Who are you?

Part 23

The next day, when she was done with her training and duties and returned to the library, the book was missing. She searched high and low, but it wasn't there. There was also no log with the book's name, so someone couldn't have just taken it.

She tried to remain calm. It was just a book, after all. She was always good at keeping her curiosity at bay. So she decided to go back to her room and train.

After some training and taking a shower, it was time for dinner. She had recently noticed something. The medicinal taste of her food was always the same. The other day, she noticed the familiar smell when she was tending to the garden.

While it would be hard to distinguish what a mixture of herbs would smell like, some were distinct enough to stand out. She was suspicious of what the mixture was for since she knew some plants.

Also, the book she read about tea making had a giant section about medicinal tea and how to brew it, and a lot of the plants they had here were mentioned. It was a matter of what that unique combination could cause.

She also had her suspicions about it. She wouldn't reveal her hand about her knowledge by acting out, so she shared the meal with Akira every other night as they conversed about different subjects.

After dinner, she headed to her room. She went through some of her personal journals and books and documented everything she could. She wasn't worried about anyone discovering and reading her notes.

When she was in Uzushio, she came across a guidebook about how, in Uzushio, they taught children how to make their own written language. It was good practice for them to use different symbols for different things.

Later, when they were to learn actual sealing, it served them as a basis. After all, seals could also be considered a language. Most importantly, they didn't want to risk children accidentally creating and activating a deadly seal, so it was a better practice to do so.

It also served them for secrecy. All information taken out of the village was written in secret languages. Shinobi were to make a manual, which would be kept in a secure vault that only a few had access to.

If any scrolls were stolen from Uzushio, they would be useless if they didn't have the manual to accompany them. Of course, public information was written in a common language everyone could understand, but depending on their role in the village, shinobi could know multiple languages.

When Shiori first got there, it took her a while to get through the information she needed. She knew she didn't even come close to learning all the secrets of Uzushio and had to visit there again sometime.

She was lucky that despite many artifacts being stolen, enough were kept safe with strong seals for her to explore. She snapped out of her thoughts and focused back on her writing.

Her personal secret language was nothing fancy, but it obeyed enough rules of secrecy to be usable. While she used different symbols for characters, it was known to be a weak measure for longer texts since it could be broken with frequency analysis.

So, she also used another language. She wasn't sure how she knew another language, but since her earliest memories, there was this language she could speak that no one else did.

It was similar to and very different from the language everyone else used, but it felt natural to her. She often found herself thinking in a mixture of both languages and sometimes shifting from one language to the other when the topic changed. She also knew how to write in this strange language.

While there were a few languages across elemental nations, those languages were usually local to small and isolated places, and most people spoke a common language with different accents.