jian yu, get the brocade immortal

The second time XL caught Quan Yizhen in chapter 133 is especially funny to me first of all because of the timing. XL just had a tense confrontation with Ling Wen and brought her back to Puqi Shrine, and while the readers are holding their breath waiting for more startling details about the Brocade Immortal unveiled, we see XL opening the door to reveal Quan Yizhen squatting in front the donation box like a clumsy thief. The verb "squat" (蹲) is important here because like I explained in this other post, it's undignified and uncouth to squat; you wouldn't catch any other heaven official concerned with their personal image doing it. However, squatting in front of the box makes it easier for Quan Yizhen to stack the gold bars, which again shows how seriously he's taking this.

When MXTX describes Quan Yizhen stuffing the gold bars, she uses the phrase 鬼鬼祟祟, which means "sneakily" but with exclusively negative connotations, like when you describing a thief tiptoeing around to find stuff to steal. So it's funny that even though Quan Yizhen is doing something nice for XL, he has to do it in a very underhanded way (I honestly never expected to see 鬼鬼祟祟 in the same sentence as "putting gold bars in donation box", which made me burst out laughing when I first read it).

The whole situation is funny also because it's gold bars. There're pretty specific standards of gift-giving in Chinese culture, like certain gifts would show that you're cultured, sophisticated, and have good taste, but other gifts would show the opposite. For example, it'd very cool to gift someone a great calligrapher's calligraphy or a great artist's painting. It'd also be cool to gift someone stuff made from jade (jade has a lot of cultural significance attached to it and is seen as a noble gem). It'd even be cool to gift someone pearls because they have aesthetic value, and the kind that glows in the dark are especially prized. But gold bars have no cultural significance attached to it except crude, vulgar, obscene wealth. Therefore it's deeply uncool to gift someone gold bars to thank them, and the deep uncoolness is why it's so funny.

Anyway I think the overall characterisation of Quan Yizhen is just hillarious, from the cartoonish way he moves to his childlike speech patterns (he usually speaks in short, broken sentences). In chapter 133, when Quan Yizhen stole a melon from XL's backyard and slinked away with the melon in his mouth, the verb for "carrying something in one's mouth" is 叼, which is usually used on animals, like a dog carrying a bone or a cat carrying its kitten. So my mental image of Quan Yizhen is literally this: