In the morning, the artificial sun at the junction point slowly rose.
Gentle morning light passed through the colored crystal glass of the hotel restaurant's dome, casting a riot of brilliant hues below.
Red gold, pale blue, and silver-white intertwined, flowing slowly across the polished floor like an ever-changing painted scroll.
The restaurant, silent through the night, awakened anew with the morning light.
The styles of different civilizations converged here.
The walls were made of the silver-gray streamlined metal panels commonly used by the Star Ring Federation, sleek and minimalist.
Yet the dining tables were fashioned from a dark spiritual wood, warm and jade-like. Its natural grain coiled and wound, faintly outlining rings of strange spiral patterns. The chandeliers overhead were filled with geometric elegance—layer upon layer of regular cubes nested within one another, slowly rotating and refracting the light into orderly, graceful patterns.
In one corner stood an emerald-green plant with more than a dozen soft tentacles.
From a distance, it bore more than a passing resemblance to a Tentacle Tree.
Benjamin sat by the window, with several local specialty dishes laid out on the table before him.
One dish consisted of the crystalline shells shed by a certain silicon-based lifeform, sliced so thin they were nearly transparent, like cicada wings.
There was no chew to them after they entered the mouth. They melted slowly like ice crystals, leaving behind only a faint fragrance and a flavor all their own.
Another dish was a cluster of spores that had undergone special fermentation.
Soft and delicate, it melted in the mouth. The rich aroma of fungi mingled with the mellow fullness unique to nuts, creating layers upon layers of flavor.
Beside them was a steaming bowl of thick soup, its base brewed from a kind of algae that glowed on