This bout carried them fighting out of the courtyard to the front gate. Look at the three monks closing on the one fiend — a fine fight it was:

場 is cháng here, the measure word for an episode or a bout, which is the standing house reading; the other one, for a place, is wrong for a thing that happens. 攢 is cuán, to converge or close in from several sides at once — not the hoarding reading the graph bases at. Three onto one, from three directions.

Whirring, the rod like wind; rolling, the rake like rain.

Five graphs a side, each opening on a doubled sound-word. Wind and rain are the standard pairing for two forces arriving together, and the verse spends its first line establishing that this is a storm rather than a duel.

The demon-quelling staff swings up, and the sky fills with rosy cloud; the four-bright spade thrusts out, and the clouds grow figured silk.

降 keeps xiáng, the subduing reading of the staff's own name. The line lengthens to seven graphs a side and the weapons stop being weapons: what we watch is the coloured light coming off them.

Like three immortals refining the great elixir, the fire-light flashing colours to startle gods and ghosts.

The image is a furnace. Three adepts working a cauldron of cinnabar was the central picture of Chinese alchemy, and the verse casts the three brothers in that scene — the monster is the ingredient being worked on.

Pilgrim shows his power, well able for it; the fiend has stolen treasure, and much in the wrong.

The verse pauses the fighting to give the moral score. Chinese battle verse does this without embarrassment: it tells you who is right while it tells you who is winning.

Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds, Eight Rules, displays his magic; the great general Sha Monk is finer still.

將 is jiàng here, the noun — a general — and it is the one place in the chapter where this graph is not the little word that carries an object forward. 天蓬 is Eight Rules's old rank in heaven, Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds, and the verse produces it here as a formal roll-call. It gives both brothers their titles rather than their nicknames, which is how a battle piece dresses its combatants.

The brothers, of one mind, work their plan together; and in the Tiger-Mouth Cave the fight rises up.

興 is xīng, the verb meaning to rise or start up, not the noun for high spirits. And the line names the thing that actually wins this fight: not power but agreement — the three of them thinking alike.

That fiend is bold and strong, and plays it clever and sly; four heroes well matched against each other.

The verse counts the monster as one of the four heroes, which is generous and entirely conventional — a fight is worth describing only if the loser was worth fighting.

They fought that day until the sun went west, and the fiend's strength grew soft, and he could hold no longer.

The whole afternoon in fourteen graphs. The verse ends on the sun going down because that is what decides it: nobody is beaten, the monster simply runs out of daylight and strength together.