The room was quiet enough to hear a pin drop, yet in this absolute silence, Qin Ming inexplicably heard a murmur right beside his ear, inches away.
He grabbed the long-handled dark-gold hammer in one hand, his body tensing like a leopard. It had not been an illusion—he had even caught sight of a vague silhouette a moment ago.
Outside the window, the night was pitch-black. Inside the room, the sunstones gradually dimmed, flashed abruptly, and went out completely, plunging everything into a dark, dead silence.
Fortunately, the murmurs at Qin Ming's ear had vanished as well.
A moment later, he reached out again to touch the leatherbound saber manual whose curled pages were heavily worn. All was quiet; nothing happened.
He picked up the manual. The room was too dark to make out the writing on the pages, and no further anomaly occurred. Had it really just been an illusion?
Qin Ming immediately went outside to the bank of the Fire Spring at the village entrance, scooped up several luminescent stones, and hurried back home.
Holding the heavy hammer in one hand, he turned the pages of the old manual with the other. Still, everything remained calm, with no murmurs arising.
"Was I hallucinating just now?"
Before long, Qin Ming put the distraction aside and refocused his attention on the ancient, mottled leather pages, earnestly studying the crystallization of his predecessor's life's work.
"Sigh..."
At that very instant, Qin Ming's hairs stood on end. In the utter quiet, he heard not only whispers, but a clear sigh echoing right by his ear.
What was more, a white-haired old man appeared in the dim room, wearing tattered clothes spattered with blood as he swayed right before Qin Ming's eyes.
The room's temperature seemed to drop a few degrees, and even the newly brought sunstones appeared to dim along with it.
Qin Ming reacted with blinding speed, striking straight at him with a hammer-blade strike.
The sigh vanished, and the ragged, bloodstained elder disappeared along with it.
What was going on? The world looked different in Qin Ming's eyes now. His expression grew grave; he was merely studying a saber manual, yet something so bizarre was occurring.
Clutching the long-handled dark-gold hammer, he scrutinized the room carefully. The sunstones were still bright, the temperature did not seem to have dropped after all, and everything had returned to normal.
"Is this a cursed book?" Qin Ming stared at the manual. Bound in animal hide, it clearly had substantial age, every single page showing signs of wear.
"Or did absorbing that liquid leave me so excessively energetic that what I see and hear has become warped?" he pondered carefully.
Gritting his teeth, he threw caution to the wind for now. He decided to wait and see rather than strike preemptively, wanting to find out what manner of fiend or phantom this truly was.
Holding the hammer in one hand, Qin Ming leafed through the manual with the other. Aside from the rustle of turning leather pages, the room was devoid of sound. Once he was completely immersed, focusing his mind entirely on the various combat techniques, the whispering returned—and a disheveled, bloodstained elder stood not far ahead.
"Time runs short. I'll leave behind a saber manual... Sigh, what a pity. My path of the saber cannot be fully captured in words, destined to lose part of its heritage. What a waste of half a lifetime of devotion," the elder sighed.
Then Qin Ming watched as the man bent over a desk and wrote. Soon after, arc after arc of saber radiance surged forth, as if to tear open the curtain of night.
With every saber form the elder committed to the page, scenes from his past training would emerge ahead, accompanied by his various emotions, insights, and understanding of the techniques.
Qin Ming realized at once how profound and important the impact on him was: after absorbing the liquid in that "scrap," the world he saw had completely changed.
When his mind reached a state of intense concentration, he could perceive the author's emotions through the ancient book, resonating with them emotionally so that his grasp of the saber techniques surpassed what was recorded on the page.
Qin Ming considered his comprehension to be exceptional; he picked up everything quickly. Earlier in the mountains, when browsing the manual, he had not found it difficult to practice and had grasped its core principles in no time.
Yet this went beyond mere comprehension—he was witnessing how the manual had come into being, resonating with the spirit of the elder's practice. It encompassed experience, realizations, and the most fundamental understanding of this saber art.
"This manual carries the life's blood of an elder's half-lifetime. By resonating with it, I'm recreating the authentic scenes from back then..."
Distracted for an instant, Qin Ming slipped out of that vivid vision.
He set down the dark-gold hammer and sat before the bronze basin holding the sunstones, starting over from the beginning to study the manual with absolute devotion.
