There in the middle air, what a fine battle this was:

The storyteller stops the action to announce a set-piece, and the poem that follows cannot be separated from this line. 場 is cháng, the counting word for something that runs its course from start to finish — a battle, a downpour, a marriage — and not the chǎng that means a place. English has nothing quite like it; the nearest thing is calling something a whole business, or a right to-do.

The rod was a treasure that stilled the sea in the Dragon Palace; the spear was iron of the mortal world, smelted and smelted again.

The seven lines rhyme at all seven line-ends — tiě, xiè, niè, miè, yuè, jié, zhé — and the first line joins the scheme rather than standing outside it, which is the tighter of the two options available to a poem like this. All seven belonged to the old clipped-tone category that Chinese has since lost, so the rhyme was exact when this was written and has since drifted: five now end in -ie, one in -üe, and one, zhé, in a bare -e. It rhymes better on the page than in the mouth. Six lines run seven characters to the half and fourteen in all; one runs nine and eighteen.

How should a common weapon match itself against an immortal one? At the least touch its divine force leaks away.

Here is the same character doing two jobs inside one poem. 著 in 擦著些兒 is zháo, marking contact that actually lands — the touch connects — against the zhe of 持著鐵棒 back at the chapter's opening, which marked a grip merely being held. 兒 keeps its full weight at ér rather than softening away: the line needs seven characters, and it only has seven if this one counts.

The Great Sage was from of old an immortal of the Grand Monad; the fiend was born an offshoot of the crooked and the wrong.

太乙 is the Grand Monad, the undivided first principle the Daoists put at the origin of things, and the line uses it as a pedigree — the way one might say a man came of an old family. 孽 answers it and means both an illegitimate branch of a family and an evil growth; the character carries both at once. Set against 仙 in the line above, a claim about morals quietly becomes a claim about breeding.

How should the goblin and the sprite come near the upright man? Let the upright stand but a moment and the crooked is snuffed out.

正 falls twice in fourteen characters, once as the upright man and once as the principle he stands for. 邪, the crooked, answers only the second; in the first half it is 鬼祟, goblins and sneaking things, that stands opposite. 一 before 正 is the adverb — once, as soon as — and it takes yí before a falling tone.

That one raised the wind and flung the dust and terrified the sovereign lord; this one trod the mist and mounted the cloud and blotted out the sun and moon.

The long line of the seven, at nine characters to the half against the others' seven, and the extra pair at each end buys something specific: 那個 and 這個, that one and this one, holding both fighters on screen at the same moment. Every other line takes them one at a time. 諕 is xià, to frighten, a variant way of writing 嚇 — and not the reading a dictionary offers first.

They threw their guards wide open and staked all on winning or losing. Where there is no ability, who dares call himself a hero?

架子 is the guard a fighter holds, with 子 gone light at zi; to fling it open is to stop defending and gamble everything on the attack. The second half steps outside the fight to editorialise — where there is no ability, who dares call himself a hero — and it is the only line of the seven that does.

It was the Great Sage Equal to Heaven who had the mastery: a clang, one blow of the rod, and the spear snapped first.

乒乓 exists for the sound and nothing else; the two characters are shaped to look like what they mean, and modern Chinese still uses them for table tennis. 還是 is hái shì, after all, when it comes to it. 折 is zhé, to snap, and it lands in the rhyme slot, so for once metre and meaning want the same thing.