Warning: Spoilers Off applies to these pages. Proceed at your own risk.
Season 1
- Emma's treatment at work. She's overworked, harassed by her boss, given more tasks than she can handle on her own and then is expected to come in early to print out the paperwork and set the table up. It's a wonder she hadn't collapsed sooner. Even more sad when whoever Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi's client was, didn't really care about Emma's terrible workplace environment and were more focused on the fact she would be able to see the data for her company.
- Emma's dream where she remembers eating egg rolls with her parents, which then cuts to Cheng Xiaoshi looking up and realizing his parents have left him.
- Then there's Emma receiving a text from her parents that Lu Guang tells Cheng Xiaoshi to not answer. However, he does and starts crying when he reads the text from Emma's mother who's worried over her daughter's health and asking her to take care of herself. This causes Cheng Xiaoshi to break down into tears as he replies back that he misses them before going to sleep.
- This culminates into Emma's parents taking a train to her apartment, leaving her some clothes to wear and fried egg rolls for her to eat. Emma then immediately calls her parents as she tearfully runs to the station in order to meet them.
- Emma's death. She runs into a stranger and then her "suicide" gets broadcasted on the news, with Lu Guang likely knowing this would be an outcome for her as he reminds Cheng Xiaoshi not to ask about their clients past or futures when he wonders if Emma was doing alright.
- Two friends who used to be close and bond over food soon grow apart when one starts to value the business over what made the food so special to them in the first place.
- Xiao arc:
- Cheng Xiaoshi finds out that the basketball court will be demolished later because the school didn't have the funding to keep it up. No matter if he won or lost the game, the end would still be the same. As the team would later learn, that's far from the worst unavoidable node in this story...
- Cheng Xiaoshi gives their client's messages to his friends and crush. We later get to hear two of the messages, revealing that they were just messages Chen wanted to pass along before his dearest friends pass in an unavoidable accident.
- Cheng Xiaoshi finds out that that day would be the day an incredibly powerful earthquake passes through. Given their client is someone who survived and the people Cheng Xiaoshi interacted with earlier from his team, his crush and his mother... he realizes in horror that they wouldn't be the ones to make it out. And what triggers this realization? Cheng remembers the date because he believed his own missing parents were in the same earthquake, and the poor kid is left sobbing into Qiao Ling's arms praying that they weren't caught up in it.
- Episode 5 is likely the one that will have the most tears sprung as Cheng Xiaoshi attempts to at least stop the earthquake from killing his client's mother even though he attempted to warn the others in town but wasn't believed.
- Cheng Xiaoshi nearly devolving into a panic attack as he cries for his client's mother, referring to him as his own mom and yelling at her to stay awake.
Cheng Xiaoshi: ....Ma? Ma? Ma!! Please! Wake up! Stay with me! Please! I'm scared of being alone!!- Lu Guang getting punched in the face by a tearful Cheng Xiaoshi who yells at him for lying to him, but soon slumps onto the floor, too tired to continue yelling.
- The frame slowly shrinking in around Cheng Xiaoshi as he thinks about Lu Guang lying to him and the fact that his attempt to be kind by sending a text as Emma indirectly resulted in her murder. It spirals out to him blaming himself for just about everything that's gone wrong over the course of the season.
- Cheng Xiaoshi using his powers to keep up with the killer in their fight, which is intercut with shaky footage of the murder victims the enjoying happy moments following each of their photos.
- When it finally looks like there's hope that Emma is going to survive, that maybe they really can change death nodes without incalculable consequences... the Red-Eyed diver possesses her and makes her walk to her death. To make it even worse, he ends the possession shortly after she starts falling, meaning she likely had time to process her impending death less than a minute after she'd regained the will to live...
Season 2
- While he's under arrest, Cheng Xiaoshi is told (rather casually, by an unknown officer) that Lu Guang's surgery was unsuccessful and he's died. He breaks down crying as he imagines a bright, soft vision of the photo shop with Lu Guang walking around him doing everyday things.
- Cheng Xiaoshi is about to go with Xiao Li to search for Chen Bin, but looks back to his friends and has a brief flashback to seeing Qiao Ling possessed and Lu Guang bleeding out, which makes him hesitate and stay with them.
- After the first episode ends with Chen Bin's abrupt death, the second starts by introducing his pregnant wife a few hours prior happily talking to some visitors (including his seemingly warm and caring former captain Qian Jin) about her husband. That same visitor later has a phone conversation with Chen Bin where the latter talks about how he's working hard because of how excited he is to be a father and how he'd hate to miss the day of his daughter's birth.
- Pretty much everything involving Chen Bin in episode two is heartbreaking given that the viewer has already seen him die at that point, but especially the actual moment of his death, which is intercut with his wife musing about the missing photograph of him (which she assumes he took in anticipation of replacing it with a picture of their newborn) talking to their unborn daughter about how she'll soon be able to meet him in person.
- Chen Bin's wife arrives late to his funeral in a dress that she might've worn to their wedding instead if they'd gotten to have a ceremony, and when she approaches the casket, she breaks down in tears and calls him a liar for breaking his promise to come home to her. By the time she starts pleading for him not to make their daughter grow up without a father, the other funeral attendees are sobbing as well.
- Liu Jing casually refers to the deceased Liu Min as "my worthless son" and says that not having to deal with him anymore is the only upside of recent events. Even though he was a serial killer, that's still his father saying he's glad to be rid of him.
- The entire domestic abuse sequence when Cheng Xiaoshi is possessing Li Tianxi.
- In a Sympathy for the Devil kind of way, the fact that it just never occurs to Qian Jin without Li Tianchen's intervention that they could use Lu Guang to get to Cheng Xiaoshi is pretty sad - given most of what we see of his relationship with his wife and the way he behaves towards his wards, it's possible he's just never had anyone he loved that much or who loved him that much in turn.
- Especially in light of the later reveal that Lu Guang has, in fact, gone back in time and changed a death node without breaking reality (yet, at least), Li Tianchen's admission that he had given them the photo out of hope that they might save his mother when they went back in time - and the way it reinforces his anger and distrust for the world - is fairly heartbreaking.
- Li Tianxi's death. Just as she signs and speaks one of the only things we get to hear/see her say, she's abruptly shot by Qian Jin and bleeds out in Qiao Ling's arms.
