So the gang took up their weapons, raised a shout together, ran up onto the highway and spread themselves out in a line, calling, "Monks! Don't move! Set down the road money quickly and we will spare your lives."

一字兒擺開 — spread out in a line, the line being the shape of the character for one. It is the ordinary way of saying a rank of people stretched across something, and here it means the road is blocked. 買路錢, road money, is exactly what it sounds like: the toll a bandit charges for the use of a road he does not own. The phrase is old and was still current as a joke centuries later.

"But if half a 'no' comes grinding through your teeth, it is one knife each, and not one of you left standing."

⚠ 牙迸半個『不』字 — if half a no comes grinding through your teeth. This is a stock highwayman's threat, and the novel uses it thirteen times in twelve different chapters. Every gang in the book seems to have learned it from the same source. ⚠ The word for no here is being NAMED, not used — it sits inside the edition's own inner quotation marks, and the sentence is about the character itself, half of one of them. A word quoted as a word keeps its dictionary tone, so it is bù and not the lowered bú it would take if it were doing its usual job in front of the word that follows. Small point, and the sort of thing that gets missed.

The Tang monk was so terrified that he shook all over on his horse. Sha Monk and Bajie lost their nerve, and said to Monkey, "What are we to do? What are we to do?"

諕得 — frightened into. The first character is a variant spelling of the ordinary word for a fright, and this chapter uses it six times. Its reading is settled and the chapter is a live test of it. The order of who panics is worth watching. Tripitaka goes first, which is usual. But Sha Monk and Bajie go too, and Bajie is a general of heaven who has fought demons for eighty chapters. They are not frightened of the robbers. They are frightened because they have no idea what is going on.

"We bore up bitterly through half a night of rain and sky, and now first thing we run into brigands blocking the road. This is truly what is meant by 'misfortunes never come singly'."

⚠ 『禍不單行』 — misfortunes never come singly. A four-character saying, and the edition marks it as a quotation with its own inner brackets, exactly as it did with the word for no two sentences ago. The printer is telling us that Bajie is citing a proverb rather than speaking his own words. It is also a small joke at Bajie's expense. He reaches for a literary saying to complain about the weather, and the saying happens to be the most accurate statement anybody makes in this chapter: they have had a wet night and a robbery, and there are a hundred and fifty armed men coming up the road behind them.