"Passing through Jinping Prefecture to see the lanterns, my master was carried off by the fiend-lord of your house.

Pilgrim states the case at the door like a man serving a writ. 魔頭 is the boss demon — literally the head fiend — and 你家, your household, treats the cave as a family business, which is more or less what it is.

"Send him back at once and I will spare your lives;

A reading: 還 in 送還 is huán, to give back — the natural partner of 送, to send — and not the hái of "still," which is the same character and the reading the bare machinery reaches for.

"and if not, I will turn your nest upside down and make the whole pack of you dissolve into pus and blood."

化為膿血 — dissolve into pus and blood — is Pilgrim's stock threat and one of the more graphic phrases in the novel. A reading: 為 is wéi here, the copular "to become," and chapter 4 has the identical construction at 化為齏粉, ground to powder. Not the wèi that means "for the sake of."

Hearing this, the little demons hurried inside to report: "Great King, disaster! Disaster!"

禍事了 doubled — the same cry the beast-soldiers of Flower-Fruit Mountain raised when Heaven's vanguard arrived, ninety chapters ago. It is what minions in this novel always shout, and it is always accurate.

The three old demons had just got the Tang Monk into the deepest part of the cave, where they were not troubling to ask him anything at all, but had ordered the little ones to strip off his clothes, draw clear water from the rapids and wash him clean, meaning to slice and mince him fine and fry him in butter-and-storax oil to eat.

The novel's flattest and most horrible sentence. It is written as kitchen preparation — strip, wash in clean running water, slice fine — and there is no menace in the vocabulary at all, which is what makes it land. Two readings: 那 in 那裡問甚麼青紅皂白 is nǎ, the rhetorical "where would they —", meaning they did not bother; and 著 in 著酥合香油煎吃 is zhuó, meaning "with, by means of." 青紅皂白 — blue, red, black, white — is still current Chinese for the rights and wrongs of a matter, and to ask nothing of it is to act without inquiry.

Suddenly hearing the cry of "Disaster!" they took a great fright and asked what the reason was.

A reading: 著 in 著驚 is zháo — something reached or suffered, so the fright lands on them. That is the third reading of this character in the batch, after the zhe of continuing action and the zhuó of "by means of," all within a few hundred characters.

The little demon said, "At the front gate there is a monk with a hairy face and a thunder-god's beak, shouting that the Great King has carried off his master, telling us to send him out quickly and spare our lives;

毛臉雷公嘴 — hairy face, thunder-god's beak — is how everybody in this novel describes Pilgrim on first sight. The thunder god of Chinese popular religion has a bird's beak, and Wukong's protruding muzzle gets compared to it so often that the phrase is practically his warrant description.