That old fiend came into the middle hall calling: "Little ones, how is it there is no lamplight?

He wakes into the aftermath and his first question is about the lighting. The novel gives him the ordinary reaction of a householder finding the lamps out, which is much more unsettling than an alarm would be.

"Surely nobody has got away?"

只莫 is the vernacular way of putting a fear as a hope - surely not, it cannot be that. He has arrived at the right answer immediately and is hoping to be told otherwise.

He called once, and nobody answered;

應 is yìng here, the reading for responding to something, and not the yīng of ought to that shares the character. 答應 is still the everyday Chinese for answering when somebody calls you.

he called again, and again nobody answered.

The novel repeats the sentence almost exactly rather than summarising it, which makes the silence take twice as long to read. This is a device that works the same way in any language.

When at last they fetched a light to look, all they saw were three blood-soaked meat pancakes on the ground; the old king and his sons and the Tang Monk and Eight Rules were all there, and only Pilgrim and Sha Monk were missing.

The discovery is delivered as a checklist - what is on the floor, who is still present, who is not. 血 takes its colloquial reading xiě inside 血淋淋, the doubled word for dripping with blood, rather than the formal xuè it has in compounds. And the meat pancakes are exactly what Pilgrim called them.

Lighting a fire and hunting front and back, they found Sha Monk still standing with his back pressed against the corridor wall.

著 is zháo here inside 點著, the reading for something that catches and takes - the fire is not merely lit but successfully alight. The difference matters in Chinese the way it does between striking a match and getting one lit. And 站哩 puts a small vernacular particle on the end that makes it almost comic: there he still was, just standing.

He seized him with one hand, threw him down, and tied him up as before.

倒 is dǎo here, the reading for toppling something over, and not the dào of on the contrary that the same character carries elsewhere in this chapter. 照舊 - just as before - is the flattest possible way to describe undoing an entire rescue.

They searched for Pilgrim too, but saw only that several sets of doors had all been smashed through, and knew in their bones that Pilgrim had broken out and gone.

情知 again - the knowing that arrives whole, without reasoning. It was used of Pilgrim when he walked into the ambush, and is used of the fiend here, which quietly puts the two of them on a level.

He did not go after him, but had the broken doors patched where they could be patched and screened where they could be screened, and held his household secure - of which we say no more.

The line that finishes the passage and defines the creature. 補的補，遮的遮 is a vernacular pattern that means doing what can be done to each - patch the ones that patch, cover the ones that cover. And 家業 is a household and its property, an estate. He has just lost three servants and been burgled, and his response is repairs.