牙齦疼痛 Kin Undoing Kin
老魔報怨三魔道：「兄弟，你是自家人弄自家人了。且是請他出來好了，你卻教我咬他。他倒不曾咬著，卻迸得我牙齦疼痛。這是怎麼起的？」老魔报怨三魔道：「兄弟，你是自家人弄自家人了。且是请他出来好了，你却教我咬他。他倒不曾咬着，却迸得我牙龈疼痛。这是怎么起的？」
逐句解 Line by line
The old fiend rounded on the third: "Brother, this is our own people undoing our own people.
自家人 — one's own household. Repeating it on both sides of the verb sharpens the complaint.
It was going well; I had got him to come out. Then you told me to bite him.
教 reads jiào in the causative sense — to have someone do a thing — not the jiāo that means to teach.
He was not bitten at all, and my gums are throbbing for it.
著 reads zháo, the ending that marks a try that came off. Negated, it says the bite never connected. 得 is the light de joining a verb to its outcome.
How did this come about?"
怎麼起的 — how did it start. A flat spoken question, with none of the literary furniture the demons use when they are trying to sound grand.
The demons' alliance starts coming apart here, and it comes apart along the seam the novel always uses: the difference between the brother who is nominally in charge and the brother who is actually clever. The old fiend outranks the third and is plainly out of his depth, and his complaint is the complaint of a man who took bad advice and would like it on record that it was not his idea.
His phrase for it is domestic rather than martial — our own people undoing our own people. These three are sworn brothers, not blood relations, and the language of household is doing the work of holding them together. Once one of them starts using that language as a rebuke, the sworn bond is already under strain.
The last line is six characters of pure bewilderment. He has been outmanoeuvred twice inside a single page and cannot construct an account of how. The third demon can, which is why the next passage belongs to him.