原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
下回分解 To Be Continued
畢竟向前去還有甚麼事體，且聽下回分解。毕竟向前去还有甚么事体，且听下回分解。
逐句解 Line by line
畢竟向前去還有甚麼事體，且聽下回分解。
毕竟向前去还有甚么事体，且听下回分解。
There is no telling what further business lay ahead as they went on; listen, and the next chapter will explain.
畢竟 is in the end, after all — the storyteller turning to the audience. 還 stays hái, still or further, and 甚 is shén, what. 且聽下回分解 — listen, and the next instalment will unravel it — is the sign-off of every chapter in this novel and of the whole storytelling tradition behind it. 分解 is to take apart and explain, with 解 as jiě, to loosen.
The formula that ends all hundred chapters, and it is older than the book. 且聽下回分解 belongs to the marketplace storyteller, who stopped at the interesting moment and expected to be paid before going on. The written novel kept it, exactly as printed serials kept the cliffhanger long after anybody needed the money on the night.
What it leaves behind is a chapter that has quietly argued one thing throughout. Two religious houses, described in the same words: the same tag, the same four costume verbs down the body, the same 問訊 and the same 失迎, four thousand nine hundred characters apart. One of them held a centipede with a locked box on a roof-beam; the other held a hen with an antidote loose in a torn paper packet. Nothing in the manners told you which was which, and the pilgrims walked into the first one discussing lunch.