捻著避火訣 Forty Snakes And A Fire Charm
幸得他有本事，坐在中間，捻著避火訣，全然不懼。耐到半個時辰，四週圍鑽出四十條蛇來咬。行者掄開手，抓將過來，盡力氣一揝，揝做八十段。幸得他有本事，坐在中间，捻着避火诀，全然不惧。耐到半个时辰，四周围钻出四十条蛇来咬。行者抡开手，抓将过来，尽力气一揝，揝做八十段。
逐句解 Line by line
Luckily he had the skill for it: he sat in the middle, worked the fire-avoiding charm with his fingers, and was not frightened in the least.
幸得 keeps the full dé — fortunately obtained, meaning "fortunately," rather than a complement, and the one sealed site reads it that way. 捻著 takes the light zhe: the charm is worked with the fingers and held there. A 訣 is a hand-sign, a mudra — the fingers folded into a shape that does the work, like a chord shape on a guitar neck.
He endured a half shíchen of it, and then forty snakes bored out all round him and bit.
A 時辰 is a double hour, so half of one is about sixty minutes. 鑽 here is zuān, the verb — to bore through — the same character that stands in the chapter's title and, four passages from now, will name the drill he escapes with.
Wukong swung his arms wide, grabbed them in, squeezed with all his strength, and squeezed them into eighty pieces.
Forty snakes, eighty pieces — the arithmetic is doing the violence. 揝 is a rare character for gripping and crushing in the fist, and the sentence uses it twice in six characters, which is the closest Chinese prose gets to a sound effect.
The bottle is not one trap but a sequence of them, and the sequence escalates in the standard order of these ordeals: fire, then vermin, then something with a will. Wukong beats the first two without effort, which is the book making sure we understand that the third one matters.
Note how little space the snakes get. Forty of them arrive and are gone inside one sentence, dispatched with a number rather than a fight. The novel is very good at signalling what is scenery and what is plot, and it does it by how long it lets a thing live.