I'm right on the border between Elysium Shore and Kepler's Crest now and already the stars are thinning out.

The galactic core is now a bright, milky streak in my dorsal camera as I head ever onwward toward the edge of our galaxy and the deep, endless black of the rim.

Picked up two ELW in Elysium Shore, taking my career discoveries to 19. Not too shabby. Even as an Elite explorer I still get a buzz finding an uncharted, habitable world with native life.

This far out I still very, very occasionally hit a system already charted. Perhaps I need to alter my route.

I like the solitude.

I've parked in orbit of a water world. Time to heat some expedition rations and hit my rack.

Well here I am. Exploring once again in the great abyss, or the Elysium Shore to be exact, on my way to Kepler's Crest before I explore the nothingness of the Formadine Rift.

The bright lights of civilisation faded for me after 10 months.

I was a rich man for a while in the bubble, although I suppose rich is relative for a CMDR. Our lifestyle and the tools of the trade (our ships) cost a hell of a lot to keep in the sky.

There's no doubt there's a lot of money to be made in the black but there's a reason that only a minute, micro percentage of humanity's hundreds of billions join the Pilot Federation. It's a damn dangerous life.

They say more than half of fresh Pilots will crash their Sidewinder within their first week - many dying right there and then. Hell, I crashed myself. Thank god for the ejection system and the exceptional emergency response ships of the Eravate system.

But I digress, what drove me back to exploring?

The grind of building competitive ships for one thing. I sought out and worked for some of the galaxy's finest engineers to get access to their stock. It was a tedious slog, filled with monotonous cargo runs, repetitive material harvesting and mediocre missions but ultimately worth it.

My FDL became a lethal and clinical killing machine, my Anaconda a multi-purpose cruiser and my DBX with Guardian FSD Boost a compact super-explorer.

I settled some old accounts in my home system of Shampang. Pirates from nearby systems had been raiding the system's colonies, killing 1,100 people on their last incursion. People wanting to live free of Governments at Oblaya Colony, living quietly on the fringe of the bubble were obliterated for their surplus of common Class-2 fuel cells.

I found and wiped the raiders out in a week.

All of them.

The engineered guns of Shampang's Bite tore through their hull's like a hot knife through butter, my rail gun piercing the power plant of their leader in a decisive blow to end it.

It didn't bother me. Ship-to-ship killing is impersonal. I destroyed 50 ships but the cold, hollow feeling left by the retaliatory killings and being hailed as hero at home was too much. Feeling stifled I headed to the galaxy's edge...

After months in the black, I made it back to civilisation - to Colonia to be exact. Not a moment too soon. I felt like I was losing my mind in the void.

Colonia is my kind of sector. Independent systems, frontier mentalities and strong whisky.

After my last exploration trip I eased my battered DBX into Eavesdown Docks in White Sun on the fringe of the sector. I cashed in around 750m credits to Universal Cartographics and hit the bar. Hard.

Fast forward a few weeks and I'd bought three new ships: an Anaconda, a Fer-De-Lance and a Krait Phatom.

In the Krait I made some big bucks fast by doing some deep core mining. The monotony of it wore on me quickly so I switched to mercenary work for some of the factions around the sector. I'm not usually one who likes combat but that FDL is a dream to fly in a hot zone and there are a lot of decent pioneering folk out here plagued by endless opportunistic pirates.

I know pirates. My home system was under the boot of the Pirate King aka Archon Delaine for years. The regime was as repressive as it was brutal. I'm happy to rid the galaxy of a few of these scumbags.

However, the fun might be over for now. It's time I went back to the Bubble. My ships need an engineering overhaul if they're to survive against other pilots out here.

It's time I went home to Shampang.

9 Aug: Discovered my 13th Earth-like world in the Izanami sector. I parked up on an orbiting moon and stared at it for hours.

I thought of home. Not because my home looks anything like the blue marble in my viewscreen, but because of what it represents: rest. A non-hostile environment. I've been out in the black for so long. Jump after jump, circling the galactic core. It's been months since I was last in the Bubble.

I lost myself for while. Landed on a ice world to refresh my water supplies and didn't leave for months. Just stayed on the ship, drove around on the service and watched GalNet streams.

My home system Shampang, is dirt poor. If any other pilots are reading this you've probably never heard of it. Look it up, it's the arse end of the bubble, it was until recently a system firmly under the hell of the pirate lord Archon Delaine. Whitelaw Camp was where I grew up, selling cheap Hydrogen fuel to any passing traders we got and helping the colony pay Delaine's 'protection' fees.

No prospects, no hope, no future.

Until I got my first ship. One of the first things I did was map the entire system to get my name in the Universal Galaxy Map

from there the stars always called me. Now I'm out in the abyss I don't know what I'm more scared of: going back or losing myself out here.

Perhaps I should head to Colonia. I have enough data stored on-board to never have to worry about money again once I get back to civilisation, but do I even want to return to the fold of humanity...?