隔年乾透 Seven Kinds Of Tinder
那土地即轉身，陰風颯颯，帥起陰兵，搬取了些迎霜草、秋青草、蓼節草、山蕊草、蔞蒿柴、龍骨柴、蘆荻柴，都是隔年乾透的枯焦之物，見火如同油膩一般。那土地即转身，阴风飒飒，帅起阴兵，搬取了些迎霜草、秋青草、蓼节草、山蕊草、蒌蒿柴、龙骨柴、芦荻柴，都是隔年干透的枯焦之物，见火如同油腻一般。
逐句解 Line by line
The local god turned about at once, a cold wind came whistling up, he mustered his ghost soldiers and had them fetch quantities of frost-greeting grass, autumn-green grass, knotweed grass, mountain-stamen grass, wormwood brushwood, dragon-bone brushwood and reed-and-rush brushwood — all of it dried right through from the year before, withered and scorched stuff that took fire like grease.
Seven kinds of tinder named in one breath, four grasses and three brushwoods, and the list is the passage. 陰兵, shadow soldiers, are the dead under a local god's command — every parish official in this cosmology has a workforce, and it is not a living one. 颯颯 is the sound of wind in dry vegetation. 隔年乾透, dried right through since last year, is the practical detail that makes the fire work: this is a year-old, thoroughly cured fuel, and the comparison to grease is about how fast it catches. 乾 is gān, dry — not the qián of the trigram.
The catalogue is doing the same job as the seventeen hearts at the start of the chapter — piling up named items until the quantity becomes the effect. There the list was moral, here it is botanical, and both are meant to be read aloud.
The detail about last year's growth being dried right through is the sort of thing that gives this novel its texture. Somebody who had actually built a fire wrote that line. The ghost soldiers hauling the fuel are supernatural; the fuel itself is exactly right.