望大聖恕罪 The God Pleads His Case
土地叩頭道：「望大聖恕罪。比丘王亦我地之主也，小神理當鑒察。奈何妖精神威法大，如我泄漏他事，就來欺凌，故此未獲。土地叩头道：「望大圣恕罪。比丘王亦我地之主也，小神理当鉴察。奈何妖精神威法大，如我泄漏他事，就来欺凌，故此未获。
逐句解 Line by line
The local god kowtowed and said, "I beg the Great Sage to pardon my fault.
He asks pardon before he has been accused, which is the reflex of anyone who knows they have been failing at their job and has just been found by their superior's superior.
The king of Bhikṣu is a lord of my territory too, and by rights I should have kept watch on this.
我地之主 puts it in jurisdictional terms: the king is a lord of the ground the god is responsible for, so the god had a duty of care over him. The spirit bureaucracy and the human one overlap on the same map, and this god is admitting he was answerable.
But the fiend's divine power and magic are great, and if I let out anything about his affairs he would come and bully me, so it has gone unreported."
欺凌 is bullying, plainly — pushing somebody around because you can. A god of the soil admitting he was too frightened of the local monster to file a report is the sort of thing this novel does constantly, and it is why its heaven feels like an office rather than a paradise.
The excuse is entirely honest and entirely damning. He knew, he was supposed to act, and he was afraid of the consequences, so he said nothing while a thousand children were collected into coops forty kilometres away.
The novel does not punish him and does not need to. It simply lets him say it out loud in front of Wukong, and lets the reader notice that the whole disaster ran on people who could have spoken and found a reason not to — the king, the court, and now the god of the ground itself.