玉爪金睛 Jade Talons and Golden Eyes
行者見事不諧，料難入他腹，即變做個餓老鷹。真個是：行者见事不谐，料难入他腹，即变做个饿老鹰。真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim saw that things were not going well and reckoned it would be hard to get into her belly, so he changed into a starving old eagle.
The plan is abandoned and replaced in one sentence. 不諧 is not harmonising, out of joint, the polite way of saying it has gone wrong. And the choice of bird is exact: a 餓老鷹 is a starving one, which is a hungry eagle rather than a magnificent one, and it explains the wreckage that follows.
Truly it was:
Three characters, and the third verse cue of this stretch. 真個是 — truly it was — vouches for the description to come.
Jade talons, golden eyes, feathers of iron; / a valiant shape and a fierce spirit beating the clouds.
The portrait opens on equipment, as portraits of fighters do. 翮 is the quill or shaft of a flight feather, so iron feathers means the wing itself is hard. 摶 is to beat round and round, the verb Zhuangzi used of the great bird Peng climbing on a whirlwind.
Demon foxes and cunning hares see him and are in a hurry; / for a thousand lǐ of hill and river they scatter in an instant.
The prey named is telling. Foxes and hares are the small clever animals of Chinese folklore, and 妖狐 is specifically a demon fox — which is what a Ming reader would have expected the lady upstairs to turn out to be.
The chapter changes weapon and changes register at the same moment. The gnat plan depended on smallness and patience; the eagle depends on neither. Pilgrim has stopped being clever.
The starving is the word that makes it. Not a noble eagle, a hungry one — and a hungry raptor does not hunt tidily. Everything about the wreckage in the next passage is already contained in that one character.
The demon fox in the second line is a small piece of misdirection worth enjoying. Beautiful women in Chinese fiction who lure men into caves are, overwhelmingly, foxes. The novel drops the word into an eagle's list of prey and lets the reader draw the obvious conclusion — which is not, as it turns out, the right one.