Right. You can’t get away from the Pshat — that He breathed life into him.
As for what we call a Neshama, it is not physical. Not made from any type of physical-dimension bound substance. If you even apply the term substance to a Neshama, that would be a borrowed phrase to refer to something else, which is harder to describe.
The only way you can describe a “Neshama” being blown through the nose, it’s in the sense that it was assigned to the person, and the affect of its presence was noticed instantly in the nose. This is analogous to what it means when it says that Hashem came someplace.