Insomniac Player

Seventeen people stood packed inside the Cloudstep Transit Formation, and Damien counted them twice out of habit before letting himself relax even slightly.

Five merchants traveled with sealed cargo stacked around their feet. Four martial disciples in matching pale brown uniforms carried matching spears, the kind of uniformity that always made Damien a little suspicious of the sect behind it. An elderly couple stood beside a blue-scaled pack animal that looked deeply, personally offended by the entire concept of teleportation. Three independent travelers kept to themselves at the edges of the circle. One formation attendant moved between the pillars checking tokens with the bored efficiency of someone who’d done this ten thousand times.

The final passenger wore the silver-moon emblem of the Dreaming Moon Pavilion, and Damien clocked her before she clocked him, which felt like a small victory right up until she proved him wrong about that.

She looked young, maybe her early twenties, dark hair gathered under a physician’s cap, grey travel robes layered over light armor, a narrow medicine case swinging at her waist. A second case rode strapped across her back, black, rectangular, reinforced along the edges with silver bands.

She caught him looking at it. He shifted his gaze back to the pillars, entirely too slowly to sell the innocence he was going for.

She closed the distance anyway. "You’re the outsider asking about the Dreaming Moon Pavilion."

Not a question. Damien turned to face her properly. "Paths meet before names do."

Her eyes narrowed. "That sounded meaningful."

It sounded better in my head, he thought, and apparently the whole city already knows my business.

"Mei Lian." She tapped the silver moon embroidered above her heart. "Junior physician, registered courier of the Dreaming Moon Pavilion."

He inclined his head. "Earthling."

"I know."

That, Damien thought, is starting to be a problem.

Mei Lian studied the mask a moment, then the crude dagger sitting at his hip. Unlike the merchants nearby, fear didn’t seem to be her first instinct. What she looked instead was suspicious, and organized about it, the way a person gets when they’ve been trained to catalog threats rather than flinch from them.

"The Peaceful Dream House sent your referral ahead of you," she said. "Lifelong sleeplessness. Repeated comas. Resistance to every conventional treatment on record. Your file has almost nothing identifying attached to it."

"A record needs only what heals."

"Physicians usually decide what’s needed."

"Patients decide what may be taken."

She held his eyes for a beat longer than felt entirely comfortable. "You’ll either impress our elders or give every one of them a headache."

Possibly both, he thought.

The attendant struck a bronze chime.

"Transit will occur across nine Cloudstep platforms. Remain inside the marked circles during pauses. Do not touch the formation pillars. If you experience nausea, spiritual displacement, or temporary separation from your shadow, report to an attendant upon final arrival."

One of the merchants raised a hand. "What if my shadow doesn’t come back?"

"File a loss claim within three business days."

The merchant lowered his hand slowly, apparently deciding that was somehow a worse answer than no answer at all.

Light climbed the carved lines under Damien’s boots. He shifted his weight and glanced at the nearest pillar, symbols rotating along its surface in a repeating sequence. Eight lines brightened together in perfect unison. A ninth lagged half a heartbeat behind them.

He clocked the delay without meaning to. A tenth of a second, roughly.

The chime sounded a second time, and the world dropped out from under him entirely.

Nothing about the Cloudstep resembled the inter-server transfer he’d survived earlier. No mind-melting vortex, no memories dragged out and shredded for inspection. This felt like space folding itself shut in one clean, violent motion, and his stomach lagged half a step behind the rest of him before finally catching up.

The group reformed on a circular platform hanging over a green valley, wind rushing past on every side. Far below, a river coiled through terraced fields and villages capped in silver roofs.

The offended pack animal made a sound like a kettle being personally murdered. Nobody reacted. Apparently this had become part of the ambiance already.

The platform held steady for six full breaths while energy fed into the pillars, gathering ahead of the next jump. Damien watched the symbols again. Same delayed ninth line. Point six seconds, this time.

"Something’s bothering you," Mei Lian said beside him.

"The last breath arrives late."

She followed his gaze to the pillar. "The formation runs nine circulation paths. Small delays happen when the passenger weight isn’t distributed evenly."

He looked pointedly at the blue-scaled animal, still glaring at everyone within range. "Perhaps."

