玉面公主 The Jade Faced Princess
行者半信不信道：「你且說，早尋大力王何故？』土地道：「大力王乃羅剎女丈夫。他這向撇了羅剎，現在積雷山摩雲洞。有個萬年狐王，那狐王死了，遺下一個女兒，叫做玉面公主。那公主有百萬家私，無人掌管。二年前，訪著牛魔王神通廣大，情願倒陪家私，招贅為夫。那牛王棄了羅剎，久不回顧。行者半信不信道：「你且说，早寻大力王何故？』土地道：「大力王乃罗刹女丈夫。他这向撇了罗刹，现在积雷山摩云洞。有个万年狐王，那狐王死了，遗下一个女儿，叫做玉面公主。那公主有百万家私，无人掌管。二年前，访着牛魔王神通广大，情愿倒陪家私，招赘为夫。那牛王弃了罗刹，久不回顾。
逐句解 Line by line
Half believing and half not, Pilgrim said, "Say on, then. Why should I go seeking the King of Great Strength?"
半信不信 — half believing, half not — is the older, tidier form of an idiom still in daily use, though modern Chinese now writes the second half as "half doubting" instead. Note also that the source opens this speech with an opening quotation mark of one kind and closes it with the matching mark of another. The mismatch is printed that way in the 世德堂本 and is kept as it stands.
The Local Spirit said, "The King of Great Strength is husband to the Rākṣasī."
剎 in 羅剎 is chà, the syllable chosen to carry the Sanskrit rākṣasa, a flesh-eating demon. It is not the shā that the same character takes in the modern word for braking a car. The reading holds at all twenty-two places the character appears in this chapter.
"Of late he has cast the Rākṣasī off, and is now at the Cloud-Touching Cave on the Mountain of Massed Thunder."
這向 is colloquial for the recent past — lately, this while back. 撇 is a blunter verb than it looks: to fling something aside. Four segments later the Local Spirit will use 棄 of the same act, which is the polite word for it.
"There was a Fox King of ten thousand years. That Fox King died, leaving behind a single daughter, who is called the Jade-Faced Princess."
兒 in 女兒, daughter, is ér — a full syllable carrying meaning, not the swallowed er that northern Chinese tacks onto the end of a word. And 一個 shifts to yí before the falling tone of 個, which is the ordinary tone change for 一.
"That princess has a private fortune of a million, and no one to have charge of it."
家私 is property a person holds in their own right, not the household's. And 掌管 is an administrative word. The problem is not that the fortune is going unspent; it is that nobody is running it.
"Two years ago she learned that the Bull Demon King's powers were vast, and willingly settled her fortune upon him in reverse, taking him into her house as a husband."
Three things to catch. 訪著 takes zháo, the reading that says the looking succeeded — she did not merely make enquiries, she found out. 倒 is dào here, an adverb meaning "the other way round," where the same character was dǎo, to topple, in the previous passage. And 招贅 is a specific institution: the marriage in which the husband moves into the wife's household rather than the reverse. 倒陪 marks the money as travelling the wrong way too — she pays the dowry.
"That Bull King has abandoned the Rākṣasī, and this long while has not looked back."
The Local Spirit finishes not on a battle but on a domestic fact: 久不回顧, and for a long time now he has not looked back.
The Bull Demon King has been a name in this novel since chapter three, and chapter fifty-nine invoked him twice — once by a woodcutter in a passing clause, once by Pilgrim at a closed door, claiming a sworn brotherhood five hundred years old. He has never appeared. What the Local Spirit supplies here, before any meeting takes place, is not a fighting reputation but a domestic situation, and the whole chapter turns on it.
The account is startlingly worldly. A fox king of great age dies; his daughter inherits a fortune of a million with nobody to administer it; she makes enquiries, learns that a certain demon king has formidable powers, and settles her property on him to secure him as a husband. Every term comes from the vocabulary of Ming marriage arrangement rather than of demonology. 招贅 is the match in which a man with ability and no property marries into a household with property and no heir; 倒陪家私 marks the money as flowing against custom, from the bride's side. The Bull Demon King is not abducted, seduced or enchanted. He is recruited, on terms.
This reframes the obstacle entirely. The fan the pilgrims need belongs to a wife who has been supplanted, and the husband who might order her to lend it has spent two years in another woman's house and has not been back. The difficulty is no longer that a demon is guarding a treasure. It is that a marriage has failed, and four monks must now negotiate across the wreckage. The Rākṣasī's refusal in the previous chapter looked there like straightforward revenge for her son; it acquires a second and far more humiliating cause the moment we learn what her husband has been doing.