After listening in on the conversation between Master Lead and Chao Wu the night before, Shin Sumi who originally had little care for Speaking now found herself more interested in the subject.
Patiently, she forced herself to listen attentively to the entire lecture of the day, given by the low level cultivator who was one of their teachers.
"To learn to Speak, one also has to learn to Listen. That simply makes sense, even though I can't quite figure it out..."
For Shin Sumi, who liked to learn things from books, having to learn by herself without having a clear plan on how to do it was excruciatingly frustrating. She was also aware of how much she usually relied on Nuan for learning.
The Lion Bat refined all of the techniques she acquired with a hundred percent success rate, providing her with the best techniques and thus avoiding the flaws that sometimes made a technique harder to learn.
Only with Speaking Nuan was of no help at all! Shin Sumi was on her own.
Passing it as a realization of her own, she told the other cultivators what she had learned from her nocturnal experience, asking for their opinion.
"Speaking and listening would be of equal importance to each other? What should we be listening for though?"
"Master Lead said a Speaker can obtain the power to Speak to inanimate things and control them but apart from a bell or a wind chime I can't see what we would be listening for," Xiu Ying jumped in on the conversation.
"Think about it, why else would they make us listen for hours on end to the lecturers?" Shin Sumi argued gently.
"I think it's for them to train, they are the ones Speaking!"
Shin Sumi nodded, having also reached that conclusion and yet she couldn't dismiss what she had heard the previous night.
"As for what you said about weapons and other techniques, that actually sounds more logical to me now. Senior Chao didn't forbid us from cultivating other things. He didn't respond to me so I think it is okay," Fei Unwan nodded slightly, holding his chin between his fingers.
Each person was coming to their own conclusion in their own time, faced with the enigmatic discipline that was Speaking. Even though it greatly differed from the sort of cultivation Shin Sumi was used too, it was very similar in that it couldn't be rushed.
For weeks, the new disciples and Shin Sumi patiently listened to the lecturers. And yet no matter how she tried, a revelation never came to her.
Even enhancing her hearing with Shinsoo didn't reveal anything besides what she had already been told, that Speaking was not a matter of using Shinsoo, or at least not in the usual sense.
At night, Shin Sumi would often leave the confines of her room and roam around Lead Peak, finding spots to cultivate on her own.
As she bathed in the light of the moon, her Moon Severing Ephemeral Shadow grew stronger, bringing her closer to the fourth step of the Liquid Realm.
One night, she was cultivating near the bamboo grove, her favorite place, when Nuan came flying to her, a strange noise escaping her closed mouth. Usually when she cultivated, Shin Sumi would let Nuan out to fly around, exercise and also hunt butterflies, moths and other insects.
Only this time, Nuan's jaws were tightly clenched around something that at first glance seemed much too big for her to eat. Whatever it was, it also made some noise, sounding panicked inside the predator's jaws.
"Nuan, what did you find?! This is way too big for you, you can't swallow that!"
Shin Sumi gripped Nuan's head, forcefully opening her jaws and making her drop whatever she had hunted down on the ground.
In a blob of spit, a Night Rat the size of Nuan's head fell on the dirt.
"You're hunting down Night Rats now? You can't even eat them, they're too big! Look at the poor thing, it's terrorized."
The rat was too scared to move, instead attempting to play possum under Nuan's glare. It's heart was beating frantically but it seemed utterly incapable of running away, something it was usually really good at to escape predators.
"Its heart sounds like it's about to explode, it is beating so fast," Shin Sumi could hear the tiny muscle's erratic beating. To give the small creature some rest, Shin Sumi let Nuan fly away and stopped moving, erasing her presence in the Night Rat's vicinity.
"There there, try to recover now. Sorry about Nuan, sometimes she doesn't know what she's playing with."
Patiently, waiting for the rat to recover from its fright, Shin Sumi waited. Unsure whether it was due to spending her days listening silently to the Speakers' lectures, she started to listen to the heartbeat of the rat abstent-mindedly.
The beats were everything but regular, forming a strange rhythm. Without realizing it, Shin Sumi started to think that maybe the irregular beating was the reason the rat couldn't move.
Just as she was considering the idea, the rat's heart started to gain regularity, finally. As a steady rhythm gradually took over the random beat, the Night Rat's leg twitched once, then twice.
A dozen breaths later, the rat suddenly jumped from its back onto its legs and scurried away in a bush as if its life depended on it, which was probably the case.
Her eyes fixated past the bush, Shin Sumi stayed there, sitting in the dirt for a long time. She had been meditating for a few hours before and her mind was still partially in a state of focused emptiness.
"I was right, as soon as the heart picked up a steady rhythm again, the Night Rat became able to move. There are doctors who listen to the heart of their patient as well. Father used to tell me that a good doctor can discern over a hundred ailments just from a person's heartbeat.
