Xie Ningyuan struggled to smile, wanting to reassure Lu Sangjiu.
But the smile that emerged looked even worse than if he were crying.
"It's not that I want to be sad, but..." He pointed to his chest. "This... it aches all on its own."
The memories hadn't come back to Xie Ningyuan naturally. To him, it was more like he'd been told someone else's story.
Knowing his parents and his sect had been annihilated was awful, of course. But since he had no memory of them, he couldn't honestly say he felt any deep pain or sorrow.
Therefore, the anguish he felt now was less his own and more of a natural reaction from the depths of his soul—something he couldn't control.
And when he felt that instinctual reaction, he understood what his parents and sect must have meant to him, which in turn inevitably made him sad.
This created a feedback loop, trapping him in ever-increasing pain.
He knew this wasn't the time to be thinking about these things, but he simply couldn't control it.
