Chapter 2188: Planned Offer
It was quite a romantic statement without context.
Of course, he didn't say it aloud.
That would be foolish.
Why would he announce his intentions to bribe the judge and poach her from the Panamic Martial Federation?
Instead, he used non-verbal communication. Normally, this was also susceptible to being intercepted by the various Martial Masters in the room positioned around himself and Sage Kole for her own safety since she was unable to use her power.
It didn't matter even if these Masters hadn't mastered the Fauna Flow technique. The Master Realm granted all of them deep enough insight to be able to recognize and understand subconscious non-verbal language when they saw it.
In other words, not even non-verbal communication could allow him to communicate with her without anybody noticing. Thus, he had known he would need another solution to speak with her privately. He probably could not ask to speak with her privately, and she didn't appear to be the type to grant him a private audience. After all, if she did that with all the Martial Masters she judged, they would undoubtedly try every measure in the book to get her to abstain from inflicting a harsh sentence on them.
Just the fact that someone would want to speak with her privately instead of openly was evidence that they were probably up to no good.
Thus, he had always known that he couldn't rely on the faint hope that she would give him a private meeting.
Which meant he needed to find a way to communicate with her without anybody else noticing. That was why he had spontaneously created a technique before the meeting could begin. One designed to solve just the very problem he knew he would encounter when trying to communicate with the Sage non-verbally in the presence of Martial Masters.
Silent Speech was what he named it.
The way that it functioned was rather simple, and it made use of the existing skills that he had mastered. He would create predictive and SOUL models on all of the Martial Master guards from the moment he met them and then use that to help with misdirecting their attention away from him.
This way, he could communicate non-verbally with Sage Kole without them noticing. It also meant that he was on the clock.
The guards surrounding him were not a problem. He had met them yesterday and had been escorted by them to and from his housing quarters.
However, the Master guards standing behind her were different; he began creating predictive and SOUL models on them the moment he laid eyes on them. He needed to balance the time he needed to create SOUL models on them while also ensuring that he didn't manipulate her into asking the question he required too early. This was the extent of Rui's planning and scheming.
All for the sake of this moment.
"The true purpose of my visit is you, Your Sagehood," he told her nonverbally. Her eyes widened, demonstrating emotion for the first time since he was with her, as she became cognizant of not just his self-professed purpose of speaking to her but also the misdirection that affected all of the Martial Masters in the room.
It was an extraordinary feat to be able to misdirect so many Martial Masters all at once without so much as an ounce of strain. She very quickly realized that the brimming mind her senses were able to detect within him preceded its reputation.
Rui grinned at the success of his plan of communicating with privacy. It was a good thing that he could finally speak to her one on one, without any problems.
Or so he thought.
RUMBLE...
Rui froze as a horrifying wave of power washed over him.
She glared at him as her eyes narrowed into slits.
"Did you think that you could get away with this little stunt, young man?" Her voice was reduced to a whisper.
He yearned to speak, yet the sheer amount of pressure she exerted on him pinned him where he stood, choking him. Rui had forgotten the simple fact that a crippled Martial Sage was still a Martial Sage.
As a lifeform, she existed in a Realm of power that existed far beyond him.
If not for the fact that she could not use her power with control, she would have long shattered the little misdirection that he struggled to maintain due to the sheer amount of pressure she aggressively exerted on his mind.
BADUMP!
He activated his Martial Heart and Mind, gaining just a moment of reprieve.
A single opportunity.
"I can heal you...!" He gasped.
Suddenly, the flood of pressure choking him disappeared.
His words shook her to her core.
She stared at him with a shaken expression.
A single whisper escaped her.
"What... what did you say...?"
Rui caught his breath as he heaved a sigh of relief.
Any longer, and he would not have been able to maintain his misdirection for any longer.
"I came here to tell you that I can heal you," Rui explained patiently through non-verbal communication as he strengthened his misdirection with his Martial Mind. "Or, to be more precise, the Divine Doctor in my position can."
Her eyes widened with shock.
She knew that name, of course.
She had tried searching for him herself when she had been afflicted with her illness many years ago.
And had failed, of course. The Divine Doctor was notoriously hard to find. It had taken even Rui, of all people, several years to find him in the Beast Domain.
"...Are you truly in possession of the Divine Doctor?" She schooled her expression with skepticism.
Yet, she couldn't hide the faint glimmer of hope that began flickering deep within the depths of her otherwise unfathomable eyes.
She might as well have been transparent to Rui.
"How do you think the Emperor of Harmony recovered from the Eternal Dream Disease?" Rui nonchalantly asked, revealing a crucial state secret of the Kandrian Empire. "In comparison to that abominable curse of a disease, your condition is nothing to the Divine Doctor. He healed my father in literally half a day. I wonder how quickly he could heal you."