連年乾旱 Why Has No Rain Come
行者道：「請起。累你遠來，別無甚事。此間乃鳳仙郡，連年乾旱，問你如何不來下雨？」行者道：「请起。累你远来，别无甚事。此间乃凤仙郡，连年干旱，问你如何不来下雨？」
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim said, "Get up, please.
The same two words he used to the prefect a moment ago. Pilgrim spends this whole chapter telling people who have prostrated themselves to stand up, and enjoying it more than he admits.
"Sorry to have dragged you so far. There is nothing much to it.
甚 is shén here, the question word what, used indefinitely — no particular business. The intensifier reading shèn, meaning very, belongs to the same character and turns up elsewhere in this chapter. 累你, having troubled you, is the courtesy of someone who has just made a very senior being travel a long way at no notice.
"This is Fengxian Prefecture. There has been drought year after year. I want to ask you why you have not come and made it rain."
乾 is gān, dry. Six of the chapter's eight are this reading and two are qián, the heaven trigram — the three-line figure from the Book of Changes that opened the chapter. Note the shape of the question: not could you, but why have you not. Pilgrim has assumed the dragon was slacking.
Pilgrim's manner here is worth watching. He is brisk, faintly apologetic about the summons, and then completely wrong about what the problem is.
He assumes the rain has not come because nobody has bothered to bring it — that this is a failure of service, fixable by finding the right official and leaning on him. It is an entirely reasonable assumption and the whole rest of the chapter is the correction of it.