Memories Squeezed Out, Time Lost

A party was underway in the bar.

Men, women, garish clothes, an obscene and flamboyant atmosphere. Looking around, they were all the good-for-nothing punks A'cheng usually knew, mud that could never be plastered onto a wall.

In an environment like this, with a crowd like this, it would not have been strange even if they had stripped naked on the spot and started a group orgy.

But they did not.

More precisely, there had just been signs of that happening, but all of a sudden, they started... talking.

Simply talking nonstop, without doing anything else.

Everyone was talking. They did not even care whether anyone was listening, or whether others could understand them. They simply went on and on about their own affairs.

Those hidden thoughts, those dark ideas they dared not speak aloud, those perverse fetishes despised even within the gang—all of it came pouring from their mouths.

Maniacal laughter, loud sobbing, curiosity clawing at their hearts and lungs, confusion so intense it made them want to tear out their hair—all of it erupted from their mouths at once. They stared at The Void before them and spoke in torrents, creating a tangled reverberation that made A'cheng's head feel as though it were splitting apart and his scalp go numb.

Unable to bear it any longer, A'cheng covered his ears.

In an instant, every sound vanished.

Everyone fell silent.

Then they came alive again.

It was as if someone had pressed pause, switched discs, and hit play again. They broke free of their torrent of speech and returned to how they had been before. The idiots went back to being idiots, the punks to being punks, the wild ones to being wild—everything had returned to normal.

Someone slapped A'cheng on the shoulder and handed him a drink. "Brother Cheng,