乘機盜我 He Took His Chance And Stole
妖王怒道：「是個甚麼賊子？好大膽，變作有來有去的模樣，進來見我回話，又跟在身邊，乘機盜我寶貝。早是不曾拿將出去。若拿出山頭，見了天風，怎生是好？」妖王怒道：「是个甚么贼子？好大胆，变作有来有去的模样，进来见我回话，又跟在身边，乘机盗我宝贝。早是不曾拿将出去。若拿出山头，见了天风，怎生是好？」
逐句解 Line by line
The fiend king said in a rage: "What sort of thief is this?
賊子, with 子 gone light. He asks what sort of thief and then answers his own question over the next twenty-nine characters — the first accurate reconstruction anybody in this chapter has managed.
"What boldness — to change into the likeness of There-and-Back, come in and give me his report, keep at my elbow, and take his chance to steal my treasure.
模 is mú. 乘 is chéng, to take advantage of an opening — not the shèng of a Buddhist vehicle. Every clause in the sentence is correct: the disguise, the report, the standing at his elbow, the theft.
"It is well he never got it out of doors.
Eight characters of relief, and they are the first thing the demon has said in the whole chapter that admits he might have lost something.
"If it had been carried past the mountaintop and met the wind of heaven, what would have become of us?"
天風 is the wind above the peaks, and the danger is that it would shake the bells. He has just watched three hundred zhàng of fire come out of one pavilion, and is calculating what the same thing would have done in open air.
The demon reasons correctly and completely, and it is the only sustained piece of right thinking anybody manages in this chapter. The thief took a shape, delivered a report, stayed close and stole at the opening — four steps, all four true, arrived at from nothing but a fire and an empty parcel.
And what frightens him is not the theft. It is the near miss: if the bells had gone over the mountaintop into the wind they would have gone off in the open. He has been calm about armies, contemptuous about weapons and delighted by a summons from his wife; the one thing that shakes him is his own treasure in somebody else's hands, out of doors.