Look how he was got up:

The storyteller turns to the audience and points. 怎生 is early vernacular for how or in what manner, and 打扮 is turnout, get-up, the way a person is dressed. What follows is a costume list, and costume lists in this book are never neutral.

On his head, a blazing red cap inlaid with gold; on his body, a robe of deepest black; on his feet, a pair of cloud-toed shoes in vivid green; at his waist, a streaming yellow Lü Gong sash.

Four clauses, and each is built to the same nine-character pattern: verb, then measure word, then a colour with a doubled intensifier, then the garment. 戴 for the head, 穿 for the body, 踏 for the feet, 繫 for the waist — Chinese has a different verb for putting on each part of an outfit, and the verse works down the body using all four. 繫 is jì, to tie: 康熙 糸部十三畫 gives 古詣切, 音計, and 玉篇 glosses it 約束也, to bind. The other reading, xì, belongs to the abstract sense of connecting or appending, as in 繫辭. 戧金 is a real technique — gold worked into incised lines — and a 呂公絛 is a sash named for Lü Dongbin, one of the Eight Immortals. The man is dressed as an advertisement for himself.

A face like a melon cast in iron, eyes like bright stars.

面如瓜鐵 is an awkward phrase and worth flagging rather than smoothing over. 瓜 gives the shape and 鐵 the colour — a long dark face — but the two characters sit together oddly, and other editions of the novel print other things here. The 世德堂本 reading is what is encoded above. 目若朗星, by contrast, is stock praise: bright eyes, and a compliment.

The bridge of his nose high and large, in the manner of a Hui; his lips turned out and open, like a Tatar's.

準頭 is the tip or bridge of the nose, a set anatomical term. What follows is a Ming reader's shorthand for foreign-looking: 回回 were the Muslim peoples of the northwest and of Central Asia, 達達 the Tatars of the northern steppe. Both were entirely familiar to a sixteenth-century Chinese audience, and the couplet is using them the way a description reaches for the nearest available type. The effect is to make the Daoist look wrong — not monstrous, just not from here — several pages before anyone learns what he actually is.

One whole expanse of Daoist heart with thunder hidden rolling inside it — a true feathered adept, tamer of tigers and subduer of dragons.

降 is xiáng here, to subdue, not jiàng, to descend. The character carries both and the chapter uses both: of its eight occurrences, seven are subduing and one is a man coming down a flight of steps, a few lines from now. 伏虎降龍 is a fixed pair — taming the tiger and subduing the dragon — and in inner alchemy the tiger and dragon are the two forces the adept must marry inside himself, so the phrase praises mastery of self as much as of beasts. 隱轟雷 is thunder held in, power that has not gone off yet.