Insomniac Player

The Dreaming Moon Pavilion smelled like rain settling onto cold stone.

That scent rose off the silver lake at its center, water climbing upward in narrow streams through rings of carved jade before scattering into mist above the surrounding halls. Patients rested under that mist while physicians studied floating mirrors positioned over their beds. Some mirrors showed peaceful forests. Others showed storms, burning houses, distorted faces mid-scream. One held a man arguing with twelve versions of himself, and none of them seemed to be winning.

Damien kept walking. Mei Lian had vanished with the injured attendant the second they’d crossed the gate, and a pavilion disciple led him along a covered bridge toward the diagnostic halls instead.

Every conversation he passed died the second he came into view. The title had gotten here before he had.

"Honored Dark Master."

"Rakshasa of the Broken Road."

"He buried an entire strike team."

"I heard he collapsed a mountain without even drawing his weapon."

I drew my weapon, Damien thought. The ceiling was maybe twelve feet of tunnel. Facts were losing this fight badly, and he’d stopped bothering to correct anyone hours ago.

The disciple opened a circular door carved with sleeping cranes. "Senior Earthling, the physicians are waiting."

He walked in without correcting the title once. Three people sat around a low table inside.

The oldest was a thin man with white hair pulled back, wrapped in a dark blue physician’s robe, fine silver chains running from the rings on his fingers to a jade disk resting at his wrist. His eyes stayed closed, and still his face turned to track Damien with exact precision. The woman on his right wore pale green and held a writing brush over an open ledger. The third physician wasn’t human at all, skin the translucent blue of deep ice, slow points of light drifting beneath the surface like trapped stars.

"Earthling." The old man’s voice carried easy authority. "I’m Elder Ren, senior diagnostician of the Dreaming Moon Pavilion. Physician Su records. Healer Orr observes spiritual structure."

Damien inclined his head.

"You requested treatment for lifelong sleeplessness."

"I seek the road to sleep."

Elder Ren opened his eyes. Solid silver, both of them. "The Peaceful Dream House described your manner of speech."

I genuinely wonder if they filed that under symptoms.

Physician Su touched her brush to the ledger. "Before we examine you, we require your basic information. Your displayed level reads twenty."

"It does."

All three physicians looked up at once, and the silence stretched long enough that Damien understood exactly what the problem was before anyone said it.

"You crossed the Broken Road at Level Twenty?" Physician Su asked.

"I traveled beneath it, technically."

The blue healer’s internal lights flickered rapidly. That might have been laughter.

Elder Ren stayed serious. "Your class?"

"Private."

"Your origin server?"

"Private."

"Your medical information cannot stay private from your own physicians."

"What heals may be known. What only satisfies curiosity stays mine."

Elder Ren studied the mask for a long moment. "We’ll begin with what your body tells us instead, then."

The first examination put Damien on a stone platform ringed by bowls of water. Elder Ren clipped the silver chains from his rings onto Damien’s wrists, throat, and temples, each one lighter than thread and cold enough to ache against his skin.

"Do not circulate mana."

"I’m not."

"Your mana is moving."

He focused inward and felt it, the energy inside him shifting toward darkness as evening crept closer, his class answering the fading light on its own without any input from him.

"It moves on its own."

Physician Su’s brush paused mid-stroke. "A passive class function?"

He nodded and left it there.

Elder Ren pulsed internal energy through the chains, and the bowls around Damien rippled at once. Colors bloomed in the water, red for muscular fatigue, gold for active mana, grey for accumulated mental strain. The final bowl went solid black.

Healer Orr leaned in close. "His body reads very abnormal." His voice sounded like ice shifting under a frozen lake. "This bowl should brighten once the body remembers what sleep feels like."

"Mine has poor memories, apparently."

They ran the test a second time with a fresh bowl.

Black again.

The second examination used incense. Damien lay under a canopy while Physician Su burned seven calming herbs in sequence, one after another. The first eased his muscles loose. The second slowed his heartbeat. The third weighed his thoughts down heavy enough that simple counting took real effort to sustain.

