This chapter's epigraph is from a poem by the famous poet Siddhartha Mukherjee. It's a quote from the poem "Siddhartha: A Tale of Two Cities" in which the protagonist asks, "What is the meaning of life?" The poem is about two cities, one inner and one outer. The inner city is a city in India, and the outer city is in China. The protagonist asks the poet to tell him the story of how he came to be in the inner city. The poet tells the protagonist that he has come to submit his quest. He asks the protagonist to count the number of reaper bugs he killed in the quest. The instructor tells him that there were 4,626 of them, and that there are 266 of them. This is impossible, the instructor says. He gives the protagonist a token and a quest token to prove that he killed 1,500 of them in total. He says that once the protagonist steps over the outer circle line, he will no longer be protected by the Quingyun sect, and his safety will be his own responsibility. He warns the protagonist not to confront the two conspirators, but instead to avoid any conflict. He tells them that it's luo peng and wangyanmiao who are trying to get into the inner circle. They've written a letter to the protagonist, but they haven't mentioned anything about their training. It turns out that the protagonist's brother, wang peiran, has been working on the house, and he's been trying to talk to yan about his training. He's also trying to find out if yan