This chapter's epigraph comes from a famous line from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. It says, "No matter how many times you have changed, there is always a pattern that follows." This is a reference to the fact that no matter how much you change, you always have the same pattern. In this case, the pattern is the "starving domain." The scene opens with a soliloquy on the subject of the "Starving Domain." In this chapter, we learn that the protagonist is a "god-tier genius" . This is because he is able to comprehend the "two kinds of rules" , which are the "martial rules" and the "supracial rules." The protagonist asks, "what tier genius is Luo zheng?" .