假綽名聲 A Falsely Borrowed Name
魔王卻發狠道：「美人在上，不敢相瞞。那芭蕉洞雖是僻靜，卻清幽自在。我山妻自幼修持，也是個得道的女仙，卻是家門嚴謹，內無一尺之童，焉得有雷公嘴的男子央來？這想是那裡來的妖怪，或者假綽名聲，至此訪我。等我出去看看。」魔王却发狠道：「美人在上，不敢相瞒。那芭蕉洞虽是僻静，却清幽自在。我山妻自幼修持，也是个得道的女仙，却是家门严谨，内无一尺之童，焉得有雷公嘴的男子央来？这想是那里来的妖怪，或者假绰名声，至此访我。等我出去看看。」
逐句解 Line by line
Then the Demon King said fiercely, "Beauty, with you before me I dare conceal nothing."
發狠 marks the change of register: the soothing is over. 相 is xiāng, the reciprocal, in 相瞞 — to keep a thing from one another.
"That Banana-Leaf Cave is out of the way, it is true, but it is quiet and free."
The Bull King's first move is to defend the other household's respectability, which is not what a man being accused of uxoriousness would be expected to say to the woman accusing him.
"My mountain wife has practised austerities from her youth and is herself a female immortal who has attained the Way. Her household is strictly kept: within it there is not a child of one chǐ. How should there be a man with a thunder-god's beak for her to depute?"
山妻 is the humble form for one's own wife. 得道 takes dé, attainment, and 焉得 takes dé again in its rhetorical sense of how could there be. 男子 is zǐ, the dignified noun-morpheme, not the toneless suffix pypinyin supplies. A 尺 is a foot of roughly thirty centimetres; 一尺之童 means no male in the house at all.
"This must be some fiend from I know not where, who has perhaps taken the name falsely and come here to seek me out. Let me go out and take a look."
那裡 is interrogative here — from where — so 那 is nǎ, against the deictic nà of 正在那裡 four passages earlier. 綽 is chuò: 康熙 licenses only 昌約切 for this graph, and the sense is that of 綽號, a by-name assumed rather than owned. The chāo of 綽下大路 is a separate vernacular loan for 抄.
The Bull King's speech is the chapter's first sight of his own mind, and it is not what either the woman or the reader has been prepared for. Asked to redress an insult offered by a messenger from his wife, he defends his wife. She is an adept who has attained the Way; her house is strictly run; there is not a male child in it. The defence is offered to his second wife, in the middle of an apology to her.
His conclusion is that the visitor is an impostor who has borrowed a name he has no right to. It is a reasonable inference and it is wrong in an interesting way: the Great Sage did claim to come from the Iron-Fan Princess and did not, so the name is indeed borrowed — but he is not a stranger, and the Bull King is about to recognise him. The suspicion is correct in substance and entirely mistaken about who is standing outside.
The passage closes on 等我出去看看, four graphs of complete calm, and the calm is what makes it ominous. He has not been talked into a rage. He has listened, drawn a conclusion, and decided to go and look — and the next passage opens with him putting on armour.