The Great Sage Sun, seeing the two of them at grips, turned about and sprang to the high peak, where he said to the Star Lord of Fire Virtue, "Three Ethers — mind your part now."

用心者 is a clipped imperative, roughly "be about it now, and pay attention." 那孫大聖 takes nà. Wukong gives the order from the peak, having brought everyone here and being about to watch, again.

Look at that fiend: just as he came to the best of the fight with the Heavenly King, out he brought the ring again.

正鬥到好處 is a storyteller's phrase: the fight has reached the point where something has to give. 你看那個 takes the pointing nà and 看 takes kàn; 好處 takes chù, the point or place reached, not the verb chǔ; 圈子 ends in the light zi.

The Heavenly King saw it, whipped his lucky light about and fled the field.

看見 takes kàn. Twelve characters, and this time the plan actually works — he gets clear before the ring goes up. It is the only piece of tactics in the entire chapter that comes off.

On the high peak the Star Lord of Fire Virtue hurriedly passed the word, having all the fire gods of his several offices let go their fire at once.

號令 takes hào, 教眾部 takes jiào, and 一齊 gives yì.

This bout was a terror indeed. A fine fire:

The cue for the showcase, and then the rhapsody opens on a second colon of its own, quoting scripture before it shows us a single flame.

The scripture says: "The south is the very essence of fire."

Opening on a citation is unusual — most of the set-piece 賦 in this book start with the thing itself. Fire is being introduced here as a cosmic department before it is described as a blaze, which fits a chapter that has spent nine passages inside heavenly offices.

Though the fire be but a spark, it can burn ten thousand qǐng of field; / Being the might of the Three Ethers, it can turn itself into a hundred kinds of fire.

A measurement worth slowing down for. 頃 qǐng is an area: a hundred 畝 (mu), which comes out at somewhere near seven hectares, so 萬頃 is a piece of farmland the size of a small county. It stays romanised rather than being turned into acres, because English has no borrowed name for a 頃 and any substitute quietly resizes the field — an acre would shrink it about sixteenfold. As for the sentence itself, 雖… 乃… sets a concession against a ground: though it be only a spark, yet it is the might of the Three Ethers. Between them the two halves license the whole catalogue that follows, and they run under one semicolon in a single sentence.

Now there are fire-spears, fire-blades, fire-bows and fire-arrows, and the gods of each office use them differently.

Four fire-weapons against Nezha's six ordinary ones in the twelfth passage — the reader is meant to be counting these inventories by now. In 所用不一 the 一 comes last in its phrase, where it keeps its citation tone yī and shifts for nothing; the 不 in front of it is therefore bù.

Then were seen, in the middle air, fire-crows flying and clamouring; over all the hilltops, fire-horses galloping.

那半空中 takes nà and 空中 takes zhōng. The rhapsody now leaves the armoury for the menagerie, and the fire stops being a weapon and becomes a population.

Pair on pair of red rats; couple on couple of fire-dragons.

Eight characters, four items, no verb at all. The line is a list held at the instant before release.

Pair on pair of red rats spitting fierce flame, ten thousand lǐ turned red through; / Couple on couple of fire-dragons breathing thick smoke, a thousand quarters gone black together.

里 lǐ is the Chinese road-mile, and it is a good deal shorter than the English one — about half a kilometre in Ming reckoning, so roughly a third of a mile. It is left romanised for that reason: calling it a mile would treble the distance and put a foreign yardstick into a Chinese poem. 萬里 is anyway a figure of speech rather than a survey, the standard way of saying "as far as you can think." The couplet takes up the line before it and expands each half in turn — the rats, then the dragons — which is how a rhapsody builds: statement, then amplification. The two halves run under one semicolon.

Fire-carts are pushed out; fire-gourds are opened wide.

火車兒 ends in the light er that forms a name, as 火輪兒 did in the twelfth passage — not the ér of 孩兒, a child.

Fire-banners waving, a whole sky of rose-cloud; / Fire-staves stirring, the ground filled with burning.

一天霞 gives yì. 攪行 keeps 行 at xíng.

Say nothing of Ning Qi whipping his ox — this beats Zhou Yu at the Red Cliff by far.

The pairing is odd and worth flagging. Zhou Yu at the Red Cliff is *the* great fire attack of Chinese story — the burning of Cao Cao's fleet, which every reader would have known. But Ning Qi whipping his ox is a recognition tale with no fire in it whatever. Many readers would expect 田單火牛, Tian Dan's oxen with blazing tails, which would make both halves about fire. The 世德堂本 reading is kept and the difficulty recorded rather than smoothed over. 說甚麼 takes shén and 勝強似 takes qiáng.

This is a fire of Heaven, no common thing, and a terror in truth: / A roaring, a blazing, fire and wind gone red.

𤊨 stands here twice, doubled after 烘烘, and it is a genuine puzzle: no Mandarin reading for it is recorded anywhere, which means the great 漢語大字典 carries none either. It is written as 火 beside 或, so the sound-giving half points to huò, and that is the reading used here — provisionally, and open to correction. The widely read 人民文學 edition prints 烈 in its place, which is an editor's substitution rather than an identification of the character. The 世德堂本 reading is kept as the main text.