"Should I have waited for their attack on me? Should I have let the arrow strike? Even when I wanted nothing more to be left alone, I wasn't allowed that. Do you think they would have stopped until I was dead?"

He regrets it came to that. He regrets the Wens had to die, that they couldn't have just finished their life in peace. If he could have gone back, no matter how excited he'd been to see his nephew, he would have sent his love to his sister instead. It isn't his fault he'd been ambushed, but that doesn't change the outcome. He'd lost everybody, everything he'd loved.

The Sunshot Campaign had been a war. The most respected of Cultivators were there, fighting alongside him.

As for Wen Chao, while it's true he needed to die, it's also true that revenge had been a huge motivator. After seeing his sect attacked and having them die, after seeing the man he considered a brother suffering so much, after losing his own Golden Core so that his brother could live again, after being grabbed and tortured while they laughed at him, after being forced to survive in a place no one had survived, Wuxian hated them.

Even after that, he protected the Wen sect members that were innocent. Xue Yang spared no one.

"You say you know I have my reasons, but that it's still terrifying."

This had been his fear when they had first met in the room, that Huiasang not understand. Most of the world didn't, most of them tried to paint him as a monster. When he'd greeted him normally, Wuxian assumed his fear was without reason. Maybe that's why he's arguing now: it had felt good to have someone else understand.

"Do those reasons not matter?"