Pilgrim and Eight Rules stood at the water's edge and looked to see how the fiend was arrayed:

The introducer 觀看那妖精怎生打扮： is not one of the ten standard verse tags — the chapter has six introducers in all and only three of them are tags — but it opens the showcase all the same, standing alone as a unit of its own. 觀看 takes 觀 at guān and 看 at kàn, the ordinary sense of looking, not the kān of keeping watch that 看守 takes. 那 is deictic, nà.

On his head a helm of burnished silver, its glitter putting white snow to shame;

戴一頂 takes 一 at yì before the dipping 頂 dǐng. 爛 is làn, brilliant rather than rotten — the older sense, which the corpus holds invariant. 欺 here is to outdo, to put to shame, and the whole line is a comparison rather than a statement.

through his body a suit of helm and mail, its brightness a match for autumn frost.

貫一副 takes 一 at yí before the falling 副 fù, 副 being the measure for a matched set. 兜鍪 dōu móu is the war-helmet, and 兜鍪甲 names the whole armour by it. 亮敵秋霜 answers 光欺白雪 in the line before: both pit the shine of metal against something white and cold, and both do it with a verb of contest.

Draped above it a brocade campaign robe — truly it is rosy cloud enfolding jade;

上罩著 takes the durative 著 zhe, as do all four of the 著 in this description; pypinyin gives zhù at every one. 籠 at 彩雲籠玉 is lóng, and the reading needs saying because the modern division points the other way. 康熙字典 竹部十六畫 puts the enveloping verb in the level-tone band at 盧紅切, 音櫳, glossing it 包舉也 and citing 漢書·食貨志 籠貨物，籠鹽鐵; the rising-tone 力董切 band it records holds only 箱籠 and other containers.

girt at the waist a belt of rhinoceros grain — indeed it is a flowered python coiled about gold.

腰束著 takes the durative 著 zhe. 犀紋 is the grain of rhinoceros hide, a costly thing for a belt. 花蟒纏金 answers 彩雲籠玉 in the line before, and the two verbs are matched — 籠 to enfold and 纏 to coil about. The parallelism is part of why the 籠 reading has to be settled rather than assumed.

In his hand he grips the crescent-moon spade, sunset flying, lightning darting;

手執著 takes the durative 著 zhe. 月牙鏟, the crescent-moon spade, was named in the prose that introduced this description and is named again inside it; it is the weapon the coming fight turns on. 霞飛電掣 is a pair of images rather than a statement, and the English keeps it as one.

on his feet he wears boots of pigskin, water cleaving, waves parting.

腳穿著 takes the durative 著 zhe, the fourth and last in this description. 分 at 波分 is fēn, to divide. 水利波分 answers 霞飛電掣 above it: 利 is used verbally, the water cut through, and the pigskin boots are what does the cutting.

Seen from afar, one head and one face; looked at close to, on all four sides a human face: eyes before, eyes behind, seeing through the eight quarters;

看 at 遠看時 is kàn, to look, not the kān of keeping watch. 處 at 近睹處 is chù, a place or point — a point of vantage here rather than a patch of ground — and the split against the verbal chǔ is by sense. 一頭 takes 一 at yì before the rising 頭 tóu and 一面 at yí before the falling 面 miàn; the lexical flag raised on 頭一 here is the documented false positive, a match across the boundary between the two.

a mouth on the left, a mouth on the right, nine mouths holding discourse.

No graph in this line stands in any guard roster. 也 is a filler particle in the vernacular pattern X也Y, X也Y, and carries none of its classical force. 九口言論 gives the creature its name at last: this is the Nine-Headed Worm of the deposition taken in the chapter before this one, described there and seen here for the first time.

One bellow, and the vast sky shudders — like a crane in flight whose cry pierces the ninefold heaven.

吆喝 takes 喝 at hè, the shouting band, where pypinyin supplies hē; 喝道 is very nearly the only frame it gets right for this graph. 長 at 長空 is cháng, the vast, against the zhǎng pypinyin supplies at nearly every site. 似 is sì by the corpus-wide ruling. 宸 is properly the imperial abode, and 九宸 the ninefold heaven.