電掣紫金蛇 Lightning Like a Golden Snake
真個是：真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
It was truly a case of:
The storyteller's tag for handing over to verse. It is three characters and it must never be parted from the lines it introduces.
Lightning whipped out like a purple-gold snake; thunder crashed and the hibernating creatures woke in uproar.
群蟄 is the sleeping insects and animals of winter, and 鬨 is a din of many voices at once. The image is precise: thunder in spring is what wakes the year up, and the Chinese calendar has a season named for exactly that moment.
A dazzling glare of flying firelight; thunderclaps that split the mountain caves.
霹靂 is the sharp crack directly overhead rather than a distant roll. Both characters are rare and exist chiefly for this word.
Forked lightning filled the whole sky with light; the shock ran quaking clear across the earth.
列缺 is an old poetic name for lightning — the gap that splits open in the clouds. It is the sort of word a Tang poet would reach for, and the verse is reaching deliberately.
One red flash burst, and the seedlings sprouted; ten thousand lǐ of rivers and hills were shaken awake.
A 里 is a lǐ, about five hundred and seventy-six metres in the Ming, and ten thousand of them is the standard way of saying the whole country. 發萌芽, putting out shoots, is the line that matters: the lightning has not yet brought rain and things are already growing.
Four lines of verse and the register changes completely. After a chapter of documents and departments, the novel reaches for the oldest poetic vocabulary it has — a purple-gold snake, the split in the clouds, ten thousand lǐ of shaken country.
The last line is the one to watch. One red flash, and the seedlings sprout. No rain has fallen yet. The verse has jumped straight from the lightning to the thing the lightning means, which is that the year is starting again in a place where it had stopped.