Of course, it was not Van. I needed to do something to test him. It was a serious bewilderment for a warrior. He had spent years in training and meditation to learn to read the thoughts of others, to feel them at a distance, and… to run into … a girl? It was amusing to watch his feelings whirl: the wish to kill the cause of his shame, and the eagerness to touch, and his embarrassment in this unexpected situation. But it was not enough for me, and I added fuel to the fire. I covered my face with my hands and ‘rushed away’, catching – by accident, of course – my dress on a branch of a Jessamine bush, and tearing it in such a way, that it could not hide anything. On top of that, I tumbled over a little rock, and fell down on the grass near the pond, my energy dragging Shi to follow me.
Chapter Two
Kill with a borrowed knife
My objective seemed to be so close: his body lowered upon mine gently, enveloping me with his pleasant heaviness. I closed my eyes and was appealing to him in my thought to be more daring. He, however, drew two short breaths, jumped on his feet, and rushed to the house. I had nothing to do but quietly disappear, leaving behind a piece of silk impregnated with the thick odour of ylang-ylang, which, apparently, had betrayed me, having reminded Shi of the morning incident, when his anxiety caused by the invisible danger became entwined with the scent of ylang-ylang.
What was left for me to remember about this meeting of ours was the sweet memory of both the heaviness and lightness of his young body. This gave me wings, and I was inhaling the aroma of the spring mountain air with all my lungs, by impulses originating in the very heart of my being, in my Dantian.
It seemed to be the very first inhalation given by God to pristine man, the inhalation that made him a living being, the inhalation that gave him life, the soul. Air, inhalation, inspiration, spirit, breathing – all these words have the same root in my language. The Chinese language is remarkable, because if the original meaning of the word is forgotten and is interpreted by different people in different ways, there is always a hint in the form of the graphical representation of the word, the hieroglyph, which depicts the concept. Yes, nowadays lots of hieroglyphs are written in an abridged form and, thus, have lost their original magic sense, their visual formula, but still there is something left.