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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/muffinrecip on 2026-08-19 01:49:54+00:00.
It all started seven years ago. I don’t know if anyone here has a friend like mine—someone with a nearly pathological obsession with water. He was exceptionally fond of drinking it.
When Avery first introduced me to his passion, we had known each other for less than a month.
I remember it was summer. The dormitory air conditioning was broken, so on my way back, I bought two bottles of chilled mineral water from the convenience store downstairs. I originally intended to press them against my skin to cool down—after all, our dorm had a filtered water dispenser, so there was usually no need to buy bottled water. But when I handed one to Avery, he looked surprised. It was the first time since the school year started that he actually looked me in the eye.
“You like this brand too? Great taste. A wise choice.”
I froze for a moment.
“What?”
He didn’t elaborate. He silently unscrewed his bottle, took a small sip, and closed his eyes in enjoyment.
“A bit hard on the palate, but the lingering sweetness comes through quickly. The calcium content is a bit high, though this year’s new batch is gentler than last year’s.”
At the time, I thought he probably had some kind of psychological condition, like high-functioning autism. Only later did I learn that he was a “water sommelier”—and the most eccentric person I would ever meet in my life.
After we got closer, I discovered that Avery was actually a minor celebrity in niche online communities and forums for liquid enthusiasts. Most people might think water tasting is just a piece of pretentious, pseudo-scientific upper-middle-class nonsense, but not to him. Avery possessed a nearly miraculous sensitivity in his taste buds; he could accurately distinguish the subtlest differences among dozens of commercial mineral waters. At least, he firmly believed he could.
Regardless, his quirk didn’t affect me. It was just drinking water—far better than the heavy drinkers in the next dorm over. On the surface, it seemed like a perfectly healthy hobby, and we got along very well through our four years of college.
Besides, I have to admit this guy was brilliant. He was the only chemical engineering major in our year to graduate with a perfect GPA, and right after graduation, he was hired as a chemical analyst at a major firm with a remarkably generous salary.
By then, we still maintained a comfortable, somewhat distant friendship, though perhaps mostly because I was his only friend. I was just glad Avery hadn’t turned into some hermit living in a basement. We still met up occasionally. Every time, Avery would talk endlessly about the waters he had recently sampled, while I nodded along and enjoyed expensive top-shelf whiskies I could never normally afford—courtesy of Avery, of course.
Until one day, Avery suddenly sent me a message.
“Do you know about Tasteless Water?”
Before I could even type a reply, Avery forwarded a post. It came from that same liquid enthusiast forum I had seen on his phone before.
By the time I clicked in, there were already over two hundred replies.
The original poster claimed that many years ago, he had drank a bottle of water with an exquisite taste. He vaguely remembered the brand name being “Taste-less.” Recently, he suddenly felt a intense craving to try it again, but he couldn’t find any record or purchase information for the brand anywhere online.
An insider in the comments replied that it was a brand distributed exclusively within a very small number of private clinics and sanatoriums in the late 1990s. Its manufacturer existed for only three years before declaring bankruptcy, and by now, all production lines and records had been destroyed.
Aside from that, almost all the other comments were questioning whether the brand ever existed, assuming the poster had made up the story for attention.
Before I could finish reading the thread, the post suddenly showed as deleted. When I returned to our chat window, a new message was waiting for me.
“Do you think Tasteless Water is real?”
“Come on, he deleted the post. It was probably just a joke.”
“It doesn’t matter. I saved screenshots.”
He sent over several images, missing not a single detail. The word “sanatorium” in the comments had been circled in red using a digital marker.
“Do you think this could be a breakthrough for an investigation?”
“No…”
“I just looked up several closed private sanatoriums. They all claimed to use some kind of ‘natural therapy.’ Makes you curious, doesn’t it?”
“Avery, DON’T do this.”
“Don’t worry, nothing’s going to go wrong. I’m just going to take a look.”
“We’re still friends, right, Ave? :D”
“I’ll reach out to you later.”
