The son-in-law was not in the least dismayed. He caught the iron cudgel on his crescent-moon spade, and there on the crest of the Mountain of Tumbled Rocks — this was truly a fine fight:

The 真個 tag is fused into this unit rather than standing alone, so the unit itself opens the showcase. 更 is gèng, still or the more, in the frame 更不 — not in the least; 不 takes bù before the level 心 xīn. Both 那 are deictic and supplied by position, and 石 stands at shí.

The fiend stole the treasure and the pagoda lost its light; / Pilgrim seized the fiends and made report to the king.

The rhapsody opens by summarising everything that has happened since the middle of the chapter before this one, in one couplet. No graph in this line stands in any guard roster.

The lesser fiends fled for their lives back into the water; / the old dragon's gall broke, and the two took counsel together.

量 is liáng in 商量, to talk a thing over. 破膽 — the gall broken — is the standard idiom for terror, the gall bladder being the seat of courage in the traditional account, and it answers 魂不附體 from the same scene told in prose earlier.

The nine-headed son-in-law put forth his martial power, / came on in armour to display his native strength.

強 is qiáng, strength as a thing possessed. 素 is what one has by nature rather than by training, so 素強 is the strength he was born with — which the second rhapsody, later in this stretch, will show is not a man's strength at all.

Rage broke out in Sun the Great Sage Equal to Heaven; / the gold-banded cudgel rose in its full hardness.

分 is fēn in 十分, ten parts out of ten, hence utterly. The couplet is built to answer the one before it clause for clause: his opponent displays strength, the Sage produces rage, and the two weapons are named in the same position in each line.

That monster — nine skulls, eighteen eyes, / front and back alike sending out a fine light;

那 is deictic, nà. The line breaks the seven-graph metre the rhapsody has kept so far, running to seventeen graphs in three members instead of fourteen in two, and the next line breaks it the same way for the other fighter. The arithmetic is exact: nine heads, two eyes each, eighteen.

This Pilgrim — a pair of iron arms with a thousand catties' force, / thronging thick, and auspicious besides.

一雙 takes 一 at yì before the level 雙 shuāng. The catty is a weight of some hundreds of grams, so the figure is a round enormous one and not a measurement. 藹藹紛紛 pairs two reduplicated binomes, dense and many, and 瑞祥 marks the light around him as auspicious where the monster's was merely bright.

The spade like the moon at the first return of the yang; / the cudgel like frost flying over ten thousand li.

似 stands at sì by the corpus-wide ruling. 一陽初現 is the turn of the winter solstice, when the yang principle first stirs again, and the moon of that season is a thin crescent — which is the shape of the spade. 一 takes yì before the rising 陽 yáng.

Said he: "It is no concern of yours — leave off reporting other men's wrongs."

干 holds gān by the invariant ruling, where pypinyin gives gàn; 無干 is the same frame as 與你何干 in the fiend's prose speech earlier. 休 is the vernacular prohibitive, do not. What is unusual is the placement: the rhapsody stops describing and quotes the two fighters directly, which a battle description does not usually do.

Said I: "You set out on purpose to steal a treasure, and that is no good at all.

No graph in this line stands in any guard roster. 不 takes bù before the rising 良 liáng. The shift to the first person is the sharpest thing in the rhapsody: for eight lines the speaker has been an outside describer, and here he turns out to be Pilgrim.

You rascally thief — less of your wildness; / give him back his treasure and get some peace."

少 is shǎo, used as an imperative verb, less of it. 還 is huán, to give back, where pypinyin supplies the adverb hái — the same correction the recitation needed at 獻還他. 得 is dé, the full verb: what is obtained is peace, and the clause heads a predication of its own.

Cudgel met and spade parried, contending which stood higher; / no winning or losing showed, and the field went on being drilled.

不 takes bú before the falling 見 jiàn, by the mechanical rule. 練戰場 treats the battlefield as a drill-ground: nothing is being decided, only practised. The rhapsody ends where it began, with two weapons and no outcome.