Pilgrim said, "It is at the Dark-Blossom Cave on Green Dragon Mountain, in the northeast quarter of Gen, in Jinping Prefecture — rhinoceroses come to spirit form."

The address again, and the trigram again — the same northeastern quarter the chapter opened on. The place has now been named four times, each time to a different authority, and each time in full.

The Dipper Wood Xie, the Straddler Wood Wolf and the Horn Wood Dragon said, "If they really are rhinoceroses come to spirit form, there is no need for all of us — the Well lodge alone need go. He can climb a mountain and eat tigers, and go down into the sea and seize rhinoceroses."

Three of the four immediately try to send the fourth. 上山吃虎，下海擒犀 is a matched pair praising their colleague, and praising a colleague into taking the job alone is a manoeuvre every workplace knows. The sentence ends on 罷, the light ba that turns a proposal into a suggestion — exactly the tone you would want for volunteering somebody else.

Pilgrim said, "These rhinoceroses are not like the moon-gazing sort. They have practised and gained the Way, and every one of them has a thousand years of life.

望月之犀 — the moon-gazing rhinoceros — is an old belief that the creature stares at the moon, and its horn takes the moon's markings. Pilgrim is saying: not the ordinary storybook kind. 修行得道 puts 得 as the full verb, to gain — they gained the Way.

It needs all four of you to go together to be any good. Do not beg off."

推調 — to push a thing away and shift it elsewhere, to make excuses. Still exactly what the three of them were just doing, and Pilgrim names it to their faces in four characters.

"If one of you at some moment could not hold him, would that not put us to trouble all over again?"

卻不又費事了 — would that not be a nuisance again. The argument is not about honour or danger. It is about not having to do the paperwork twice, which is the argument most likely to land in this building.

The Heavenly Preceptor said, "What sort of talk is this from you?

說得是甚話 — the same shape as the four stars' protest a few lines back, but with the reproach going the other way. The 得 is the light de, linking the speaking to what came out of it; and 甚 on its own is the older way of saying "what".

The decree tells off the four of you — how can you not go?

旨意著你四人 has 著 in its dispatching sense, read zhuó — the decree assigns you. It is the bookish reading of a character that has already appeared in this chapter holding a weapon, catching fire and meaning "downright". Four jobs, one written form.

Fly at once.

Four characters, and the argument is over. Rank has spoken.

I go back to report the decree carried out."

回旨 — to return the decree, that is, to report an order executed. The Preceptor's whole part in the chapter is delivering a piece of paper and then going back to say he delivered it.