The photo showed a happy family of three.
The tall, powerfully built man struck an exaggerated pose, bending his arms and using them like a horizontal bar so the lively little girl could spin around on them.
Beside them, the Lady had a heroic cast to her brows and eyes, yet wore a childlike smile as she reached out, seemingly trying to compete with the girl for that "toy" horizontal bar.
"This is a family photo of Sister Yueyin's family. The man is Xiu Shenyu, Master Xiu... Ah, Aunt hadn't formally established a legal relationship with him yet."
"Is that so?"
Ronan responded casually. He had guessed who the people in the photograph were, but in another context, he likely would not have recognized them at all—the figures in the photo were simply too difficult to reconcile with how they looked ten years later.
The marks inevitably carved by time seemed utterly divorced from their original selves. Gauntness and sturdiness, liveliness and composure, happiness and indifference... Under such starkly contradictory images, claiming to see any resemblance in their features would have been far too hypocritical.
One could imagine that such enormous changes must have come from some shattering blow later in their lives.
This truly was just imagination—Ronan's baseless deduction. Yet as He Donglou's introduction went deeper, he learned that the roots of those changes ran far deeper than he had imagined.
"This photo was taken in '85. Back then, that man—I mean Master Xiu—had just returned from leave in the Deep Blue World... It should have been his last leave."
He Donglou was still too nervous. A casual remark from Ronan threw him completely off rhythm, sending all the opening remarks he had prepared straight out of his head. His logic was a complete mess.
Yet this jumbled account