Pilgrim, hearing her out, laughed a cold laugh and said: "Well, you cursed beast! If you have been living inside the Toad Palace, then you must know old Monkey's powers — and you still dare stand there fencing with me?"

He heard the whole ten-line boast and answered the fifth couplet. Everything about the moon he took in; everything about jade and Chaos he ignored. That is the point of the cold laugh. She thought she was overawing him and she was giving him her address. 支吾 means to fence, to fob somebody off with words that go nowhere. He is calling ten lines of grand verse a stalling tactic, which as an assessment of the poem is unfair and as an assessment of her situation is exactly right.

"Show your true form and submit at once, and I will spare your life."

The standard offer, made to nearly every demon in the book and refused by nearly all of them. Two readings to watch. 相 in 現相 is xiàng, an appearance or a form. And 降 in 降伏 is xiáng, to submit — not the jiàng of coming down from the sky, which is the same character and turns up five times elsewhere in this chapter meaning exactly that.

That monster said: "I know you for the Bimawen who made such an uproar in Heaven five hundred years ago, and by rights I ought to give way to you. But to break up somebody's marriage is like murdering their father and mother — my feelings will not stand for it, and I mean to have a crack at you, Bimawen, you cheat of Heaven and defier of your betters!"

She concedes his reputation and then reaches for the one word that will cost her. 弼馬溫 — Bimawen — was the title Heaven gave Wukong when it first tried to buy him off: Keeper of the Imperial Stables, a groom. He accepted it proudly until somebody told him how low it was, and then he wrecked the place. It is the single insult in the universe he cannot let pass. 欺天罔上 — cheating Heaven and deceiving those above — is a formal charge out of the law codes, the sort of language a censor uses when impeaching a minister. She is arraigning him, and she has just called him a stable boy twice.

What the Great Sage could not bear was those three words, Bimawen. Hearing them, his heart swelled with fury, and he raised his iron rod and struck straight at her face; and the fiend swung up her pestle to meet him. And so, right in front of the Western Gate of Heaven, they set to in deadly earnest.

The narrator tells you plainly which part of the speech landed, and it is not the part about murdered parents. 惱得 takes the light reading, nǎo de — the verb handing off to the thing that caused it. Chapter ninety-two has the identical frame, 最惱得, followed by the same complaint about a different insult. 聽得, nine characters later, takes the full dé instead. Same character, same sentence, two different readings, and the difference is whether the word is a hinge or a verb.