Pei Ye watched the Emerald Feather Sword Sect's direct disciple leave the Martial Field with considerable regret, suppressing his itching desire to test his skills.
Today, Pei Ye had reported to the instructor that he would no longer follow the training schedule, and had gone beneath a tree to ponder the two Clear Cry forms himself. With Zhang Dingyun absent, Chang Yue and Zhang Junxue could conveniently pair up to spar.
To tell the truth, after his attempts that morning, Pei Ye felt as though these two sword forms had trapped him again.
The gulf between "learning" and "using" seemed deeper and wider than that between "not knowing how" and "knowing how."
He had thought that, after performing the two forms in one seamless sequence, he only needed to familiarize himself with them further to discover the knack of gathering momentum in actual combat. Now, however, he was beginning to doubt whether that knack really existed.
Facing a powerful enemy already left no more than a hair's breadth of room for error. To bind his own hands and feet on top of that, trying to gather momentum under his opponent's fierce assault-by any reckoning, that was impossible.
Pei Ye had thought the answer to this problem would lie within the sword form, but now it seemed it did not.
But someone did devise a strike like this. Pei Ye frowned in thought, beginning to doubt his talent for the Sword Dao for the first time.
For the entire day that followed, Pei Ye wrestled doggedly with these two sword forms.
Although he had taken a "shortcut" when learning them, that was only because a shortcut unique to him had been right there. When it came to solid, painstaking practice, the youth had never lacked the patience and perseverance to try