On the far side of the distant official road, the caravan that had passed earlier had made camp.
Someone woke in the middle of the night with a full bladder. Still half asleep, he blearily got up to find somewhere to relieve himself.
Sometimes, in dreams, there was a hazy sensation of the spirit wandering outside the body, as though one had traveled far away in sleep.
At such times, one often could not open one's eyes, seemingly able to see only through narrow slits, yet many strange things became visible, while the body remained difficult to control between sleep and waking.
The man relieving himself was not yet fully conscious. Half his soul was still tethered to his dreams, and he retained something of that sensation.
Bracing himself against a tree trunk and aiming at a large tree, he was nearing the end of his comfortable release when, through the slits of his eyes, he suddenly saw someone in the hazy distance across the official road rise into the air with a horse and look back toward the ground.
"Huh?"
Mumbling in sleepy confusion, the man thought he was still dreaming. The next moment, the person and horse ascended, seeming to gradually dissolve into a faint white light in the wind and disappear.
As he finished urinating, a sudden shiver ran through him, shaking his body several times. He seemed to wake fully all at once.
He shook his little brother with one hand and rubbed his eyes with the other. There was nothing in that direction now, as though it had all been an illusion.
Was I still half asleep?
Despite that thought, an inexplicable feeling lingered in his heart. He flicked his right hand, wiped it on the tree bark, then hunched over and hurried toward the