The next jump carried them over a mountain river wide enough to hold whole islands. The third platform dropped them in a forest of white-barked trees, deer with flowering antlers watching silently from between the trunks. The fourth landed them on the roof of a traveling stone fortress that crawled forward on hundreds of mechanical legs.

Murim kept unfolding beneath them in pieces too strange to fully absorb. A city built along both sides of a canyon, bridges packed with sword-carrying civilians going about their day. Fields where cultivators guided rain across the land with long banners held overhead. On the seventh platform, a red bird larger than John circled close enough that a single wingbeat rocked the whole formation.

Damien kept counting anyway. Point seven seconds. Then point nine.

The delay was getting worse with every jump, and that felt like exactly the kind of pattern nobody else on this platform seemed inclined to notice.

He crouched near the marked line without actually touching it. A hair-thin scratch crossed one of the engraved symbols, and it could have simply worn thin over time, or it could have been carved there with enough precision to interrupt the flow only after a few repetitions.

Mei Lian noticed him crouched there. "The attendant said not to touch the pillars."

"I’m admiring the craftsmanship."

"From six inches away?"

He straightened. "Beauty rewards attention."

She stared at him, then at the damaged symbol, connecting the two thoughts a beat faster than he’d expected. "You could just say you found something, you know."

He could, Damien thought. Earthling apparently never learned how.

She knelt and produced a thin jade instrument. The moment it neared the scratch, it flared orange.

Her expression hardened at once. "This was cut."

The attendant hurried over, examined the mark, glanced at the waiting group, then checked the energy already building inside the pillars.

"We cannot halt mid-sequence," he said. "The final platform will run a full maintenance inspection once we arrive."

"Will we actually reach it?" Damien asked, and this time the question came out in his own voice, no riddles attached.

The attendant blinked at the mask, apparently startled that Earthling knew how to talk like a normal person when it mattered.

"The system hasn’t issued a failure warning."

That’s not an answer, Damien thought, and he was still turning the thought over when the light climbed the pillars again before anyone could argue further. The eighth jump began. For one instant he caught a glimpse of the intended destination, a mountain gate framed under a silver waterfall.

Then the ninth circulation path failed outright, and space tore sideways.

The platform vanished from under them. White light collapsed into dark green. Damien hit the ground shoulder-first, rolled across a bed of wet needles, and slammed into the roots of a cedar hard enough to knock every ounce of air out of his lungs.

Cries and splintering wood rang out around him. A cargo box burst open, scattering metal bowls down a slope. The blue-scaled animal crashed sideways through a bush and kept screaming, apparently satisfied that this entire disaster had proven every single thing it had ever believed about teleportation.

He held still for one breath, running the checklist. Shoulder hurt. Nothing broken. Left knee working. Fingers moving fine. Mask still on. Dagger still there.

He got up.

The group had landed inside a narrow ravine, walls thick with cedar, mist drifting low between the trunks, the late-afternoon sun barely making it through to the stream cutting the ground in half.

"Count yourselves!" the attendant shouted.

Damien had already started. Seventeen passengers. All alive, at least for now.

Two merchants were hurt. One of the spear disciples had a dislocated wrist. The elderly couple had gone down together in a heap, their pack animal circling them and clicking its disapproval at the whole situation.

Mei Lian pushed herself upright ten paces off, the black case still strapped tight across her back.

Damien’s eyes drifted up the slope past her, and something in his chest went cold.

The ground here was damp enough to hold a footprint clean. Boot prints crossed the ravine floor, and none of them belonged to anyone who’d just fallen out of a broken formation. The steps sat too evenly spaced, and not one of them started anywhere near an actual point of impact.

He tracked them with his eyes. One set approached the clearing from the eastern treeline. A second circled the stream. A third stopped dead behind a cedar with a clean line of sight directly to Mei Lian.

Someone had already been here, waiting, long before the formation ever broke. Someone had known exactly where a failed jump would send its passengers.

His hand drifted to the First Blood Dagger without any real decision behind it.

"Nobody leaves the clearing," he said.

This time Earthling didn’t need to sound profound to make his point stick. The arrow burying itself in the formation attendant’s shoulder made it for him.