不分勝負 Neither Could Win
概眾爭戰多時,不分勝負。那妖精又解搭包兒。行者又叫:「列位仔細。」太子並眾等不知「仔細」之意。概众争战多时,不分胜负。那妖精又解搭包儿。行者又叫:「列位仔细。」太子并众等不知「仔细」之意。
逐句解 Line by line
The whole company fought a long while and neither could win.
分 is fēn. Neither could win — the same deadlock the earlier battle poem reached, and it arrives at the same point in the sequence, just before the bundle comes out.
The fiend untied his bundle again.
又. Eight characters, and the reader knows exactly what follows.
Pilgrim called out again, "Have a care, gentlemen!"
The quotation is word for word the warning he gave the dragons — take care, gentlemen, courteous address and all — though the narrator's frame around it is shorter this time.
The prince and the rest did not know what "have a care" meant.
The edition puts 仔細 inside its own quotation marks here, quoting Monkey's word back as a thing not understood — a piece of punctuation the earlier telling did not use.
The whole passage is a repetition, and the novel makes no attempt to disguise it. The deadlock, the bundle untied, the same four-character warning, the same failure to understand it — every beat matches the loss of the dragons, and the warning itself is repeated without a character changing.
One thing has changed. When the dragons failed to understand, the narrator wrote that they did not know what care meant; here he puts the word in quotation marks, as an object of study. The second time round the failure is presented as a problem of vocabulary, which makes it slightly funnier and considerably bleaker.
Monkey has now given the same useless warning twice. He knows what the bundle does and has never once explained it, and the chapter has stopped short of saying so twice in a row.