PART ONE: Run Away To The Space July is not a comfortable month in southern Vietnam. It is a part of summer, filled with boiling hot temperatures, lasting for all the month. And so does today. No clouds floating beyond, the sun just emits its light rays, turning all this area into a huge steamer. And as a result, fans, air conditioners or anything cooling have to work more. Followed by that is money. The electricity bill we had to pay for last month was extremely higher than usual, most of which is spent on the electric fans, therefore my mother has stopped me from touching them. How fuckin' upset… I think about it while my hand is waving the paper fan, full of despair. “Remember to lull your brother to sleep, he needs a nap at noon.” My mother, after changing her clothes, stands at the door and talks to me—lying flat on the sofa. “I have to go to your auntie's house now. If I don't come back in time, warm up the food for dinner, okay?” I look up to the ceiling, feeling the dull pa

Hello, guys.Are you coming here to see the interesting battle between me and that idiot streamer?It’s kind of you to do so, but… no, we don’t fight.Oh? You ask why?Ha ha, it’s just a little mistake, a really tiny one.“Slam!”Not even closing the plastic box containing the electrical fuse with all my strength can cool down my fury now. It also has my finger stuck for a second, thrusting my nerves, and I just can’t hold back all my bad words like any other normal person. Of course, the one in the fire of anger.“I’m gonna hang that guy! Holy shit! Why the hell does he shut off my circuit? Today is damn hot and you come to switch off the others’ power?”And… yeah, you know the reason. An irritating event called artificial power cut, with an informal way to explain that phrase: there was a damn miserable guy coming to my family’s fuse box, turning off the power at noon, right at the moment I was about to take a serious fight. The capitalized ‘serious’.Like eating a delicious hamburg

Besides the identity of Leo Pavilion, I have a job as the one owning a part of this luxurious restaurant. Yeah, you don’t misunderstand. It’s me, who has just graduated from high school.To be honest, the birth of this restaurant derives from lots of factors: Long’s own dramatic parents, his mental wound, and a crazy moment of mine. Not the intentional idea to startup at a young age, certainly.The guy who is grabbing every piece of abalone over there is Long, one hundred per cent. He is ugly; I have to accept that reality, with naturally brown skin, black curly hair, a round face, and congenital myopia which forces him to wear glasses all the time. Those are the reasons he got rejected by his own parents.I don’t know it clearly, because it was Long’s sad memory, anyway. I just heard his butler saying that his mother, a young wealthy heir (yes, childish too), slept with her boyfriend and gave birth to Long a year later, when she was just sixteen. She rejected the little one who was h

Like solving a mathematical problem, let’s analyze with simple eyes.If the culprit is not an alien, there must be someone throwing a huge rock, or something similar to a rock, into Nam’s room. Though a big rock can break the glass window easily, it’s not that easy to move the tool away. It’s in the victim’s room, right? But no one mentioned something like a rock when they talked about Nam as if there wasn’t any rock.All of us know the sound when someone throws a rock through the window. ‘Shatter’, and that sound is loud for sure. But the sign taking the neighbors to Nam’s house is the scream of his parents, not that sound. So, if the tool is not a big rock, then what breaks the window, causing no sounds and leaving a big hole in the road?If we suppose the culprit is something nonhuman, we have another scary scene.The time when that thing attacked Nam was half past thirteen. I didn’t check the clock, but according to Long’s irritating call at fourteen o’clock, I can guess that Nam

Though our neighborhood is just a suburb lying not so far away from the center of HCMC, we got an area with about one hundred houses abandoned twenty years ago. People said it used to be the place where illegal residents lived without permission. When the authorities moved them away to build a factory here, a monetary problem arose, and they had to stop their plan.From then on, this uninhibited area turned into a point where gangsters and criminals gathered.They can be anyone. Please remember the fact that we’re living not so far from one of the biggest cities in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City. Kidnappers, human traffickers, or even drug dealers can appear in this abandoned area. The only unexplainable thing here is why they can be here.As mentioned, we got a police station near this area. The police check out randomly, so even if this place is on the way leading to our neighborhood, the chance to come across those dangerous criminals is tiny.Here, congratulations, we spin to the box ‘