Insomniac Player

Darkness settled over the gorge, and everything sharpened instead of fading. Nocturnal Eyes adjusted without any notice, tree bark resolving clean, individual needles separating along distant branches, the shrine’s cracked tiles turning as distinct as they’d been under full daylight.

The investigators lit no lamps. None of them realized Damien could see their faces perfectly well anyway.

He watched the unit settle into the kind of silence that came from real experience rather than fear. Fang Ji checked the ridge cord twice, then a third time, purely because Su Lei raised one eyebrow at him. Duan Ke handed out bitter warming pellets and deliberately gave Bao Yu the smallest one, and she caught the insult by weight alone and swapped it for his the second he looked away.

Han Rui crawled over to Damien’s observation hollow and held out a strip of smoked meat. "Does the fast continue after sunset?"

Damien looked at it. Heavily salted, no trace of grey root anywhere near it.

He took it with both hands. "An empty vessel that refuses rain worships thirst rather than discipline."

Han Rui nodded like he’d just received permission from an abbot. "Then eating honors the purpose of fasting after all."

That is absolutely not how fasting works. He ate anyway.

Across the ridge, Pei Shan whispered, "What did he say?"

"That deprivation becomes vanity once it outlives its purpose."

Several investigators murmured approval at that. Damien chewed the meat and genuinely wondered whether Earthling might accidentally found a religion before finding a cure for his insomnia.

Wei Jian moved between the positions, checking every angle without disturbing a single stone underfoot. He corrected Wu Kai’s line of retreat, shifted Lin Hua three paces clear of a root that would interfere with her formation, and reminded Qiao Sen that marsh moisture would change his tracking powder’s behavior after midnight.

Level 101 is the least impressive thing about this man.

Damien had spent years assuming powerful people became commanders because nobody could force them to actually listen. Wei Jian listened constantly, to his team, to the weather, to the ground itself, and even to a masked outsider handing out decorative sentences from the center of the formation.

Wei Jian finally settled it. "We observe tonight. We enter at first light unless something forces our hand sooner."

"Dawn is only useful to the man whose enemy agrees to wait for it."

Wei Jian immediately ordered the outer guards doubled.

Damien had meant that as a general warning, nothing specific. Twelve breaths later, Nocturnal Eyes caught a line moving between two trees.

Thinner than hair. Darker than the night surrounding it.

The line tightened. Fang Ji, standing nearest the ridge, jerked backward as a black cord snapped around his throat.

The darkness erupted.

Fang Ji never reached the ground alive.

The cord pulled once. His neck broke with a sound far too small for the distance between life and death.

Bao Yu moved before his body finished falling, her spear crossing twenty paces to split the cord, but the attacker had already let go. Fang Ji struck the ridge on his knees and folded beside the alarm marker he’d checked three separate times that night.

"Inner ring!" Wei Jian shouted. "Don’t chase shadows. Lin Hua, close the western line. Han Rui, third tree above the shrine."

The investigators moved without wasting a breath asking what had happened.

➤[Player Killer Title’s effects have been enabled.]

➤[While battling ordinary players: All Attributes −10%]

➤[While battling players bearing the Murderer or Player Killer title: All Attributes +10%]

Nocturnal Eyes lit the darkness up like a thin grey veil rather than an absence. Damien picked out three figures lying flat under the eastern pines, two hanging upside down from branches, and one more standing inside the shrine’s broken bell frame, black clothing swallowing ordinary light but never quite erasing shape, movement, or the pressure their feet left in bark.

More stood behind them. He counted eleven before the first volley even landed.

Black needles fell in from three directions at once. Lin Hua slammed both palms into the ground, and a pale wall rose around the camp, catching half the needles outright. Bao Yu spun her spear and deflected six more. The rest curved through the air, chasing.

One came straight for Damien’s throat, and he could see it perfectly clearly. His Level 20 body still wasn’t fast enough to actually get out of the way.

He stepped into the cedar’s shadow instead.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Imitation]

Cold darkness folded over his cloak, his outline thinning until it matched the shape of the shadow across the ground, presence and color and breath all sinking below the surrounding night.

The needle passed clean through the space where the attacker believed he was standing.

Shadow Imitation wasn’t invisibility, not quite. Quick movement tore it apart instantly, and the skill slowed him while he stayed merged with it. He moved one careful step along the cedar’s darkness, then another.

The upside-down assassin dropped onto the ridge, head turning, searching.

Damien held still.

Han Rui’s arrow caught the man’s shoulder and burst into silver wire. Bao Yu closed the distance before he could break free, her spear driving through his chest and pinning him straight to the tree.

The dead man’s sleeve tore open. A silver, shadowless knife marked the cloth. Shadowless Palace.

Or someone who really wants everyone to think so.

Another assassin caught the movement of Damien’s shadow and threw a hooked blade straight through the cedar’s darkness. He broke the imitation and threw himself clear.

