“Work myself to the death” - lit. “fail to finish the quest before dying”. The context here is that Chen Shi tries to quote a line from a famous poem about Zhuge Liang The Prime of Shu by Du Fu, but only remembers mismatched words, and Li Bing recognizes the poem and says the line properly. I couldn’t really come up with anything similar in English and I’m over here trying to do localization or whatever, so I just went with a relatively common idiom…

“I opened this mountain…” it’s mostly known as a quote from the XVII century book Romance of Sui and Tang. These lines are said by a famous double axe-wielding general of late Sui-early Tang dynasties, Cheng Yaojin. He wasn’t actually a bandit of any kind, but at some point (in chapter 30 - that’s mostly a note to myself because it took me a long time to find the exact quote) he ambushes some people escorting a load of silver, starts a fight and robs them. Cheng Yaojin died a little before Wu Zetian’s rule, but from what I could gather, the rhyme, as well as the following lines: “if you dare refuse - a knife for each, [kill everyone] without bothering to bury” is generally used as something bandits say in literature, at least I’ve seen several texts with the same lines. I think the part about a knife is the only one that doesn’t appear in the book (at least I didn’t manage to find it, but it’s quite possible that things vary from edition to edition. It is a pretty old book).

Cheng Yaojin sounds pretty badass, if I’m honest, though sometimes it’s more a matter of luck than skill. In folklore he is often depicted as a somewhat inept warrior who manages to appear in the right place at the right time to save everyone. Still, even if it was out of a lack of knowledge about fighting on horseback and sheer recklessness, him swinging two axes while charging at his opponent (armed with a spear) and managing to cut the top of his helmet off makes for a pretty cool image.