Ryu raised a weak hand and caressed Hope's cheek.
These sorts of feelings had truly settled in for him after he saw his past lives.
He knew he wasn't special. Given a different set of circumstances in life, he might be at the bottom of a barrel somewhere, despairing just as much as Hope or cowering just as much as Sarriel.
What he did know was that this version of himself… the version that could look down on the world and dauntlessly stare into the face of death was the version of himself he wanted to be.
But that didn't change the fact that he could have easily been different.
And yet, even that was more complicated than it seemed.
He had had almost three decades of secluded meditation. Most of that time seemed to have been spent calculating out his Body Realm Cultivation Method, but only he knew how much of that time had been idle, running experiments, testing how the flow of different elemental qis worked and how they vibed with his Vital qi… so on and so forth…
