People like them won't follow the rules they lay down if it theeatens their own life. They'll just go, "Oh, sure, I pardon you. By the way, your face offends me, so die."
Oi vey, can't authors leave well enough alone? If he's come back in time, that means he's died, which means he should side with the MC this time. How much you wanna bet he won't and the author will pull all kinds of garbage "plot twists" that don't even make sense? Sigh.
In China it's important for the powerful to bow down to the state. If they don't, it becomes more difficult for the state to torture and kill people as they please, so all fiction will at some point show the MC being subservient to the state to encourage compliance. If the fiction doesn't do that, it either gets cancelled or the author gets arrested for various made-up crimes.
Cultivation record