If you're looking at Yue Qingyuan, the composed, reasonable, ever-polite sect leader, you will probably be taken aback by how much of that is just smoke and mirrors. And not just like one layer, either, it's not simple like "beneath that smiling facade he's actually an ambitious asshole" or something, no, beneath the first layer of smoke and mirrors there is another one, and then another one, all piled up and twisted together over a core that is a terrified and starving child. He's like one of those old English pubs where the wood rot is so thorough that it's actually what's keeping the roof from collapsing.
But if you're looking at the former slave child who had to be the biggest, most responsible of a gang of neglected and traumatized urchins, who ran away to become a cultivator only to make a wrong choice that got his entire body and spirit taken apart and put back together again, only to lose the one relationship that mattered to him, then the fact that he's anything other than a weeping mess on the floor is genuinely impressive.