Book-2 Chapter 1: The Archaeologist

  "The Machinist, Monk, & Mesmerizer Chronicles"

As a war hero searches the oldest language in an ancient art of dance, he might discover the Intuitionist's power of reaching any answers.


Missing memories might pile up if you encounter the Mesmerizer—the one who stopped World War III with a four-minute speech, especially if he asks you to forget. Even if it’s the one and only purpose you have, you will forget it, for he has the voice.

Kusha forgot what she found on the night of the High Auction.
But the laws of the universe are painfully fair sometimes. Purpose always calls you, either through your dreams, or daydreams, even nightmares … perhaps, through intuition?

So the Intuitionist, Kusha, runs through the questions the universe asks her. Each question leads her to her purpose. Her life as an unevolved, Ungraded citizen seems rich compared to those of her friends outside the walls who aren’t ones. She wants to help her friends, but her questions, her past, her missing memories lead her to myths she never should tangle with. She never should encounter the war heroes, for they seek the Source, for they seek the signs that the devil has left, for they seek an old dance. A dance that calls her in her nightmares.

Welcome to the Episode 2 of Wisdom Revolution.

TITLE: The Oldest Dance 

AUTHOR: Misba

No of Pages (Paperback): 255

Inside Illustrations & Cover Art: Misba

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1.   The Archaeologist

I

T’S A LAUGHABLE LOCK—ONE that you would use only to guard a graveyard. Not that anyone would trouble themselves invading a timber hut in a mangrove forest farther away from the Bay of Bengal. Still, how can someone live with a lock like that? Made of ancient iron, reeking of rust. It would need a primordial key to be twisted and turned, going through several moments of mechanical trouble until the old lock opens. Good luck if you can do that without breaking the key.

Oh! The key … Well, the owner of the hut has left the key right beside the lock, including instructions. The Monk, Yuan Yagmur—revealing his muscled arms from under his wide, dark shawl—takes the note (the one with instructions):

Please, scan your CRAB first before touching the key. For your own safety.

From what, you ask? It’s a surprise.

Enter without scanning if you want to find out.

—Mee-Hae Ra

Scan? Or not scan? The Monk wonders, but soon, he decides to follow the instruction. He takes his CRAB to the scanner as any modest monk would do. Though, it itches him to find out what trap that woman has set in such a shabby cottage. Could even be some prehistoric tricks with wooden logs flying like pendulums or spikes under the moving floor. Perhaps a net—used to catch monkeys?

With those sorts of traps, the cottage would break for sure. But who knows? For a woman, who once was a yearning of the Mesmerizer, anything is possible.

When he finishes scanning the CRAB in his wrist, a text appears in old-style, green fonts: 

YOU’RE ‘STILL’ WELCOME!

The Monk takes the key and inserts it into the lock carefully, hoping neither the key nor the lock will break. Of course, he does the methodical twists and turns with mechanical precision, winning through the rust until he opens the almost broken door like the gentle monk he is. The door shrieks.

How does she live here alone? He wonders, forgetting that he, too, used to live in such a hut once, until a certain mesmerizer designed an entire mansion for him. However, Mee-Hae Ra isn’t a monk. She’s never been one.

The Monk enters the wooden house. His geta sandals tapping the floor: Pit-pat … pit-pat …

The lights glow, sensing a human presence. “Welcome home!” a high-pitched, familiar female voice says from a speaker made with old-fashioned magnetic functions instead of a quantum sound-wave carrier. The inside of the house isn’t as shabby as the outside. If his first impression weren’t ninety percent pre-constructed by the entrance, he would think that it was a nice, comfortable place to live in. A place deep inside a forest where Royal Bengal Tigers have increased their numbers after the Apocalypse befell humans.

The Monk senses no human prana anywhere. No one is home. To think she’s living so close to that man, right near the south of Alpha, while he has been exploring the entire earth, searching for her just the last week. Not everyone has flawless intuition, do they?

