When Jian Ming heard a lie, he could hear "the truth behind the sentence" - not his reasoning, not his guess, but the naked, unadorned truth exposed in the air after the sentence was stripped away from its host by some force at the moment it was spoken. That truth appeared to his hearing in the form of a voice that was completely different from the liar's voice—different in timbre, pitch, speed, and accent. That sound seemed to be pulled out from another time and space. It did not belong to this timeline or this space, but it was there, in his ears, in his brain, and in his bones.