The heart is the core of the body, the most important piece to make it work. When it stops working, the rest quickly fails too. When the body needs more attention, the heart will speed up and send more blood around the body. When it needs to calm down, the heart will slow down and rest as well."
"The synchronization between the heart and the rest needs to be perfect at all times for the body to work, which implies a certain rhythm that depends on the situation!"
Rhythm.
Suddenly, Shin Sumi's mind clicked. After weeks of trying without success, never understanding what listening was about, it was as if she had finally gotten the key to an impregnable locked door.
Synchronicity, rhythm, pace, these were what she should listen to. They were the key to the first steps of Speaking! Master Lead had even told her that Speaking came from the heart, how did she fail to realize it earlier?!
"Nuan come back, we are done for the day. Once more, it is thanks to you that I have made progress. You really are the best, little girl!"
The following day, Senior Chao was giving the daily lecture, to which Shin Sumi eagerly attended.
Instead of focusing her attention on what he was telling the low-level disciples, Shin Sumi instead concentrated all her mind power and hearing ability on the way he was Speaking.
At first nothing felt special, or out of the ordinary in any way but Shin Sumi persevered.
After one hour, she still failed to feel the rhythm of his words but she understood the vast difference between something as complex as a speech and something simple like a creature's heartbeat.
After two hours, Shin Sumi stopped hearing the words entirely. Anybody could have asked her what had just been said a second earlier and she would have been incapable of repeating. In some kind of meditative state, she concentrated on the flux of the words and the way the sound produced by Senior Chao reverberated and propagated in the lecture hall.
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After four hours, Shin Sumi had closed her eyes. Even without sight, it was as if she could perfectly see the hall. The voice of Senior Chao bounced on the obstacles and mixed at different places in the room. Like the wind agitating the surface of a pond, sound waves twisted and turned around every object, every person, creating a mental map of the room for Shin Sumi.
After eight hours, Shin Sumi could almost sense the pulse of the words, which words were accentuated because of the complicated acoustics and which died out quickly.
Concentrated as she was on the rhythm of the words and their ability to move around the room, Shin Sumi didn't understand their meaning anymore but she could feel the true nature of the daily lectures. Like a secret message, some words naturally dissipated while others grew strong, forming a rhythmic string of sentences.
"If I could just hear the words," Shin Sumi thought, aware that she had concentrated so hard for so long that all meaning had escaped her thus far.
Only what she feared would happen happened the second she tried to understand the words again. Suddenly her whole connexion with the world of sounds before her broke, rupturing her state of concentration which fell apart as quickly and violently as an avalanche.
"And this is where we will stop today."
At least Shin Sumi was back to understanding human speech, she thought.
***
"Aaaargh, I can't do it anymore. It takes so long to concentrate, and then I can barely start listening in on what the true lecture is about before it's over. Now my head hurts, my muscles are tense and my ears are playing tricks on me, it feels like."
Months had now passed since Shin Sumi's first arrival in the Blue Fire Sect.
"I can only try to listen to the Speakers for a few days at a time after which I need to rest and do something else," she thought. "Should I go spend time in the library or cultivate?"
Shin Sumi would usually cultivate at night, especially when the moon was full and its Shinsoo was at the highest concentration. When night hadn't fallen yet, she would usually work on her movement skills and techniques in the calm of her room but these days she could feel her cultivation level reach a bottle-neck.
The Liquid Realm was divided into nine steps, one to three being considered the Lower Liquid Realm. As such, the bottle-neck before the fourth step and the seventh step were the hardest to overcome, to enter the Mid Liquid Realm and the Late Liquid Realm respectively.
Now that Shin Sumi had reached the end of the third step, she could feel the difficulty of cultivating increasing.
"The Moon Stone can help me break through but it would be more efficient to use Enhancing Pills in combination with it."
And so Shin Sumi decided to go to one of the Blue Fire Sect's markets.
Because unlike the others, Lead Peak focused on Speaking, a form of cultivation that didn't require the use of Shinsoo, at least in its first steps, the market of Lead Peak was disappointing. It almost looked like a mortal town market and was almost entirely devoid of cultivation resources as well as weapons.
"Stop there for a second, fellow disciple," a voice called out to Shin Sumi as she was leaving Lead Peak and entering the valley known as the Common Area.
"Can I see your identification?"
Nodding respectfully, Shin Sumi produced the piece of jade that had been given to her by Master Lead when he accepted her as a disciple of Lead Peak.
"Do you mind telling me what business you have in the Common Area?"
"I am looking for cultivation resources in the sect's markets. Do you know where I could find low prices for Shinsoo Absorption Pills or Cultivation Enhancers?"
The disciple in charge of controlling the gate between Lead Peak and the rest of the sect shook his head slightly, a pitiful smile on his lips.
"Aaah, you wouldn't believe how many people ask me that question every day. I don't know why people don't start selling that stuff in Lead Peak. Whoever does it would be rich by the end of the week!
Try Hon She's stall in the south-west market, I heard he buys his pills from the alchemists and sells them with only a small margin."