Sure enough, the more focused his concentration, the clearer the voices, the images, and that emotional and mental resonance became.
For a time, he watched the elder gaze up into the night sky, pondering his bladecraft, before piercing the darkness with a brilliant saber beam.
Then the scene shifted. Thunder roared and lightning flashed amid a torrential downpour. Having gained a new realization, the elder stood in the driving rain with a wooden practice saber and struck out with a breathtaking blow, seemingly filled with the intent to sever the heavens. The radiance bursting from the wooden saber seemed to overpower the lightning in the sky, cleaving the darkness asunder.
Qin Ming trembled with excitement. This form was nowhere to be found in the manual. Such an exquisite technique could only be felt, not conveyed in words—a strike that could be manifested only when the spirit transcended.
Such an ethereal sensation was nearly impossible to commit to paper, which was why the elder had lamented that part of his saber art's essence was destined to be lost.
Yet now, having witnessed it and resonated with it both emotionally and spiritually, Qin Ming fully grasped the essence of that strike.
In the subsequent scenes, the elder trained bitterly in deep mountains, slaying colossal beasts.
Next, he trudged alone through wind and snow, fighting fierce battles against formidable enemies and losing an arm. Heavily wounded, he fled far away, and in his twilight years, he buried a broken saber.
Thereafter, he lived in seclusion to heal, rarely stepping outside. After five years of meditative sitting, he unearthed the broken saber. When he drew it once more, the splendid saber light that had seemed to sever the heavens on that rainy night had grown even more domineering, as if it would cleave mountains that barred the way and flatten seas that hindered the path.
The older he grew, the fiercer his spirit became. His saber intent was not one of returning to simplicity or blending with nature, but a relentless, soaring ascent until that terrifying saber radiance threatened to incinerate his withered frame, reaching the point where his body could bear no more.
Setting out on a journey once again, the elder swept through all his opponents with that broken saber. Finally, he returned to the place where he had meditated for five years, buried his blade, left his writings, and reached the end of his life.
"Alas, trapped in this remote corner without any secret art to efficiently elevate the essence of my life, I could only halt here. Though my comprehension of the saber is profound and my insight second to none, my body held me back, and higher-level tomes were beyond my reach. My entire life had to stop at this stage."
His time running out, the elder wrote swiftly, saber light flashing with every stroke of the brush. But when it touched upon heavenly light, the scene blurred, and the subsequent pages became entirely unreadable.
Qin Ming knew that this was likely because he had yet to cultivate heavenly light. Unable to achieve emotional and mental resonance with those portions, he could not see them for now.
Closing the manual, he shut his eyes. Everything he had seen, heard, and witnessed surfaced in his mind—the experiences, realizations, and novel understanding of the saber felt as though he had lived through them himself.
Picking up the long-handled dark-gold hammer, he stepped out into the courtyard and performed the saber techniques omitted from the manual. For a time, lightning seemed to flash under the veil of night.
The heavy hammer in his grip cut repeatedly across the night sky, its head gleaming with a dark-gold sheen. Moving faster and faster, it traced terrible trajectories that wove together in the yard, gradually tangling into what looked like a dense, terrifying burst of saber radiance.
He brought the hammer to a halt and stood still, thoroughly shaken by having reproduced those saber forms.
Qin Ming was confident that given a complete saber technique and enough time, he could master it without fail.
Yet through this mental resonance, in a single night he had mastered techniques that went beyond the manual itself, as though he had practiced them for decades.
Soon, Qin Ming calmed down. This was limited to technique, experience, and comprehension of the saber art. Elevating the essence of his own life would still require cultivation.
Even so, this was already astonishing beyond measure!
He wondered what on earth that liquid in the stone could be, that it allowed his mind to resonate with the mysterious emotions carried within the book.
Qin Ming realized that the mysterious yield in the "scrap" might not be inferior to what had been birthed by the fusion of the ten beams of light and the five-colored mist. If word got out, it would likely stir up an unimaginable tempest.
He even harbored a suspicion that the origins of this scrap might be even more formidable.
Thoughts churned in Qin Ming's mind, bringing many things back to him.
