Insomniac Player

The moment Damien confirmed his new identity, the chamber vanished. There was no door opening, no floor dropping away, no merciful pause in which his body could catch up to what was happening to it. One instant he stood inside the operation room, and the next he was falling sideways through everything at once.

Light twisted into a tunnel around him, black and blue and silver folding through each other too fast for his eyes and too slow for his mind to process. He felt stretched across some distance with no end to it, crushed into a single point, then spun like an impatient god trying to wring water out of his soul.

Closing his eyes did nothing. The vortex wasn’t coming in through his sight at all. It was happening directly inside his head.

Memories stirred in his mind like a mixer grinder. Saint Mary’s dark corridors. John swinging his mace. Goblins screaming under the Legendary Horn. Tycho burning beneath a broken sky. Each one shattered before he could hold onto it, and his thoughts began to fray at the edges from the effort of trying.

➤[Initiating inter-server transfer.]

➤[Destination: Murim Server.]

➤[Reviewing visitor restrictions.]

He forced himself to focus on the words rather than the spinning.

Five years. That was the grace period every gamified world received. For five years after the system took hold of a world, it stayed sealed off, its own players leveling and adapting entirely on their own, without outsiders from older, more developed civilizations walking through the door. Once that window closed, the world got redesignated as a server and opened up properly, and everything came flooding in after that: trade, knowledge, alliances, religions, guilds, mercenaries, and eventually wars.

The First Sanctuary wasn’t just a marketplace connecting distant planets, then. It was the hallway between worlds, once the locks had finally come off.

But the system didn’t just fling open a newborn server and let some ancient monster stroll in at full strength. Every server had an entry limit built into it, calculated from the average level of that world’s hundred strongest native players. The stronger the natives got over time, the higher that ceiling climbed. It was an odd kind of fairness, one that still allowed a world to be invaded without letting one overpowered visitor flatten it by accident.

➤[MURIM SERVER]

➤[Current Entry Level Limit: 2,000]

➤[Visitor Earthling: Level 20]

➤[Entry permitted.]

He nearly said something out loud in disbelief before remembering that his mouth probably wasn’t fully attached to the rest of him at the moment.

Level two thousand. Murim’s top hundred were strong enough on their own to pull that average up that high, and its visitor ceiling alone sat leagues above anything Earth-69 could offer for comparison. The place was bigger too, more populated, more developed, physically larger in every direction than the world he’d woken up in.

And here he was, a Level 20 player in a demon mask, crossing into all of that to ask for help sleeping.

"Excellent plan," he tried to say, though his mouth still might not have been listening.

The pressure kept climbing. Something cold slid through his bones, and his awareness folded inward until even the system panels blinked out of view entirely. He stopped fighting the pull and locked his thoughts around a single count instead. One. Two. Three. The rhythm gave him something the vortex couldn’t twist out of shape, and he followed it while impossible distances rushed past him in every direction.

At forty-seven, the spinning stopped, and silence dropped in behind it.

He didn’t open his eyes right away. A voice spoke somewhere ahead of him.

➤[Earthling, welcome to Murim. Please come out.]

He waited through three full breaths first, checking his body one piece at a time. Feet. Legs. Hands. Ten fingers, still all attached. Head, still on his shoulders.

The Rakshasa mask sat exactly where he’d left it, the red braid resting against his back, the bowler hat still perched on top like it belonged there.

He opened his eyes to another circular operation room, and for a moment he genuinely wondered if the transfer had failed. Same seamless white walls. Same raised platform underfoot. When the circular door slid open, it revealed the same silver mist, the same glasslike floor, the same pale corridors floating at impossible angles overhead.

Nothing had changed except his own clothes.

He stepped out and looked toward the lone wooden exit standing in the mist. "A mind-destroying vortex just to reach the room next door. Efficient."

Nobody answered. He crossed the transparent floor, his new clothes moving naturally with each step, the black fabric silent underfoot, the mask turning every breath into a faint hollow whisper behind it.

Then he opened the door.

Warm wind hit him first, carrying cedar and rain and cooking oil and flowers, and underneath all of it, the sharp metallic bite of forged steel.

He stepped outside and stopped where he stood. The Sanctuary building behind him was still the same modest two-story structure of pale stone and dark wood. Everything past it belonged to a different world entirely.

A vast city spread down the slope in front of him, curved roofs layered in green and gold and crimson as far as the horizon. Towers shaped like open pagodas rose between gardens, their upper floors connected by narrow bridges strung hundreds of feet above the streets below. Silk banners caught the wind, each one marked with a crest he didn’t recognize. A river wider than parts of Tycho split the city down the middle, white stone bridges arching over it in graceful curves while wooden ships drifted along without sails, carried by something glowing beneath their hulls.

Past the city stood mountains that weren’t pretending to be mountains, immense blue-black pillars vanishing into a sea of cloud, waterfalls pouring off cliffs that had no business floating where they were, forests climbing slopes steep enough that the trees seemed nailed straight to the rock. Far overhead, enormous birds circled beneath a sky deeper and brighter than anything Earth had ever managed.

One of the birds was carrying a building on its back.

He watched it for a few seconds. The building looked occupied.

"Of course it is."

Closer to the Sanctuary, a broad avenue ran down toward a gate carved with dragons, and hundreds of people filled it. Long robes, fitted martial uniforms, layered coats, veils, full armor, sect colors he had no way of reading yet. Swords hung openly from belts. Spears rested across shoulders. Sabres, staves, bows, chains, and weapons he couldn’t even put a name to sat out in plain sight rather than tucked away in an inventory somewhere.

It looked exactly like the wuxia and xianxia stories he half remembered, except this world had never once needed to care that it resembled fiction. The mountains were real. The warriors were real. The power humming faintly through the air was real, and so, presumably, was the death waiting on the other side of every one of those weapons.

His awe cooled into something more careful. He counted six visible exits from the square, fourteen armed figures within easy reach of him, three rooftops good for watching a crowd from above, and one narrow alley that could double as a retreat if things went badly.

Then he noticed the street had gone quiet.

People were looking at him. A swordsman slowed mid-step in the road. Two women in pale blue robes stopped talking mid-sentence. A merchant leaned out from under his awning to get a better look. Even a kid holding a stick of candied fruit stared openly at the black-cloaked figure in the demon mask standing in the middle of the square.

He’d built this entire identity specifically to avoid attention, and inside ten seconds of stepping into Murim he’d managed to get the attention of the whole square instead.

"Shit," he muttered under his breath.

He looked down at his own baggy black clothes, the cloak, the hands he’d deliberately hidden from view. Then he looked around at the elegant robes and openly worn weapons surrounding him on every side.

"Rahul," he murmured, "is going to be unbearable about this."

He pulled the hood lower and started walking. The crowd quietly parted to let him through, and that, more than anything else, didn’t make him feel any better about it at all.

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[Note: The Character Image of Earthling has been uploaded.]