STEP

CHAPTER 1

It's a room of about 20 square meters, an opened door right opposite it; outside, what seems to be an effulgent light coming from the cliff. To the left of the room a telescope is embedded into the wall, underneath is a screen, a small chalkboard with messy and chaotic scribbles hanging by the side.

"Luhan, thank you for your curiosity." The man gives him an auspicious smile and glides his hand across the chalkboard, the scribbles disappear without a trace.

"Where is this?" Luhan asks, trembling, " am I dead?"

"You aren't dead. The man gently replies, "if you want to ask where you are, it'll be very difficult for me to explain. You can think of it as a place that solely exists outside our accepted concept of a 3D universe, it only exists within your mind, you can also think of it as a dream." His smile looks amicable.

"You probably think you have traveled through time, returning to the past so abruptly then showing up in this strange place all of a sudden, and you certainly must not have a good impression of me. "He claps his hands together and observes luhan. "I understand you aren't irritated about this and to be honest, I hope my explanation would be a little helpful to you."

Luhan looks at him, then at the dazzling luminous light filled by open door, speechless.

"I don't have a name, you can call me anything you like; but of course if you can't think of anything, you can call me Clown." Says the man, even if he isn't ugly*, Luhan thinks.

*(t/n): when directly translated, clown means "little ugly."

"I bet you perceive time the same way as most people. You probably think time keeps moving forward at a flat rate infinitely, and even though mankind has made plenty of time traveling books and movies, that is actually nothing but the wishful thinking of humans." He looks at Luhan and whips out a pen.

"In actual fact, the concept of time is a measurement created by humans, comparable to the U.S. dollar or the unit of weight. In order to make this concept precise and constant, people have used great amounts of the most authentic atoms to create a few stable time systems. Take note of all that I'm saying, because the time system you use in your everyday life is just one of those called UTC, humans dictated the location of UTC +0, which is also known as the Greenwich Mean time, and as a result of the Earth's rotation, the different time zones were defined, the timing you see on your computer every day is the result of the UTC+ value, of course, I've missed out the time delay consumed by the hardwares and transmissions.

Luhan throttles his temples and continues to listen.

"In fact, the time system we defined was imperfect, even the most delicate atoms in our universe differ by the slightest, the x-axis represents the time system we've derived at while the y-axis depicts the best time atoms on Earth, apart from the offset at its start point, a pretty smooth-lined graph would be formed. Assuming a little difference at every instant between these two timings, the tiny gap would only accumulate and increase, however the accumulation speed would remain the same and therefore, the gradient of this time would change." He lifts his eyebrows and looks at Luhan who squints, "I'm referring to the simplest smooth line because apart from this straight line, there is the slightest difference between the two, I won't elaborate on this, I see you're already having a little headache." He smiles and tries to maintain Luhan's patience.

"Actually, this straight line deviates from 1 and the slope can't define the quality of this atomic clock, perhaps it precisely explains the lacks of our time system because it's original definition of time similarly relies on a series of other atomic clocks. Therefore, there is no absolute predicament of time, everything is relative, the time you spend every day is in fact no rules, you just don't feel it." He erases the y-axis labels.