At this the Heavenly Honoured Jade Emperor, hearing the memorial, sent down at once an edict for the Keeper of the Han Office: "As Wukong has laid before us, let inquiry be made of all the stars of Heaven and the divine kings of every mansion, whether any has gone down to the world out of a longing for ordinary life. Report back at once and act upon it. Thus for your hearing."

降旨 takes jiàng, to send down. 各宿 takes xiù, the lunar-mansion reading, not the sù of lodging. 星斗 takes dǒu, the measure reading the graph keeps everywhere in this corpus. The edict closes with 以聞, the same tag Wukong used a passage earlier — Heaven answers a memorial in the form the memorial came in.

The True Lord, the Elder of the Han Office, received the edict and went off that same moment with the Great Sage to make the inquiry.

當時 takes dāng. 可韓司 is the office; 丈人真君 its holder, whose title stacks an honorific for an elder onto a Daoist perfected-lord.

First they checked the divine kings, officers and clerks at the gates of the four heavens.

The next six segments are a single sustained inventory, and the book keeps the same verb 查 at the head of each: this is an audit, conducted in the manner of a real one.

Next they checked the perfected ones, great and small, within the three enclosures.

三微垣 is the three enclosures of the circumpolar sky — Purple Tenuity, Great Tenuity and the Heavenly Market. 垣中 takes the locative zhōng.

Next they checked the officers and generals of thunder — Tao, Zhang, Xin and Deng; Gou, Bi, Pang and Liu.

官將 takes jiàng, rank rather than the coverb jiāng. The eight named are the thunder marshals of the Department of the Five Thunders; Deng and Zhang come back in person later in this chapter.

Last of all they checked the thirty-three heavens, and every heaven was at ease.

天天自在 is a four-graph clause that reads like an auditor's tick: heaven by heaven, all in order.

Then they checked the twenty-eight lunar mansions: of the eastern seven, Horn, Neck, Root, Room, Shen, Tail and Winnowing-basket; of the western seven, Dipper, Ox, Maid, Barrens, Rooftop, House and Wall; of the southern seven and the northern seven, mansion by mansion all was quiet.

Two things in this list do not sit right, and the 世德堂本 reading is kept for both. The eastern seven should run 角亢氐房心尾箕, but the text prints 參 where 心 belongs — and 參 is itself a western mansion, read shēn, not the cān of 參天 or the cēn of 參差. The set given as 西七宿 (斗牛女虛危室壁) is in fact the northern seven. 斗 takes dǒu, and all seven 宿 take xiù — the lunar-mansion reading, which pypinyin gives only under phrase context and never per-graph. The 三宿 join here follows the ； that runs through one sentence.

They checked further the sun and the moon and the five planets of water, fire, wood, metal and earth — the seven regulators; and Rāhu, Ketu, the Ether and the Comet — the four remainders.

計都 is Ketu, the descending lunar node, and 都 there takes dū, the reading it keeps in transliterations and in 骨都 — not the dōu of "all". 羅睺 is Rāhu. 七政 and 四餘 are the standing terms of Chinese horoscopy, and putting them in an audit register is the chapter's quiet joke: the sky is a staff list.

The stars stood full across the sky, and not one had gone down out of longing for ordinary life.

星斗 takes dǒu again. The finding is flat and complete, and it destroys Wukong's whole theory of the case in ten graphs.

Pilgrim said, "If that is how it stands, old Monkey need not go up to the Hall of Divine Mists at all.

那靈霄寶殿 takes the deictic nà. Having demanded an audience two passages ago, he now declines to attend the answer.

It would be most inconvenient to trouble the Jade Emperor.

深為不便 takes wéi, the copular verb — "would be" — not the purposive wèi of 為此. The politeness is sudden and hollow; what he means is that the answer is no use to him.

Go back and report by yourself. I will simply wait here for word from you and be done."

去罷 takes the sentence-final ba, the hortative, not the verb bà of ceasing — position in the utterance decides. 便了 closes with le.

The True Lord, the Elder of the Han Office, did as he was bid.

那 takes nà. 依命 is the standing formula for a subordinate carrying out an order without comment, which is what an office does when a monkey gives it instructions.

Pilgrim waited a good while, and made a poem to set down what stirred in him:

紀興 takes xìng, mood or the lift of feeling, against the xīng of 興隆 in the first passage of the chapter — the same graph, two readings, four passages apart. The hand-slice falls at this 曰：.

Wind clear, clouds cleared, gladness in the reign of peace; / The spirits still, the stars bright, showing signs of good.

樂 takes lè, gladness, not the yuè of music. 昇平 is the settled reign, the condition an audit confirms.

The River of Heaven at rest, sky and earth at peace; / Through the five quarters and eight limits the war-flags are furled.

河漢 is the Milky Way. 偃戈旌 lays down the halberd and the standard — the sky is at peace, which is the whole difficulty. Wukong needs an enemy in Heaven and Heaven has none to give him.