On the night flames engulfed the entire village, the youth in feather garments had appeared ethereal and transcendent, holding a glowing purple bamboo cane, utterly otherworldly. One look was enough to tell he possessed an extraordinary background, his strength bound to be unfathomable, and the faction behind him terrifying beyond imagining.
Now Qin Ming had gained composure and confidence. In the future, he could march toward Luoyue City and confront the bloody past.
At the same time, the two women who had appeared at the village entrance clearly walked a path different from his own, seeming to look down upon those who practiced the Newborn arts.
Now, Qin Ming believed his own path would not necessarily be weaker than any other. As long as he advanced quickly enough, he could smash through any path.
Once his heart settled, he began assessing his own strength.
Right now, his arms possessed over two thousand jin of strength, bordering on two thousand two hundred jin. Coupled with having mastered essence that was not even recorded in the manual, his combat prowess was downright terrifying.
"Could I test my mettle against those old-timers who have developed heavenly light force?" Qin Ming pondered.
He calculated silently: even if those old fellows had been able to hoist a six-hundred-jin cauldron during their first Newborn transformation, using that as a baseline, a third Newborn transformation would put them around eighteen hundred jin—still short of his strength.
This was why everyone attached supreme importance to the initial Newborn transformation and sought to build a golden foundation: all subsequent Newborn transformations compounded upon that very base.
To Qin Ming, the most terrifying thing about someone in the third Newborn realm was that they had developed heavenly light force. If he let them close the distance and entangle him, he would certainly die.
For that special force could pierce and shred even the scaled armor of colossal beasts. Its lethality was immensely ferocious, the fundamental reason humans could contend with anomalies despite their disadvantage in physical size.
However, within the Newborn realm, heavenly light force could only cover the body's surface and extend slightly beyond the fists and feet; it could not yet spread into weapons.
Qin Ming murmured, "In that case, so long as I don't let those old third Newborn practitioners get close, keeping an appropriate distance, I can still fight them."
The prerequisite was a suitable weapon. Sabers and swords definitely would not do—they would likely be shredded and snapped by heavenly light force. A long-handled dark-gold hammer, on the other hand, should suffice. Relying on raw physical might, he refused to believe he could not batter his opponent to death.
"Sure enough, another sleepless night."
Qin Ming felt helpless. His vigor remained overflowing, and only in the second half of the night did he manage a brief nap. He figured he might not need sleep for the next several days.
During the latter half of the night, he studied the bladecraft, breaking down all the elder's experience, realizations, and insights completely to perform them in his own way, incorporating flashes of his own inspiration and understanding.
The next day, Cao Long, Mu Qing, and Wei Zhirou told Qin Ming and the others that if they found no special discoveries or gains in the coming days, they would be heading back.
That day, they brought out an intermediate Yiqi Art and gifted it to Qin Ming, Old Man Liu, and the others as compensation, granting permission to pass it on to those close to them.
The few villagers of Twin Trees Village were naturally overflowing with gratitude; this was the first time they had ever come into contact with a Newborn art of this level.
Above all, they had genuinely provided significant aid to the three teams; Fire Bat Cave, for instance, had yielded rich rewards for Mu Qing, Cao Long, and the others.
That night, Qin Ming examined the intermediate Yiqi Art and felt it fell short of the method on his silk book. Furthermore, this copy was a hasty transcription, devoid of intense emotion and thus incapable of producing mental resonance.
"It seems it has to be the crystallization of a predecessor's life's blood," he realized anew.
That evening, when Qin Ming took the intermediate Yiqi Art over to Old Man Liu, he asked, "Old Master, you wouldn't tell the three teams from Chixia City all the places with spiritual substance just to repay their favor, would you?"
"Rest easy, this old man knows what he's doing. Once my wounds heal and you achieve your second Newborn transformation, and when the mountains settle into complete peace, the two of us will head into the mountains together to find the spiritual substance for our third Newborn transformation. I'm keeping the best spots reserved!" Old Man Liu said, patting his chest.
Then Qin Ming asked, "Old Master, in our parts, are there any factions or lineages with an illustrious past that have completely fallen into decline?"
"Why ask that? What are you up to?" Old Man Liu asked suspiciously.
Qin Ming replied, "I'd like to borrow books from them to read. Don't worry—I'll certainly offer night silver they won't be able to refuse!"
Chapter 39