"'The earth god and the city god of the gaol are unquiet, and have reported it to King Yama, who has dispatched a ghost-runner to escort me here and tell you to go to the prefecture and appeal again, and get the Tang monk released, so that calamity may be avoided; and if not, old and young alike shall perish.' And so we have come specially to hand in a retraction. We beg your honour's indulgence."

差 — dispatched. The fifth of this chapter's seven, and the invented chain of command is now being recited back by the people Monkey invented it for. 押解 — escorted under guard. This one comes out right without help, where the same character wanted the same reading and did not at han#2921 when the soldiers marched the pilgrims into the hall. The chain can reach it through one word and not the other. 庶免災咎 — so that calamity may be avoided. Formal, almost liturgical language for what is, underneath, a threat.

The prefect heard him out and thought privately, "Their father is a warm corpse; a newly dead man showing himself, that much one might credit. But my uncle has been dead five or six years — how is it that he too came last night to tell me to hear the case and release them? Looking at it, there must be a wrong here."

報應猶可 — that much one might credit. The middle two characters mean the response a deed draws, and the second takes the answering reading, not the one meaning ought. The word turns up twice in the novel and the reading comes out wrong at both. 熱屍 — a warm corpse. The prefect is applying a rule of evidence to ghosts, and the rule is that a fresh death is more likely to walk than an old one. He is reasoning about the supernatural exactly as carefully as he reasoned about the robbery. 看起來必是冤枉 — looking at it, there must be a wrong here. This is the moment the case turns, and what turns it is not evidence but corroboration: two independent ghosts, on one night, saying the same thing. And he is right. There is a wrong here, and both ghosts were the same monkey.