➤[Skill Deactivated: Shadow Imitation]

➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]

The blade split his cloak without touching skin. Wei Jian’s measuring rod cracked into the attacker’s wrist, shattering the bone, and he reversed the weapon in one motion, driving its square end up under the man’s jaw.

The attacker died before he hit the ground.

"Eight visible," Wei Jian said. "At least six concealed. They’re pushing us east."

Damien had counted eleven himself and suspected more still hidden. Wei Jian, meanwhile, had counted attack angles, tracked missing projectiles, and mapped retreat lanes while killing a man with his bare weapon. Level 101 explains some of that. Not all of it.

"The open road has teeth because the closed road is already swallowing."

The captain glanced once toward the shrine. "Correct. East is prepared for us. We go west and circle beneath the cliff."

I meant that every direction looked bad, Damien thought, watching him turn the whole vague warning into an actual route. The unit moved as one.

Lin Hua collapsed the western barrier outward, spirit light striking three black-clad figures and driving them out of cover. Han Rui shot one clean through the thigh. Qiao Sen scattered tracking powder that bonded to the internal energy of the other two, and their bodies started glowing faintly for everyone in the unit, not just Damien this time.

They descended the steep western face in pairs. Fang Ji stayed behind on the ridge. Nobody had time to carry the dead.

Damien reached the first drop just as a cord snapped around Lin Hua’s ankle and yanked her clean off the path. She struck the slope and slid toward a line of black stakes waiting below.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]

He turned into a streak of black lightning, closing the slope before gravity finished pulling her down, drawing his new Tang Dao and cutting the cord in one clean motion. Bao Yu caught her by the wrist a half-second later.

Damien landed badly, more momentum in his body than his legs had expected, rolling hard against the path with stone tearing through one knee.

➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]

Lin Hua stared at him. "You teleported!?"

He got up like the fall had all been part of the plan. "Distance is a habit taught to feet that have embraced darkness."

Her eyes went wide. Even for Earthling, that one was too dramatic. No time to regret it, though.

The black stakes below erupted. Purple vapor rolled up the slope, and Pei Shan shouted a warning, hurling three medicine flames into it, but the vapor swallowed the fire whole. Duan Ke breathed a single lungful and staggered, then drove his own sword through his sleeve to stop the numbing poison from reaching his shoulder.

"Not poison." Pei Shan’s voice cut through the panic. "Dream suppressant. Don’t circulate anything through your head."

It didn’t touch Damien’s sleep at all. It just piled more weight onto an already exhausted body, while his mind stayed painfully, uselessly wide awake through all of it.

The unit reached a narrow shelf under the cliff, and Wei Jian counted heads. Eleven, including Damien. Fang Ji dead. Duan Ke’s left arm gone useless. Qiao Sen carrying a needle through his calf. Two attackers dead, three more injured, and more than a dozen dark figures still moving along the ridge above them.

Wei Jian looked at Damien. "Can you repeat either movement skill?"

Both windows gave him the same answer.

➤[Cooldown Remaining: 00:56:41]

He watched the enemy silhouettes on the ridge. "A borrower returns only after the hour has been repaid."

"One-hour cooldown," Wei Jian said, catching it instantly.

Almost disappointed he got there that fast.

"Then we give you an hour." The captain led them toward the abandoned shrine, which the attackers had clearly expected the unit to avoid. That made it the one structure built to contain them rather than kill them outright. Lin Hua dismantled the first dormant formation on the run. Chen Luo triggered the second with a captured needle, redirecting its force straight back at the pursuing assassins. Bao Yu broke the shrine doors open.

They made it inside twenty-one minutes after the ambush started, three overlapping barriers sealing shut behind them the moment the last person crossed the threshold.

Damien pulled up his profile while the others turned to holding the line.

➤[Player Profile]

Alias: Earthling

Level: 20 Class:

Nightwalker (Uncommon)

Class Status: Synchronization: 10.2%

Titles: • Boss Killer 17th (Legendary) • Player Killer 99th (Legendary)

Stats: Strength: 17 | Physique: 20 | Perception: 21 | Intelligence: 23 | Stamina: 22 | Agility: 39 | Speed: 51 | Mana: 20

Echo: Hollow Giant

Skills: Active: Shadow Imitation (Lv. 1), Shadow Dash (Lv. 1) Passive: Nocturnal Eyes

Available Stat Points: 24

A new line sat there that hadn’t been there before. Echo. He had no idea what it actually did, no description attached, no way to access it yet. He filed the mystery away for later and focused on what mattered right now.

Twenty-four stat points, untouched since he’d cleared the Verdant Labyrinth and survived Tycho. He’d been saving them on the theory that an unknown threat could turn a handful of loose points into a real option later. Murim had just handed him more than enough information to finally know exactly what threat he was building against.