He glances around. Things look familiar: the high shelves full of books, jars of green tea, dried flowers—also for tea, big rocks, and crystals that emit strong prana and light. The light trapped inside the crystals makes them brighter, stunning against the dark background of the wooden floor and ceiling. A splendid collection of tea and rocks and books by a seventy-year-old archaeologist, yes,  but that sofa is a literary hell!

Books open, socks unwashed, cornflakes and chips scattered, undergarments with 34D tags faded—no, they are not washed either. Standing seven feet away, the Monk, with his evolved nose, smells what a woman should smell like around the breastbone that protects a woman’s heart.

Before the unwashed, pink and grey briefs can reveal any signs of masturbation, Yuan Yagmur looks away like the perfect, gentle monk who hasn’t touched a woman, at least, not in that way. And, no. He’s not blushing. What monk would blush, witnessing something so human, something as normal as eating or shitting? So, he looks around, as indifferent as he is to most things.

The largest wall in the living room is full of framed photos, depicting stories of war, peace, friendship, and love—everything in the last six decades displayed on a single wall. He feels a tiny spark of emotion, seeing his own photo here, right in the middle of the war and the friendship zone—if there’s any zoning at all among the chaotically placed frames, that is.

And there rests him—the Mesmerizer, frozen in one of his rarest smiles, right beside Mee-Hae. His hair is a darker shade of blond in the photos, as it was back then, and his eyes blue like the clearest sky. His never-aging arm is wrapped around Mee-Hae’s waist until his palm touches her swollen belly. The Monk remembers taking this shot himself. Sometimes, he wonders if it’s his fault that that man lost his last threads of humanity.

The Monk turns towards the entrance of the hut. Something approaches from the forest. Footsteps. They stiffen a little, tense and alert. Whoever is coming has sensed his presence. It’s her. She’s closer now, climbing the wooden stairs cautiously one by one and releasing her tension as she checks the entry log.

The door screams open.

“Yuan?” calls one of the most influential archaeologists of the planet and also the owner of this half-broken hut.

Mee-Hae Ra.

Pointy face, angled eyes; skin warmed after years of living in the south; blue T-shirt, jean shorts, and CRAB in her left wrist. Nothing has changed, except the short, dark-red hair—it was black during the war. “Nice hair, Ra,” the Monk mutters.

Approaching, Mee-Hae stops a foot away from him, who is wrapped in his decades-old, dark shawl that should be torn and faded by now, but it isn’t, thanks to the technology that repairs one molecule at a time (if you have the budget for it).

Mee-Hae finally jumps to him, wrapping her arms around his neck; her feet leave the floor. “Your shawl smells the same.”

“And you don’t feel well.” The Monk touches her shoulder, tracing her body with his palm. It rests at the back of her waist.

“Stop scanning me.” Mee-Hae releases him. “Your hair is greying. Is it a new fashion? And what’s with the laugh lines?”

“Pico says I look younger than last month,” the Monk mutters, averting his gaze from the wall of photos, not wanting to talk about a particular mesmerizer.

“I’m guessing something happened?” Mee-Hae says, busying herself with make-the-sofa-sittable and turn-the-room-walkable for a sudden guest.

The Monk avoids the question. He brings out a small package of tea—procured from the Himalayas with difficulty. He puts it on the desk that Mee-Hae has just cleaned. “You talked about some stones you found a while ago,” he says.

“Three years.” Mee-Hae quickly turns around to face him, holding her unwashed panties. From this close, they smell prominently feminine to the Monk’s highly evolved nose. Mee-Hae Ra throws them with her faultless aim to a basket twenty feet away; she’ll have to wash them in the river later. “Your a while ago is actually three years,” she says. “You didn’t pay attention then. I wonder what happened? You even brought the rarest tea on the planet!” She throws a piercing gaze at him. Her pouty lips make her look angry. Abandoning her cleaning, she approaches the balcony, holding the tea package.

“It looks hand-procured,” she mutters. “By any chance, did you pluck it yourself?” She looks at the Monk and already gets the answer that a modest monk won’t provide.

