An outsider quietly walked into the bar. It was not difficult to tell an outsider from the locals, mostly broken drunkards stinky as this half-ruined bar itself. His ink-coloured long cloak shimmered silently in the distance under the dim light of this gloomy bar. It aroused your curiosity.

You took a sip from the mug while fixing your sight on that mysterious figure. There was something inexplicable that locks your attention, narrowing your vision little by little.

The dim yellow light emitted from the old lamp began to flicker. His presence in proximity also filtered the sound of the drunkards around telling dirty jokes. And his figure grew steadily bigger in your vision.

Was he walking to you? You asked yourself. His walking stance was so steady that you felt like he was levitating and drifting in the sticky air, like Charon steering his lamentable ferry alone, over the silently flowing Acheron river, not making the slightest noise on this journey to the underworld.

« How cold… » You muttered to yourself. The bone-chilling cold that one could feel when being in the very middle of a forest glade covered in thick snow.

Your thought was abruptly interrupted. You suddenly realised that he had already sat in front of you, which you were not yet prepared for.

« Uh, hello… » You didn’t know where you should stare and forced an authentic smile. His face, so close to you, was covered by a veil.

« Hi! Enjoying your night? » He answered in a surprisingly light tone, which contrasted his mysterious appearance.

« I guess, yes? » A dull answer. « So, you too? »

« Me? Yes yes! »

His fickle tone gave you a feeling of a rolling billiard ball on the table, back and forth, bounced back after occasionally hitting the frame.

« Hmm. So… where do you come from then, you don’t belong to here didn’t you? »

« Me?! I came back from the farthest star in the starry night you can see here! »

« Wha..? » You raised one side of your brows, judging the seriousness in his sentences. You were not buying this probably, but you decided to play alone. « So, why do you come here? Sightseeing? »

« Sightseeing? Yes, I like traveling between the stars! I like it. » he seemed more passionate but spoke always with an interesting tone. It could remind one, for example, of the undulating waves along the shoreline, up and down. They quietly upsurged, then slowly drew back to the deepening thickness of the high sea, leaving a grudgingly whimpering echo which escaped upwards to the moon.

« So… how was it like? Have you seen something interesting ? » You leaned closer, started wondering the things underneath.

« Interesting? Yes, for sure! »

He then began his long speech. Multiple suns and moons in the sky, colossal cliffs that stretched on half of the surface of planet, forests of ice spikes pointing to an altitude out of sight, volcanoes that spurt out iridescent metal dust, gigantic stone deserts where hollowing gale could carry boulders thousands of miles away, the barren valley in heptagonal mountains where the everlasting rain was in purple, and such exotic scenes went on and on and on.

Indeed, his story was deadly fascinating to you, no matter out of the wildest fantasy or not. You laid back on your chair, let escape a soft sigh, « How I wish I could save those things myself too… Only if I got a spaceship for myself. »

« Spaceship? You don’t need such thing to see things! » He was apparently surprised, but your astonishment was not slighter. You wondered if you had heard him right.

« So you have built up some teleport machines? » 

« No… No! I don’t need anything else! » He agitated a little bit. A storm on the sea was brewing. His quivering finger pointed at his head. « You can travel in your dreams. » He managed to support himself with his arms on the table, eager to give another convincing speech, « Look… look… Three premises and one conclusion. First, the outer space in the dream is the closest to absolute emptiness, for it is the emptiness of outer space and reality multiplied by the emptiness of the intangible mind. Second, fullness and emptiness are compatible; the smallest particles will get expelled immediately if they enter the absolute emptiness. Third, absolute emptiness is an entity without existence in the perceivable realm because the sky and the universe are a whole. Conclusion, you can change your locations in this universe by making a purest dream. Imagine you are ridding like a chevalier! »

« Huh… If all your statements are true, then why isn’t there anyone else talking about this. »

« Because of the risk. Sometimes the process can go wrong, and there will be unbearable consequences. And… » His voice got extremely low. « I am the only one who has succeeded in overcoming it. »

The air around you became shivering as his voice lowered to the point like whispering, something was gradually emerging from the dark water below. But you couldn’t suppress your curiosity, for he seemed absolutely out of sanity and his speech sounded like childish sophistry or just groundless fantasy. « Is that so? Then what are these consequences? »

« Consequences… consequences… » He lowered his veiled head. « Emptiness is not friendly to beings like you and me. Sometimes you will get recognised by it if you are not at your purest status in your dreams. It detains everything that wants to transgress itself, like a falling leaf floating on the ocean, locked forever there by the streams, waiting until it can attach to something that passes by and causes distortion… Like the ball bouncing forever in the middle of the boundless trampoline… insatiable… lurking… » He began to sob.

« Then how did you manage to overcome this? » You smirked. It is the time, your inner devil pressed you to prick the bubble of madness and give him a precisely calculated mercy kill.

He paused, then took off his veil, and all sound and all light in that shabby bar disappeared at once. Only his face was visible under the shimmer of his cloak. Only his colourless tears, flowing down through his dehydrated mummified face, flowing down out of his fathomless sockets filled with squirming emptiness like the forever hungry outer space itself.

Step back to the Lounge