None of them delivered sleep. By the seventh, his body felt buried under warm sand while his mind stayed wide awake and increasingly irritated about the whole exercise.

"Describe what you feel," Physician Su said.

"Exhausted."

"Anything beyond that?"

"More exhausted."

"No drifting thoughts? Images? Any sense of lost time?"

"None of it."

She glanced sideways at Elder Ren.

The third examination dug into his history. When had it started.

"Before my first clear memory."

How long did he stay awake at a stretch.

"A week. Sometimes two."

What happened once the exhaustion finally became unbearable.

"My body drops into a coma. Days pass. I wake up functional again."

"Do you dream during the coma?"

He hesitated at that one. His comas had always come back empty, no images, no voices, nothing that felt like time actually passing through him. But he also knew, after the tutorial, that the system itself had tried to erase something inside him while he sat trapped in that emptiness, which meant something had clearly been happening in there whether he’d witnessed it or not.

"Not that I recall." He left out the failed erasure entirely, along with the recurring system errors, the strange synchronization notices, and the impossible gap of years that had swallowed him between disappearing and coming home. Every one of those omissions kept him safer. Together, though, they made the physicians’ findings a lot harder to explain than the truth ever would have.

Elder Ren finally lifted the chains free. "Your body knows what fatigue is. Muscles, organs, mana pathways, all of it is asking for rest. The obstruction isn’t physical."

"A soul wound?" Physician Su offered.

Healer Orr shook his head. "His spiritual structure runs continuous. Scarred in places, but never divided."

"A mental defense, then?"

"No active defense is holding on right now."

Elder Ren’s attention shifted to the black case Mei Lian had carried in, now resting on its own stand at the edge of the room under the watch of two pavilion disciples. "Use the moon jade."

A disciple opened it, revealing six thin disks of pale stone, moonlight moving through each one despite the afternoon sun still shining outside. Physician Su selected one and set it inside a circular frame suspended above Damien’s platform.

"This will display the threshold of your dream state," she said. "It doesn’t read your thoughts or expose your memories unless you actually cross into it."

"And if I don’t cross it?"

"The mirror stays clear."

He lay back. The room darkened. Silver light dropped from the disk and settled over his face, the same artificial heaviness he’d felt from the incense returning, along with a gentle pull building behind his eyes.

The jade stayed clear. Elder Ren pushed the formation harder, and the pull sharpened into real pressure. Damien’s heartbeat slowed. His breathing deepened. Every physical sign in the room agreed he should already be asleep.

His thoughts kept counting anyway.

Thirty-two breaths. Thirty-three. Thirty-four.

Then the jade went black, not clouded, not darkened by any image forming inside it, just a total absence that seemed to swallow the silver light gathering around it. His system flickered.

➤[Mental-state inquiry detected.]

➤[Response unavailable.]

Another message opened right behind it.

➤[COMATOSE STATE]

➤[COMATOSE STATE]

➤[COMATOSE STATE]

Damien tried to sit up. The jade cracked in the frame above him.

A sharp crack tore through the room. Silver light burst outward, and all six bowls flipped over at once, water spilling everywhere. Healer Orr caught the mirror before it could hit the floor while Elder Ren cut the formation with one hard sweep of his hand.

Damien pulled in a violent breath. He hadn’t actually stopped breathing at any point, but it felt exactly like surfacing from underwater all the same.

Physician Su stared at the shattered disk. "What did you see?"

"Nothing useful." Technically true.

Elder Ren ran a finger along the blackened crack. "The mirror never found a dream in there."

"Then what did it find?"

The elder’s silver eyes lifted to meet the mask. "That is the actual question."

Healer Orr pressed one translucent finger against Damien’s chest, the lights beneath his skin moving fast now. "His body approached sleep. His consciousness never followed it there."

Physician Su frowned. "Consciousness can’t stay awake once the entire body crosses that threshold."

"And yet," Elder Ren said, quiet, "this one has apparently spent his entire life doing precisely that."

Damien sat upright. "Can it be cured?"

Elder Ren took his time answering. "Perhaps. But first we need to find out exactly where your awareness goes when your body falls into that coma."