But he didn’t reach out. From that day on, Avery disappeared for about six months. I tried every way I knew to contact him, to no avail. Then, one day, Avery suddenly showed up at my office door, telling me he had something incredible to show me.
He took me to the basement apartment he was renting. The room was thick with a heavy, musty odor and a strangely indescribable fishy metallic stench. If I hadn’t been certain that our friendship was rock solid, I never would have set foot in such a creepy place.
Avery told me that during the months he was gone, he had spent all his savings searching for Tasteless Water. He had even quit his job and moved into this basement, relying solely on odd jobs for basic living expenses.
In the center of a battered wooden table stood a single brown glass bottle. It was tightly sealed, the top fused shut with a black resin-like substance. There were no commercial labels on the bottle, only a single handwritten line in permanent marker, faded with age. A date was barely legible: 1998.04.12.
Avery stroked the bottle with a gentleness that bordered on sickening.
“An old collector kept it as a specimen from some psychiatric treatment. It took all the money I had to buy this one bottle.”
That was it—a bottle of twenty-year-old expired mineral water had wiped out my friend’s entire life savings, and he couldn’t have been happier about it. Maybe he really did have high-functioning autism after all.
He carefully cut through the sealing wax with a small knife and pried the cap off with a bottle opener. There was no hiss of escaping gas, not even the slightest disturbance in the air.
Avery pulled out two spotlessly clean glass tumblers. As if performing an ancient ritual, he evenly poured the liquid from the bottle into the two glasses.
“Drink.”
He looked at me with an urgent, coercive intensity in his eyes.
“I have to drink it too?”
“Of course.”
He glanced at me oddly, as if wondering why I would even ask such a question.
“We’re friends.”
Fine. For friendship’s sake. It was just a glass of twenty-year-old water; at least it was stored in glass, so there was no plastic degradation to worry about.
We raised our glasses at the same time and swallowed it down in one gulp.
The liquid slid over my tongue and down my throat.
To be honest, I felt nothing special. It was just water—slightly below room temperature, flat, completely tasteless. If I had to name a difference, it was that after swallowing, there seemed to be a tiny, almost imaginary hint of sweetness at the back of my tongue—or maybe that was just a trick played by my own saliva.
“How is it?”
“Pretty… smooth?”
I weighed my words, trying to make his money feel well-spent.
“Maybe a little sweet aftertaste? I suppose the calcium, zinc, and magnesium levels are decent…”
Avery watched me wrack my brain for an answer, then suddenly burst out laughing.
“Don’t be so nervous. It’s just water.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Right. Just water.”
Avery swirled the empty glass in his hand, his tone sounding a bit regretful.
“Although it really is tasteless, it’s nothing extraordinary. Looks like my three million dollars went down the drain.”
Three million? That was less than I expected; I guessed he still had some savings left. It seemed Avery hadn’t completely lost his mind after all.
“How have you been lately? Did I cause you a lot of trouble?”
Avery’s expression returned to normal, and he casually started making small talk. I had been worried he might lose his composure, but now he seemed in decent spirits.
“Same as usual. But don’t you ever vanish without a word again. We’re friends, you know…”
We rattled on about all sorts of mundane things. How’s business? Fine, not too bad. You look terrible, you need to get some rest. Doesn’t everyone? Do you remember that trip we took in college? Oh, of course, that was a great trip, wasn’t it?
I did most of the talking. Looking back, I think I was trying to use those worldly trivialities to pull Avery back into the real world, or at least get his brain to stop thinking exclusively about the subtle differences between a dozen types of mineral water. Avery didn’t say much; he just nodded occasionally, his hand constantly gripping the empty glass. Our roles had reversed.
Just as I was rambling on about a bizarre coworker at my office, Avery suddenly interrupted me.
“We’ve been talking for so long, I’m getting a little thirsty.”
“Really? How about we head out and grab a drink? I still have plenty to tell you.”
“No, don’t bother… There aren’t many bars around here, it’s a long walk… I mean, you can keep talking, I’ll just manage…”
His eyes wandered, his head slightly bowed.
Following his gaze, I looked down at the empty glass in my hand. There was still about a third of…
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