There are a lot of ways to say “I” in Chinese. Some are just dialect variants - like the word Chen Shi uses. However, there is also a wide array of phrases that also indicate the speaker’s status regarding the person they’re speaking to. Often it’s something like “humble me”, sometimes - quite the opposite.

In this chapter our cat protagonist believes himself to be superior to Chen Shi - and he uses a very arrogant version of “I” (something like “how dare you oppose the great me?”). What’s interesting about it is that aside from being a colloquial arrogant phrase, its literal meaning is close to “prince’ - a title that, as we’ll come to find out, the cat protagonist used to bear prior to his imprisonment.