Zou Liqin was a bit unsure at first, but as more ti went by and the sound didn't dissipate, she beca sure what she heard were indeed sounds made by swallows.
She was bewildered by the whole thing, but then she suddenly rembered what Yu i had said earlier when she spoke about hearing the voices.
Zou Liqin gently touched her heart as she recalled her explanation of why she could hear those noises while Zou Liqin, Zou Yi, and He Shan couldn't.
The prerequisite of hearing those voices was for soone to have a sense of calmness. The latter two, i.e., Zou Yi and He Shan, were already suffering from the side effects of the red suckle berserker mushroom, which left them in an agitated state. At the sa ti, Zou Liqin had the four-year demons courtesy of the heart-cleansing waterfall to deal with, and even after when the trio had passed out, she was in a panicked and frantic state at being the only one conscious and overwheld by the weight of that reality.
"Turns out Mom didn't lie about the benefits of sleep," she thought as she smiled.
With the appearance of the swallow noises, it had altered the situation. Things seed slightly more positive and hopeful than a few minutes to an hour ago. At least now she had sothing to work with. Even if it swallow noises she still didn't know how to use or make sense of, it was at least sothing.
Zou Liqin placed the trio down along with the coat as she decided to focus all her attention on the swallow noises.
"From what Yu i said, she heard swallow noises, cricket, bull, crane, katydid, and cicada.
Did the noises follow that exact order, or did she ntion them based on what ca to her mind first.."
Zou Liqin walked forward to pick up the stick she had used to select the direction she would go in. She gently sat down in a lotus position and proceeded to use the stick to write down all the clues Yu i had given her.
First were the voices she had, after which she added so of her questions, such as the order of the noises. Next, she went on to write a question in bold.
"Is this a formation?"
The experience from monts ago, where she walked a few steps only to reappear at this grassland, were indicators of the presence of a formation.
The fact that she couldn't even detect its fluctuations ant it was sothing above her current level of expertise, which ant she couldn't brute force it.
"Are the noises the key?" she wondered, increasingly feeling that may be the case.
She felt there was no way Yang Qing would put a formation so high level proving impossible to break through without leaving so clues behind, and maybe the noises were it.
Once she had written all she wanted to write and got her thoughts in order, she gently exhaled, inhaled, and then closed her eyes as she centered all her senses on hearing.
She subrged herself in the noise around her as she cald her heart further. As she was writing her thoughts and making conjectures, she still had not heard any other noises apart from the swallows, which she suspected ant her heart wasn't completely calm.
She emptied her thoughts and committed her sole focus on the swallow noises. Her actions imdiately bore fruit in less than five minutes.
The swallow noises that sounded like they ca from all over the place and from a bunch of different swallows at different frequencies now had so order and uniformity to it.
The way Zou Liqin heard it, at first, when she listened to the swallow noises, it was all jumbled up, and it sounded like a thousand swallows were all making sounds trying to outdo each other.
As ti went by, that cacophony of noises sounded less combative and more harmonious, and the number shrunk from a thousand to a hundred, and now it sounded like they were less than twenty.
Zou Liqin clenched her fists in excitent when she saw the results of her guess starting to show. However, that little burst of excitent made the noises turn a little bit chaotic again as the number of swallows making noises shot to fifty in an instant.
She hurriedly reigned in her enthusiasm and regained her calm focus. The number reduced, and harmony resud. She couldn't tell how much ti passed by, but the noise transford into a lodic sound from just one swallow, and now she could accurately tell the direction it was coming from.
"Where are the others?" she inwardly wondered.
As if in response to her thoughts, noises from different animals imdiately flooded her ears and seed even to echo in her mind.
The sudden influx ca as a surprise to her that she almost broke her concentration, but with clear results and a thodology to work from, she recentered herself as she slowly listened.
Instead of actively trying to force it, she allowed herself to be guided by it like a leaf gently floating on a river.
She thought this was the safest option for her since she wasn't sure if the animal noises had an order to them and if it would have an effect later. Therefore, it was better just to empty her mind of the choice and be guided blindly by the noises.
If that failed, she would isolate those noises based on the order Yu i gave her.
Just like before, the noises were so jumbled up that she couldn't even make how many different types of animals made those noises. This didn't deter her. She sat there silently welcoming it all in, and soon she could clearly make it out, and there seed to be an order to it; first was the bull, then the crane, then the cricket, followed by the heron, then wolves, followed by cicadas, which were followed by katydids, then swans and finally ended with goat noises.
Zou Liqin was surprised when she heard more noises than Yu i did, and the order also seem different than hers.
She couldn't help but feel maybe she had assud wrong, and Yu i randomly ntioned those nas in the order of what she could rember and recognized, and as for the part about her hearing more creatures; Yu i may have heard them but didn't have enough ti to ntion them all, since she seed to be hanging on by a thread by the ti Zou Liqin had regained her consciousness.
Either that or the extra noises could only be heard once they were in the forest grove.
Whichever the case, Zou Liqin decided she would work with what she had on hand to see if it would lead her anywhere, hopefully out of the formation they were potentially entrapped in.
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