The Monk follows and breathes in the green mangrove forest. The balcony entrance is open from the outside. “You keep an ancient lock with a scanner while the balcony is open?” he asks.

“Who will steal from an archeologist who gets no gold and camps temporarily in a forest?” Mee-Hae replies.

“Ten years doesn’t sound temporary.”

“Ten years is a blink for a seventy-year-old High Grade,” Mee-Hae says. “But you’re avoiding my question, Yagmur. Don’t think I didn’t notice.” She rolls her eyes as she says the Monk’s last name.

The Monk looks warmly at her. “I wasn’t interested in it then.”

“Now you’re interested? After three years? No wonder you even found me here!” says Mee-Hae. “I’m sure I was harder to find than the tea I’m holding.”

The Monk smiles in response.

“You’re after secrets, aren’t you? Just like him,” Mee-Hae says.

“Why do you have his photos?” the Monk finally asks, even though he wanted to avoid talking about the Mesmerizer, at least, with her, yet he asks, more out of worry than curiosity.

“I thought a Monk with no emotions would understand.”

“No emotions? That hurt!” The Monk widens his eyes. “That proves I do have emotions, just not the unnecessary ones.”

“What’s unnecessary? A partner on bed?” Mee-Hae now looks at his face, probably to find out if he’s still a loner in his Lotus Lodge. It takes only a second to find the answer she seeks. She shakes her head in denial.

“Now, you are avoiding my question.” The Monk looks into the forest, a few deer with dark spots peeking through the trees.

“I just don’t care enough, Yuan. Let’s say, throwing away the photos or keeping them means the same to me. I’m busy with something more meaningful, and I don’t have time to think about what I should throw out or not,” Mee-Hae says.

“You mentioned prehistoric civilizations in your last … well, three-year-old email.” The Monk changes the topic. No one cares about the past. To a High Grade who has lived long enough, the past is just a tiny pixel in a large, high-resolution canvas. “You said they got destroyed mysteriously,” he says.

“It’s not a mystery anymore. I found proof, and WSI shut down the research. A few Silver Agents came and took my stones. They didn’t even bring me some tea as a courtesy when they came,” says Mee-Hae, frowning, probably at the thought of the World Security Intelligence. Everyone hates them.

“What stones?” the Monk asks while browsing her bookshelf.

“Evidence of radioactive rain destroying a city seventy thousand years ago,” Mee-Hae replies, frowning.

“A city? Seventy thousand years ago, you say?”

“Rewrites history, huh?” Mee-Hae gazes at him. The sparkles in her eyes are those of an archaeologist who is living in a forest near her latest discovered underwater civilization. “The last Ice Age was supposed to be twelve thousand years ago.”

“What do you believe, Ra? I’ll believe whatever you say.” The Monk turns at her, his complete attention now at her eyes.

Mee-Hae doesn’t reply for a long time. A High Grade’s words have weight; she must now think through what leaves her lips. “There are signs of war. The radioactive rain wasn’t natural. I believe they were annihilated.” Mee-Hae utters annihilated so carefully as if someone might hear, as if it’s a cautiously chosen word and not spoken as a part of a casual description. The fewer words you say, the more chance they have of being general, that is, both true and false. After all, the devil lies in the details.

“War?” The Monk frowns—almost, noticing how vaguely the Archeologist crafted her answer, for he said he’d believe it blindly.

“I know what war looks like, Yuan.” Mee-Hae gazes into the forest from the balcony. Her palm traces her lower belly where her womb should be, and her face creases as if she is in physical pain.

“They took my stone samples,” she says. “They said those were under the jurisdiction of WSI. Sometimes, I wonder if he is behind it, too. Or maybe I’m thinking too much.” Her voice drones as her thoughts drift to a certain mesmerizer.

“It’s not him,” the Monk says in a determined voice.

“Because he never hides knowledge?”

“Because he’s busy seeking knowledge,” the Monk says.

“Oh, yes, busy was the word. Always.” Mee-Hae nods. “I remember how much scared he was of not having enough time for all he wanted to do, for all he wanted to … achieve.” After several more moments of gazing at nothing in particular into the forest, she suddenly faces the Monk. “I want answers, Yuan,” she says.

