Circa 50 BBY, Vo-Shay piloted his freighter, the Ashanda Ray into a dangerous region of space called the Tyus Cluster. There, he was trapped in the island of stability, at the center of a cluster of black holes. He would have died there, had he not met the ghost of a previous victim, a Jedi Master named Aryzah. She taught him a little about the ways of the Force, and somehow helped Vo-Shay escape the cluster. Aryzah's ghost came along with him when he escaped.
Though some fifty years had passed to the outside galaxy, the gravitational fields of the Tyus Cluster had distorted the flow of time in Vo-Shay's frame of reference. As Vo-Shay put it, "time was nonexistent" at the cluster's center: he did not age a day.
Vo-Shay promptly returned to the gambling tables, skinning a Herglic named Doune out of a quarter of a million credits. The single credit he had bet at the beginning of the sabacc game had been provided by a farmboy named Nyo, who hoped to use his share of the cash to buy a lightsaber. Nyo got his lightsaber, and Vo-Shay decided to sign him on as the first mate of the Ashanda Ray, where Aryzah decided to teach Nyo the ways of the Force.