神珍棒 The Rod Against The Sabre
這一場好殺：这一场好杀：
逐句解 Line by line
And it was a fine fight:
場 is cháng, the measure word for a bout or an episode — the event band, not the chǎng of a place. The tag may never be parted from the verse it introduces.
The Divine Treasure Rod that gauged the bed of the Heavenly River; the rod named As-You-Will, highest in the world.
如意 — as you wish — is the rod's proper name and describes its one great property, obedience to intention. The battle poem runs seven units and rhymes throughout on the 蕭豪 group, the -ao family, exactly as the sabre's poem did.
Boasting of his skill, the fiend-chief in a temper; the great guarding sabre held high, his power bold.
The couplet gives one half-line to each combatant, which is how these battle rhapsodies work — alternating, item for item, until one side runs out.
Outside the door they contended and could still close; up in the air they wagered and neither would give way.
還 is hái, still, and 相 is xiāng, mutually — neither would spare the other. The line marks the move from ground to air that the prose just described.
This is the second rhapsody in three passages and its job is different from the others. The staff poem was a biography; this one is a camera. It alternates between the two fighters line by line, which is the standard way Chinese narrative verse handles a duel — you cannot show two things at once, so you alternate fast enough that it feels simultaneous.
天河定底 in the first line is the same fact the staff poem opened with, that the rod was Yu the Great's depth-gauge — except that here the river it measured is the Heavenly River, the Milky Way. The two accounts do not quite agree, and the book has never minded.