That crowd of spirits fought the Great Sage and his two companions together for half a day, and before they knew it evening had come.

不覺天晚 - they did not notice it had got late - is how this book marks a fight going on too long. The phrase is doing the work a film would do with a dissolve.

Eight Rules was drooling sticky spittle from his mouth, his legs were going soft under him; he made a feint with the rake and fell back out of the line.

The novel is unsentimental about which pilgrim gives out first. 看看腳軟 has the sense of watching it happen to yourself - his legs going, moment by moment. 虛幌 is a feint, a swing with nothing behind it, made to buy the space to retreat.

At which the Snow Lion and Gibbon Lion spirits shouted after him: "Where do you think you are going?

那裡走 is the standard challenge flung at a fleeing enemy in every novel of this kind, and it is a question in form only - 那 is nǎ here, the asking reading. Nobody expects an answer. The English that fits it is not "where are you going" but "where do you think you are going", which carries the same mock enquiry.

"Take this!"

看打 - literally "watch the blow" - is what a fighter calls out as he swings. It is the same courtesy-in-form as the challenge before it, and just as sincere.

The idiot could not dodge in time, and was struck across the spine with a truncheon. Down he lay on the ground, crying only: "I am finished, I am finished!"

獃子, the idiot, is the narrator's own pet name for Eight Rules and carries more affection than contempt. 罷了 doubled is the cry of somebody who has given up - it is still what Chinese reaches for at the moment a thing is beyond saving.

Two of the spirits seized Eight Rules by the mane and hauled him off by the tail, carrying him away to the nine-headed lion, and reported: "Ancestral sire, we have taken one of them!"

The indignity is precisely calibrated. 採鬃拖尾 is how you carry a hog, not a prisoner - by the bristles and the tail - and the novel picks the phrase because Eight Rules is, under everything else, a pig. 祖爺, ancestral sire, is the title the younger lions use for the nine-headed one; it is a family word, not a military one.

Before the words were out, Sha Monk and Pilgrim were beaten too, and the whole crowd of spirits came chasing after them.

說不了 - before the saying was finished - is one of the commonest hinges in this novel, used dozens of times to cut from one scene to the next at the exact moment somebody is mid-sentence. Here 了 is liǎo, the full verb meaning to finish, and not the le reading that the same character carries everywhere else in this chapter.

Then Pilgrim plucked a handful of his hairs, chewed them to fragments, blew them out and called: "Change!"

The signature trick, and note how physical the description is: pluck, chew, spit, shout. 嚼碎 keeps the older literary reading of 嚼 rather than the everyday chewing one, which is the register the whole novel keeps for this character.