Wukong raised his eyes and looked into the distance, and saw a few buildings beside the main road. He called quickly to his master: "There — we can put up there." The elder came up to them and found a collapsed archway, and on the archway an old plaque, and on the plaque, in four large characters with the colour gone out of them and the dust lying on them: Huaguang Hall.

大路傍 — beside the main road. The character stands in for its commoner twin meaning at the side of, and both of the sites in this chapter go the same way. 落顏色積塵 — the colour fallen out of it, the dust piled on it. Six characters, and they do the whole job: this place had money spent on it once and nobody has been near it for years. Set it against what they left this morning. A hall big enough for a hundred guests, hung with new banners, and a board over the gate reading Ten Thousand Monks Not Turned Away. Twelve hours and forty li later, another board, and nobody has read it in a long time.

The elder got down from the horse and said, "Huaguang the bodhisattva is a disciple of the Fiery Five-Light Buddha. Because he put down the Poison-Fire Demon King he was demoted, and became the Wuxian Spirit Officer. There must be a temple-keeper about the place."

因剿除毒火鬼王，降了職 — because he destroyed the Poison-Fire Demon King, he was demoted. Read that twice. He killed a demon and was punished for it. The novel drops this in without comment and moves on. It is the last theological remark in a chapter that has been quietly odd about religion throughout — a Daoist whisk in a Buddhist sutra hall, two rival clergies hired for one morning, a folk proverb flatly contradicting the doctrine of shared merit — and this is the strangest of them: heaven's bureaucracy docking a bodhisattva for doing what bodhisattvas do. 五顯靈官 is a real cult figure — the Five Manifestations, an officer of the spirit world — worshipped widely in the southern provinces under this and several other names. Tripitaka recites the god's career like a man reading a temple guide, which is what he is doing. 降 takes the descending reading, not the one for subduing an enemy — which is faintly comic, since subduing an enemy is exactly what got him demoted. All five in this chapter go the same way.

They all went in together, and found the corridors and rooms fallen in and not a soul to be seen. They were about to withdraw when, without warning, black cloud covered them overhead and the rain came pouring down.

廊房俱倒 — the corridors all fallen. The character takes the reading for toppling over, not the one for reversing, and it is the second of the chapter's two sites for that word. There is no temple-keeper. Tripitaka said there must be one, in the confident voice of a man who knows how these places work, and the building has been empty long enough for the roofs to come down. 欲抽身而出，不期 — they were about to leave when, unexpectedly. The same word for withdrawing that the mother and sons used walking out of the guest rooms, and the same structure the chapter uses for everything that goes wrong: somebody is on the point of leaving, and something stops them.