“Come to Lotus Lodge. I’m getting a team together.”

“Who else?” Mee-Hae asks.

“You first.”

“Let me guess, you want me to call the others.”

“I sent them emails,” says the Monk.

“Just answer a question, Yuan. Did he put you onto this?”

The Monk stares, not hiding that he wanted to avoid answering this question. “He tried to make me work. With him,” he says truthfully, just as a war hero, the owner of a strong voice, should.

“You are wrong, Yuan,” Mee-Hae says, half-worried and half-angry, her voice suddenly quivering. “He wanted to make you work. With or without him.”

“I have to stop him,” the Monk says.

“Am I the bait?”

The Monk looks at Mee-Hae. He never wants to answer it if he doesn’t need to. So, this time, he visibly avoids her question. “You’re still depending on healing pills?” he says in questioning tone.

And Mee-Hae, like the perfect, gentle, and understanding woman from contemporary books of the Old World, lets the Monk avoid her crucial question. The question she should never have overlooked. The question even the Monk will regret not answering right now, right here, not only for her sake but also for his own.

“Don’t worry about my pills. It’s common in this era. Thoughts are powerful,” Mee-Hae whispers in response.

“Just cut the negative ones,” the Monk says, watching her face, the suffering clear in her eyes. He approaches enough to put his palm on the back of her waist. Her waist is too warm. He closes his eyes, focusing inside of her, his palm becoming one with her body.

In an instant, her muscles, her blood, thousands of lymph vessels, including the inner wounds around her womb, become visible, sensible—not in the way you see with your eyes, but the way you see the things in a book.

The Monk watches her womb bleeding internally because of her creative mind that is so strong that it turns her imagination into reality. Even though her strong prana heals it at the same rate, constant damage and regeneration is happening inside her. And much of her energy gets drained in cell-building, in self-healing.

The Monk focuses his prana, passing it into her body, making the healing faster a little. “You need to control your thoughts, Ra.”

“Don’t heal me, Yuan. I need to learn to live on my own,” Mee-Hae mutters, but she doesn’t push his hand away. She hasn’t felt this pain-free for so long … she just wants to enjoy this for a moment or two longer.

“My nightmares are out of control. The thoughts during my dreams,” Mee-Hae says, leaning against his chest.

The Monk frowns. He remembers the thirty-seven beasts in his forest that turned stone-hard and dead. They marked him for something. Some sort of ritual—dark ritual, for no ritual of the light would involve death.

It’s too dangerous for her to step into this. Is he making a mistake bringing her? What if that monster harms her? He saw what that man has become in their recent meeting. Guilt overwhelms him. But Yuan Yagmur soon buries his guilt like a well-trained monk. Emotions won’t defeat him. Not ever.

The key to conquering emotions isn’t in not feeling them. Rather in catching them the instant they appear. “Mastering emotions starts with observation,” their master used to say.

Their master, and not his.

“But if you are really looking for it,” Mee-Hae releases him from the light embrace, “will you read the Devil’s Book?”

A herd of deer catches the Monk’s attention. They are running. He senses the fear in them. Soon, the largest cat in this forest takes one of them: it runs, grabs a neck, halts, and mauls; then it kills. A predator wins. Always.

The herd of deer accepts it. Mourning a while, they go back to grazing. Perhaps they even think, this time too, it wasn’t me. Not yet.

The Monk remembers what he told the Mesmerizer. That he won’t step into the evil. That he won’t read the Devil’s Book.

He will never let that predator win. Never.







Thanks for reading it! 
It's the first chapter of "THE OLDEST DANCE" of series "WISDOM REVOLUTION"... If you find any mistakes or confusion about the prose or any comments about it, say it here in the comment section or contact me anywhere in the social media. If you like it, please share; I need more reader-opinions. 


Few authors wanted to know who critiqued and edited my book, for them I'd suggest looking at these blogs. (I'll get their contacts and blog links soon): 



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