All I have in this sleeve of mine are three dates, which were for serving with tea to the Lord Emperor of the Eastern Flower. I never ate them, and I will give them to you now."

罷 is ba, the neutral particle that turns a statement into an offer — the second and last of the chapter's two, and the same reading as the plea for the deer's life. It is not the bà of "to finish." The dates are left over from the chess game. The Longevity Star has been carrying his guest's untouched refreshments in his sleeve since the afternoon his deer ran away.

The king swallowed them, and gradually felt his body lighten and the sickness recede.

身輕, the body becoming light, is the standard first sign of successful cultivation in Daoist writing — the step before rising into the air. Ten characters, and the illness that a thousand children were to have cured is gone.

Those who afterwards attained long life all trace it back to this.

The narrator steps outside the story to make an aetiological claim, which he does perhaps twice in the chapter. The line reads like a footnote explaining where a real tradition came from, which is a very old move in Chinese storytelling.