金作鼻 A Nose Of Gold
你說這精怪是甚麼精怪：你说这精怪是甚么精怪：
逐句解 Line by line
Do you ask what kind of spirit this spirit was?
甚 is shén, the question word. The storyteller turning to address the audience directly is the standard cue that a description in verse follows.
Her nose is made of gold, her fur laid on like snow.
鋪 is pū here, the verb to spread or lay out, not the pù of a shop or a plank bed. Six characters, and the riddle has already given the answer to anyone paying attention.
An earthen passage serves her for door and house; wherever she settles, the place is secure.
為 is wéi, to serve as. A burrow described as architecture, which is the joke — and the bottomless cave she will carry Tripitaka to is the same idea at enormous scale.
She has nourished up three hundred years of breath, and went more than once to Spirit Mountain.
氣 is the vital breath of Daoist cultivation, and three hundred years of it is what has made an animal into a spirit. Spirit Mountain is the Buddha's own seat.
The riddle-verse announcing a new adversary is one of this novel's set forms, and this one gives the answer in its first six characters to anyone who knows the trick: gold nose, white fur, burrow.
The earthen passage is the detail that matters most. What sounds like a modest touch of animal realism is the seed of the whole next arc — she lives underground, and the place she is about to take the master is a cave with no bottom.
Three hundred years of cultivated breath is the standard Chinese account of how an animal becomes a spirit. It is not magic conferred from outside but discipline practised over centuries, which is exactly what Pilgrim did on his own mountain.