"and if not, he will turn our nest upside down and make us all dissolve into pus and blood."

The threat repeated verbatim by the messenger, which is how vernacular fiction shows a message being delivered intact. The doubling is not padding: the reader hears it twice because the demons hear it once, and it works.

Hearing this, the old demons were alarmed, every one, and said, "We have only just caught this fellow, and have not yet asked him his name or where he comes from.

The admission that turns the chapter. 還不曾問他個姓名來歷 — we never asked his name or his provenance. They were going to eat a man without finding out who he was, and now somebody is at the door who makes that look like an oversight.

"Little ones, give him back his clothes and bring him over, and let us question him — what manner of man is he, and where has he come from?"

審他一審 — question him, give him a questioning. 審 is the word for a judicial examination, which is exactly the register the scene now takes: three demon kings sitting as a bench.

The demons crowded forward together, untied the Tang Monk's bonds, put his clothes on him, and pushed him up before the seat.

The reversal, performed by the same hands. They stripped him a moment ago and they dress him now, and the man himself has no more say in the second than the first. 推至座前 — pushed up in front of the seat — puts him where a defendant stands.

So frightened was the Tang Monk that he knelt below, shaking, and could only cry, "Great King, spare my life, spare my life!"

戰兢兢 — trembling — and the plea doubled. This is the Tripitaka the novel has never flattered: brave enough to walk to India, and reduced to begging by anyone who raises a voice at him. A reading: 諕 is xià, the character being an old way of writing the word for frightening.

The three demons said with one voice, "What quarter do you come from, monk?

異口同聲 — different mouths, one voice — is still the ordinary Chinese for people speaking in unison. A reading: 那 is nǎ, "which," as chapter 4 has it at 你是那路毛神.

"How is it that you did not get out of the way when you saw the buddha-image, but blundered into my cloud-path?"

The question is outrageous and entirely sincere. From the demons' side of it, the offence was Tripitaka's: everyone in Jinping knows to 迴避 when the wind comes, and this one stood on the bridge and got in the way. 雲路, the cloud-path, is the traffic lane of a flying being. They are complaining about a pedestrian.

The Tang Monk knocked his head on the ground and said, "This poor monk is sent by the court of the Great Tang in the Land of the East, and goes to the Great Thunderclap Monastery in India, to worship the Buddha and fetch the scriptures.

The deposition begins. A reading: 差 is chāi, dispatched on a commission — chapter 4 seals the same band at 奉玉帝欽差 — and not chà, meaning amiss.