run of a sequence the reader has already seen, and the novel is inviting comparison.

Red Boy laughed, tilting up his face: ‘That monkey must not have been burnt up in the fire, and so has come back.

Red Boy laughs with his face tipped up -- 仰面, a small physical detail that conveys the whole attitude. His reading of events is that Wukong survived by luck, not that anything has changed. He is wrong, and there is an ocean overhead to prove it.

This time on no account spare him — burn him till skin is charred and flesh is melted, and only then have done.’

燒個皮焦肉爛才罷, burn him till skin chars and flesh melts, and only then stop. 罷 here is bà, the full verb meaning to cease or have done -- not the light sentence-ending ba it becomes elsewhere in the chapter. The demon is not making a threat so much as issuing a specification.

Hastily he sprang up, levelled his long spear, and ordered: ‘Little ones, roll out the fire-carts.’

And out come the carts again. The novel has now shown the reader this machinery three times, and each time it appears the tension is that we know exactly what is coming and the characters on the ground do not.

He came out before the gate and said to the Pilgrim: ‘What have you come back for?’

A genuinely good line: what have you come back for? Said with the weary contempt of someone who thought a matter was settled.

The Pilgrim said: ‘Give me back my master.’

Five characters, and they are the same five he would give at any point in this chapter. Wukong is not here to argue about kinship any more. Give me back my master.

The demon said: ‘You ape-head, you're monstrously slow to take a hint.

忒不通變: 忒 means excessively, and 通變 is the capacity to adapt, to see how things have changed and adjust. So: you are monstrously incapable of taking a hint. It is the third time in the chapter someone has told Wukong he cannot read a situation, after the demon in the first duel and Bajie in the pine-wood.

That Tang Monk can serve as a master to you, and can serve as an appetiser to me; and you still think to have him back? — dream on, dream on.’

And then the truly nasty line. 按酒 is a snack eaten alongside wine -- the dish that comes with the drink. The demon is saying: he can be a master to you, and he can be an appetiser to me. Same monk, two uses. It is the most casually horrible sentence in the chapter, and it works because of the shape of it, the two clauses balanced as if the alternatives were equivalent.

The Pilgrim, hearing this, was greatly enraged, whipped out his gold-banded cudgel, and struck straight at his head;

十分惱怒 -- ten parts enraged, meaning wholly. And the cudgel comes straight at the head with no further conversation, which after that line is the only possible response.

and the monster, wielding his fire-tipped spear, hastily parried and met him.

The spear comes up to meet it. Both fighters know this exchange by heart now; they had twenty rounds of it an hour ago.

This bout of fighting was not as the one before.

One flat line to turn the page: this bout was not like the last one. It is the narrator promising the reader that the repetition has a purpose, and pointing at what is waiting in the clouds.