拜天不題 Every House Sets Out Water
郡侯十分恭敬，傳出飛報，教滿城大街小巷，不拘公卿士庶、軍民人等，家家供養龍王牌位，門設清水缸，缸插楊柳枝，侍奉香火，拜天不題。郡侯十分恭敬，传出飞报，教满城大街小巷，不拘公卿士庶、军民人等，家家供养龙王牌位，门设清水缸，缸插杨柳枝，侍奉香火，拜天不题。
逐句解 Line by line
The prefect, in great reverence, sent out urgent notices ordering that through every street and lane of the city, without distinction of noble or commoner, soldier or civilian, every household should set up a tablet to the Dragon King, place a jar of clean water at the door with a willow sprig standing in it, and keep incense burning; and so they worshipped Heaven, of which no more need be said.
供 is gòng, the offering sense of the character rather than the gōng that means to supply. All nine in this chapter are the offering reading. The water jar with a willow sprig in it is the standing iconography of Guanyin, who sprinkles sweet dew from exactly that vessel; a whole city has just set up the same arrangement at its front doors. 不題, no more of that, is the storyteller's way of closing a thread and turning elsewhere.
A single sentence, and a whole city changes what it is doing. The prefect's response to being told that rain requires paperwork in heaven is to organise, at speed, on a municipal scale.
It is worth noticing what he actually orders. Not a levy, not a work detail — a tablet, a jar of clean water, a willow sprig and burning incense at every door in the city, rich and poor alike. He has turned the entire prefecture into a single act of devotion, and the phrase without distinction of noble or commoner is doing quiet work in a chapter that has already told us the rich merely survive while the poor cannot.
The willow sprig in water is Guanyin's own emblem. Nobody in the scene says so. The novel simply sets it at ten thousand doorways and moves on.