Shin Sumi thanked the disciple and left, after watching him inscribe her name with Shinsoo onto a piece of jade.
Such were the rules in the Blue Fire Sect, or at least in Lead Peak. The movement of each disciple was monitored at the gate and they were not allowed out of Lead Peak past night time. As curious as Shin Sumi was about why the rules were in place, she didn't mind them very much.
As long as she could roam freely in the common area and find what she was looking for, she was fine.
Walking around in the Common Area, it was very easy to forget that she was still inside a cultivation sect. To her, the valley was more reminiscent of a large city.
The Common Area alone was bigger than the two valleys of the Dark Sky Starry Sect and was much more cluttered too. Disciples' residential areas were mixed with all sorts of other buildings. Arenas, training areas, eating and drinking establishments, shops and markets were everywhere.
It took a while for Shin Sumi to find the market that the guard at Lead Peak's gate had told her about.
Buying a few pills to aid her in breaking through the bottle-neck of her cultivation, night was already about halfway there when she found her way back to the gate.
"Can I see your identification again, please?" asked the same guard as before, "this is procedure, I need it to erase your name from the list."
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
Shin Sumi and the guard chatted amicably for a few minutes, exchanging their thoughts on different places of the Common Area.
She was about to leave when the disciple suddenly froze, his eyes looking in the distance with a strange gleam in his pupils. Fear, Shin Sumi thought.
She made a motion to turn around to see what he was looking at when the guard suddenly grabbed the fabric of her sleeve to stop her. In silence, his eyes told her not to do anything.
It was her divine sense that informed her about a small ground of people walking slowly towards them. They were walking at a mortal pace, almost unbearably slowly, and there were seven of them.
When the guard dropped to one knee and bowed to the group, Shin Sumi followed along, not willing to offend whoever the disciple had been scared of.
As she lowered her head, she couldn't help but steal a glance at the group before them.
The seven were all dressed similarly. They each wore long purple robes with hoods covering most of their faces. From where she knelt, Shin Sumi might have been able to see their faces under the hoods from the side were it not for a band of purple fabric that wrapped around their mouth and nose.
Instantaneously, Shin Sumi knew who they were. She had heard Master Lead talk about them to Chao Wu.
"This Silent Seven!"
The sheer power they exuded felt reminiscent of that of the Night Twelve, the elite troops of Bronze Peak but at the same time it was different. The pressure from the Night Twelve came from their power and the strength they had as a group whereas the Silent Seven had a formless presence that was hard to put into words.
Shin Sumi's cultivation base couldn't quite decipher that of the group, meaning they were on another level from her but yet her divine sense wasn't thrown in a disarray like when observing an expert. More than the group of cultivators themselves, it was the atmosphere surrounding them that felt off and dangerous.
By the time Shin Sumi and the guards rose from the ground, the group had walked a long way. They had walked slowly, almost leisurely, which added to their eerie presence.
"They were the Silent Seven, weren't they?"
"The strongest of Lead Peak under Master Lead and the sect Elders. Whatever you do, do not cross them. They each have the level of a Master Speaker on their own and when they're together...," the guard shuddered strongly, "nobody knows who they really are but no one attempts to find out."
"Why are they 'silent'?"
"As the rumors go, whoever heard them Speak never lived old enough to tell the sound of their voice. As Master Speakers, the words they Speak are sharp like an expert's sword and also as deadly."
Shin Sumi looked in the distance, where the group had disappeared. From their pace, she calculated that they couldn't have gone far.
She turned one last time towards the disciple guarding the gate, "Do you know where they are going? Do they live atop the mountain?"
Seeing the alarm in the guard's eyes, Shin Sumi coughed lightly and clarified, "It is simply that I need to go somewhere tonight and I don't want to cross their path again."
She could tell that she had asked enough questions regarding the Silent Seven. Any more question and it could become dangerous as there was a difference between a new disciple enquiring about the powerful elite troops and someone curious or foolish enough to try to find who they were.
The guard answered to the best of his ability, which meant basically no useful information except advising Shin Sumi to wait for a while before walking around Lead Peak.
She departed from the gate, quickly leaving the guard's field of view.
"If there is something strange going on around Lead Peak, the best way to find out would be to investigate Master Lead himself. Why did he lie before choosing new disciples? Where are the newcomers who were not accepted into the Speaker's way? Maybe only he has the answer to that."
Shin Sumi's thoughts clicked together, formulating a plan of action that could very well lead to understanding more things about the Blue Fire Sect.
"However I can't investigate an expert like Master Lead. It is way too dangerous, he would see through me in a heartbeat. The Silent Seven on the other hand, none of them seem to have an earth-shattering cultivation base. Would they be able to see through me?"
By now, if the Silent Seven had kept the same pace, Shin Sumi knew there were only three paths they could be walking. She only needed to find which to put her plan to action.
"Invisible Crane of Oblivion!"