Less than a week after the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, although the sun is no longer so strong, Poseidon Island and the surrounding area are still as warm and humid as ever, and the olive groves are in the middle of the harvest season, and women and children are going into the woods to pick bunches of burgundy fruit in the fragrant air, which are piled up in baskets and transported to the mills (basically in one day). In order to preserve the unique and wonderful original flavor of the local olive oil, processors insist on the age-old slow and seemingly inefficient method of pressing — the cleaned and sorted olives are mashed into a paste by a mill and hammer and fed into a pressing plate, which then uses a press to extract the juice of the olives, and finally uses an oil-water centrifuge — perhaps the only modern thing in the mill — to separate the oil and water, and the golden oil needs to be filtered before it can be loaded into dark glass bottles.

Men are responsible for exploiting, transporting and selling. The women of Poseidon Island still adhere to centuries-old traditions, except for going to churches, their own fields, and weekly markets, the "meek daughters" and "chaste wives" and "responsible mothers" rarely leave the sight of their fathers, husbands, and sons, and they are always busy...... The house was cleaned every day, the orchard and the cattle needed to be taken care of, the men and their clothes were clean and decent, and the children's appetite was better—they had neither the desire nor the strength to be free—and when they had time, why not sit down and have a glass of cheese or a piece of lace on a hook?

Only the most generous and tolerant heads of families occasionally travel with their dependents, but more men choose to bring them gifts when they return home, and that is enough for them to be satisfied.

It must be mentioned that they are not as ignorant and unheard of as outsiders think - "Don" Chegalle is an enlightened person, there are schools, libraries and networks on Poseidon Island, and if they have a satisfactory academic record, they can also receive a generous scholarship enough to complete her entire university studies under the supervision and help of her father and brother - a female writer from a remote town on Poseidon Island has even won a world literary award. But as far as Sasha has seen in the past few years, the women of Poseidon Island, as well as the men, never seem to have any doubts or dissatisfaction with their existing lives.

They stay in their houses, walk down the street with their heads bowed, pray in churches, wrap their clothes tightly, coil their hair or comb their braids, and married women wear headscarves, and they never look directly at someone for long periods of time, which is an acceptable, frivolous and impolite behavior.

So you can imagine how many boys would have aroused curious glances when a girl from an outsider, almost completely different from them, appeared happily and unscrupulously in the alleys paved with gravel and oyster shells and on the white sand.

Especially though she's still so beautiful—and bold, John. Carson's daughter did not seem to realize how out of place she was here, and after the first two or three days of panic and apprehension, she poked out of her nest like a chick that had just grown its feathers. In John. While Carson and his friends and subordinates were busy dividing, dissecting, extracting, and analyzing the three- or four-year-old clams they had received at the bottom of the shallow sea, his daughter's attention and curiosity were already drawn to the various things on Poseidon Island—for this girl, who had lived in the federal capital of the Western Continent for the first fifteen years, it was in every way as mysterious and interesting as staying on the island a hundred years ago—the sapphire blue sea, the white sand of the snow, the black reef, Verdant olive groves and vineyards, orange houses, mottled walls, uneven gravel paths, a well in the middle of the town square, the statue of the Virgin everywhere, the three bells in the church reminding people to go to Mass...... It's all like a little hook that hooks the girl's heart...... Well, if that's not enough, there's something even more fascinating.

Chiz had never seen such a boy before, and there was no doubt about his beauty, and his looks were not only superior to those of men, but even to women (including those seen by Chiz on television and in pictorials); He is very good at water, and when he is in the sea, he is like a dolphin, or a shark, because sometimes he can be very fierce - the boys on Poseidon Island are more rough and aggressive than the boys elsewhere, and their war does not stop at land, and the sea is also one of the best battlefields for them to establish their position - the order of entry into the water, the position of the parade (as it is literally), the joking provocative gesture or the collision of the heavy and the light...... All have the potential to lead to a fierce and outright fight. And no matter what, the boy did a pretty job. He is adept at speeding up and slowing down in an instant, raising his arm to strangle his neck as he skims his side, then rolling wildly like a crocodile biting an antelope, pressing his opponent to the reef if there is a reef around, letting the sharp shells take the place of a knife to tear the flesh of the perpetrator and the victim, and if not, he will drag the opponent to the bottom of the sea and drown the unlucky man with the sand until the latter is unconscious from suffocation or makes a timely gesture of surrender.

At one point, they were so close to Chiz - Chiz couldn't be sure if they really didn't see herself behind the reef or didn't care, she only knew that the victor was only a few feet away from her when he swam away...... Chiz knew it was a hallucination, but she did feel the astonishing heat as he swam past the reef where she was hiding, and she thought she must have been like a lobster thrown into boiling water.

He glanced sideways at her, the water was clear, she saw his eyes, at first she thought his iris was a deep gray-blue, and when he left, her pounding heart gradually calmed down, she was surprised to find in her memories that it was a rare and wonderful color between navy blue and purple.

She'd also seen him use spearfishing, which was definitely a sight worth buying a ticket to see, the whole process was like a flash of the shutter of a camera, the sharp harpoon pierced through the dark blue gills and body of the albacore, and the blood contaminated the sea water around him in the final struggle, and he reached out and brushed it away, raising his eyes, his eyes calm.

