Chapter 108 - Listening and Speaking (1/2)
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.
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.
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.
”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 bȧrėly 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.