一副腳力 He Is My Mount
壽星笑道：「他是我的一副腳力，不意走將來，成此妖怪。」行者道：「既是老弟之物，只教他現出本相來看看。」寿星笑道：「他是我的一副脚力，不意走将来，成此妖怪。」行者道：「既是老弟之物，只教他现出本相来看看。」
逐句解 Line by line
The Longevity Star said with a smile, "He is a mount of mine. He got away without my meaning it, and turned into this fiend."
腳力, leg-strength, is the ordinary word for a riding animal or a porter — what carries you. Calling the creature that, after everything, is a small masterpiece of understatement. 不意走將來, "he wandered off without my meaning it," is the entire admission of negligence, and it is eight characters long.
Pilgrim said, "Since he belongs to you, brother, just make him show his original form and let us have a look."
本相, original form, with 相 as xiàng — appearance, not the xiāng of "mutually." It is the third time in the chapter a creature has been made to drop a disguise, and the phrase has been the same each time. 之物, "your thing" — Wukong accepts the ownership claim and immediately uses it as leverage.
The whole moral weight of the chapter lands in the phrase "a mount of mine." A thousand and eleven children were caged for slaughter because a god of longevity did not notice that his riding animal had gone missing for three years.
The novel does not editorialise, and it does not need to. It simply reports the explanation and lets the reader hold it against the goose-coops. This is a recurring shape in the book — the celestial bureaucracy causes the disaster and then arrives to collect its property — and it is the closest the novel gets to satire of the heavens it otherwise takes seriously.