His body was as tight as a fish, full of strength, shining in the water, and Chiz fell headlong uncontrollably.

Judging from the moral code of the Western Continent Federation, Chiz is a good girl who is clean and self-conscious, she stubbornly believes that her virginity must be kept at least until adulthood, but she has also dated boys she is interested in, watching movies, eating ice cream, dancing, hugging, kissing, etc. are not strange to her, but she has never had such feelings and impulses, "A good boy." Chiz said to herself that she was determined to try it, to do nothing, and that it was not the habit of the Carson family to watch the baby slip away from her eyes.

She didn't do it to her father, John. Carson mentioned this, and Chiz knew that her father would be against it, and she didn't know why her wise and sensible father would share the same opinion as most of the Western Continent Federation people on this matter, that is, everyone on Poseidon Island was a thug or a soon-to-be mob.

In Chiz's eyes and mind, Poseidon Island was a place of old-fashioned tradition and serenity, as she navigated the narrow alleys and steep streets in the early morning mist, admiring the blackened wooden doors, the painted wheels, the roadside niches of the Madonna carved out of stone or wood, the daisies and roses hanging from the window lattices and walls, the kind women and the taciturn men...... There was no robbery, no rape, no murder, she walked peacefully in the lair of the thugs, unhindered or harassed.

Chiz. Unbeknownst to Carson, just three years ago, the road beneath her feet had been stained red with the hot blood of humans, and the rebellion of her former heir and the suppression of her leader had destabilized the entire island, and the aftermath of it was still alive and well.

Chiz walked through the square, she was going to make a move today, and she had to do something to prepare before she could act.

One side of the square is occupied by the church, which is a small bazaar, where the main goods are fish, but also some vegetables, fruits, pickles and wines, which are only open in the morning, when the fog lifts, and it is over, and the buyers and sellers are almost all locals.

The pickled olives are arranged in round baskets, one next to the other, densely packed like a plate of sunflowers; Slender moray eels shimmer with silver light, sardines with bones removed, small black hedgehog-like urchins cut open, marlins, tuna and tuna five or six feet long are cut into various ingredients and neatly laid out on ice, huge octopuses, shells and lobsters are peeled according to the buyer's requirements; In the corners were crowded with stalls of spices and herbs, and old women hung dustpans around their necks, and in the dustpans were piled high with their own goat's milk cheese – the only women in the market.

Chitz did not notice this—the fruits and vegetables were arranged on the steps of the church, and the merciful God and his agents did not seem to care that his dwelling was temporarily cut off by the merchants. Eggplants with round heads, tennis onions, fist-sized red tomatoes, purple and black raspberries, golden pears, and nectarines with a tempting butt...... They swaggered over the layers of white marble, and the girl looked left and right, finding what she was looking for.

She bought some lemons at a very affordable price, and the buyer was a young man, very shy, and hardly dared to look up at her. Compared to the young girls of Poseidon Island, Chiz was dressed unusually presumptuously - basically a conservative version of the bikini, with well-developed breasts perfectly framed by delicate and elastic fabrics, limbs, shoulders, waist and abdomen exposed, and light brown buttocks hidden under a wavy little skirt - better than nothing.

As Chiz left the bazaar with a small paper bag of lemons, the old woman selling sheep's milk cheese shook her head.

***

It's a good time to eat oysters.

The people of Poseidon do not eat oysters like the people on the mainland, and the oysters are dug out of their shells and fried in flour or boiled with mushrooms in a creamy soup which they consider to be a very sissy practice, and they only like to eat oysters raw, preferably freshly picked from the reef and served directly in their mouths.

The boys, led by Beelzebub and Sasha, paraded along the tortuous coastline of Poseidon Island with nets and iron drills, and chiseled out of the black reef one by one, and the oyster house, which was shaped like a rock, was a laborious and skillful work, and the oyster house was immovable, and the strength was great, and the oysters were crushed, and the residue of the shells would pierce into the meat, and the sea water in the oyster shells would flow out, and the peculiar taste of the oysters would be lost...... Only a few boys were up to the task, and the rest had to go into the olive groves to search for dry grass needed to roast oysters.

Sasha sat on a half-buried clam shell in the sand, which was cool and lush, just offsetting the gradually heating sun.

Sasha had reached five feet six inches tall a few months ago, and now he continued to grow, and he felt his bones ache every night.

He grabbed a blue-black oyster, it was the size of his palm, and little Hopkins pulled out the knife from his waist and pressed it against the middle of the oyster shell, and in the blink of an eye, the knife had pierced into the gap, and with a slight downward pressure on his wrist, the oyster shell opened, revealing a shiny and moist inner layer and ivory-white oyster meat with gray-black saliva and less than a tablespoon of seawater.

Before feasting on his catch, Sasha sensed someone approaching, and he lowered his still-trembling oyster and cast his gaze to the other side.

"Hello." Chiz said she wished her voice hadn't been too pitched: "I'm Chiz, Chiz. Carson, would you like some lemonade? ”

(To be continued)

Bad news – sorry, a bit of a cardin......

Good news - it's already in the past, there will be a change tomorrow, there will be a change the day after tomorrow, that's all......