神通廣大 Their Powers Are Vast
那老爺倒也被山主拿去綁在樹上。他那三位徒弟老爺神通廣大，把山主一頓打死。卻是個艾葉花皮豹子精；那老爷倒也被山主拿去绑在树上。他那三位徒弟老爷神通广大，把山主一顿打死。却是个艾叶花皮豹子精；
逐句解 Line by line
That reverend gentleman had likewise been taken off by the master of the mountain and tied to a tree.
倒也 is contrastive — as it happens, likewise — and 倒 is dào there, the actually reading rather than the falling one it takes at six other sites in this chapter. The woodcutter is making the point that his rescuer was a fellow prisoner.
Those three reverend disciples of his have vast and far-reaching powers, and they beat the master of the mountain dead in a single burst.
神通廣大, divine powers vast and wide, is the standing formula for a being of great capability — the vanguard used the very same phrase about Wukong in the cave, as a warning. Here it is a countryman's praise.
And he turned out to be a mugwort-leaf mottled leopard spirit;
Ten characters. The source cuts here at a semicolon, but the halves are not a matched pair — ten characters against twenty-six, and the second turns to a wholly different subject.
The woodcutter's report is accurate in every detail, which is unusual for a witness in this novel. He saw it happen, he knows what the creature turned out to be, and he gets the sequence right.
There is a nice symmetry in his phrase for the disciples' powers. The vanguard used exactly those words to warn his king what they were up against. The same sentence serves as a threat assessment in a cave and as a compliment in a farmyard.