The Yellow Lion Spirit ground his teeth and cursed back: "You filthy vicious bald wretch!

潑狠禿廝 packs four separate insults into four characters - coarse, vicious, bald, fellow. The baldness is the point: it marks the target as a shaven Buddhist monk, so the abuse is aimed at what Eight Rules is, not merely at how he behaves.

"Yesterday the three of you took on me alone, and I went back beaten and let you off as a fellow creature - and how do you repay it? With this savagery. You burned my cave dwelling, you ruined my mountain domain, you slaughtered my kin.

The lion's case against the pilgrims is, on the facts, entirely sound, which is one of the quiet discomforts this chapter keeps handing the reader. 為 is wéi in 讓你為人, the sense of being or acting as something rather than doing something for someone - he is saying he treated Eight Rules as a person rather than as prey, and got arson in return.

"You and I have a grudge between us as deep as the ocean. Do not run - take a blow of your lord's spade!"

冤仇深如大海 is a stock formula in vernacular fiction and still recognisable now, the way "a debt of blood" is in English. What makes it land here is that it is technically accurate: the pilgrims did burn his home and kill his relatives, in the previous chapter, on the page. 老爺, your lord, is standard fighting-talk self-aggrandisement.

Splendid Eight Rules - he raised his rake and met him.

好八戒 is the storyteller's own applause, dropped in mid-scene the way a narrator in performance would raise his voice. The novel uses this formula for all three pilgrims and it never means anything more complicated than "watch this".

The two had only just closed, and neither had yet shown the upper hand, when the Gibbon Lion Spirit swung an iron caltrop-mace and the Snow Lion Spirit wielded a three-ridged truncheon, coming straight on to strike.

Note how quickly this stops being a duel. The formal single combat lasts one clause before two more lions pile in, and that is the shape of the whole chapter - the pilgrims keep expecting an honourable match and keep getting a mob. 三楞簡 is a truncheon with three raised ridges running down it, a real Song and Ming weapon rather than an invention.

Eight Rules let out a shout: "Come and welcome!"

來得好 is what a fighter says when an attack arrives exactly where he wanted it - "good of you to come", with the sarcasm doing the work. Here 得 is de, the linking reading that joins a verb to how it turned out, not the dé that means to get.

Look over on that side: Sha the monk snatched out his demon-quelling staff and pressed up to help.

你看這壁廂 turns the reader's head. It is the storyteller pointing across the stage - literally "you, look at this wall-side" - and it exists because this material was performed before it was printed. 降 is xiáng in 降妖杖, the subduing reading, not the jiàng that means to descend.