Insomniac Player

Bao Yu fell with three blades through her back. Han Rui killed the men holding her down, and then a cord took his head clean off before he could pull back.

Qiao Sen reached Mo Xian’s platform. The physician touched two fingers to his own forehead, and Qiao Sen turned around and attacked Lin Hua with empty eyes.

She refused to strike him back. That hesitation killed them both.

Wei Jian stood alone now between Damien and whatever was left of the assassins. His Level 101 aura cracked the road beneath his boots. The measuring rod shattered one mask, then a second. He reached Mo Xian and drove the weapon straight through the physician’s chest.

The body collapsed into a pile of black paper. A decoy skill, nothing more. The real Mo Xian appeared directly behind Wei Jian and pressed a dream needle into the base of his skull.

Wei Jian remained standing for three full seconds.

He looked at Damien once. Then the captain who could interrogate moss itself fell beside the broken road.

Everyone else was dead. Damien’s new speed and agility had carried him further than his old body ever could have. None of it made him equal to the six assassins closing in from every side now.

He caught sight of one last shadow past the reeds and used the only movement he had left.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]

He became a black streak across the moonlit road, and instead of running west, he emerged from the shadow directly beneath Mo Xian’s platform.

The Tang Dao rose toward the physician’s throat. Mo Xian leaned aside at the last second, and the blade only caught the wooden mask, splitting it open and exposing one narrow, furious eye underneath.

Damien turned on his improved agility and struck again.

An assassin caught his wrist mid-swing. A second kicked his knee out. A third drove a hooked blade straight through the edge of his cloak, pinning him to the platform.

➤[Cooldown: 01:00:00]

Twenty-four stat points had improved his chances tonight. They hadn’t changed the outcome.

Mo Xian removed the damaged mask entirely. Older than Damien had pictured, a narrow face, grey threaded through dark hair, a shallow cut still bleeding faintly across one cheek. Something surfaced behind his eyes that wasn’t recognition of Damien’s face, or his class, or his history. It was recognition of the mind that had thrown him out of that dream in the first place.

"The conscious dreamer," Mo Xian said.

Damien knelt on that platform, surrounded by twelve dead investigators and six living enemies.

His voice came out hollow behind what was left of the Rakshasa mask. "A guest thrown from one door should question the wisdom of entering through another."

Mo Xian smiled. "I didn’t come to enter."

He pushed a silver needle into Damien’s shoulder.

"I came to open you."

The needle went in cold and stayed cold. Damien waited for sleep to follow it down. Nothing came.

Instead his shoulder went numb, then his neck, then something colder crawled along his spine and settled there. He tried to close his hand around the Tang Dao. His fingers didn’t answer. The blade slid free and hit the ground, and a black-clad hand scooped it up before it finished bouncing. He reached for his inventory out of pure reflex.

Nothing happened. The command just sat there, unanswered.

Hands went through his cloak next, patting down every fold, checking every seam. Someone grabbed the edge of his mask and pulled. It didn’t move, not an inch, like it had grown into his own skin overnight. Two of them lifted him onto a wooden frame between them.

Sleep would’ve been better, he thought, and meant it.

They carried him down through a passage below the platform. No torches lit the way, and none of them seemed to need any. Damien counted anyway, because counting was the one thing his brain still did without asking permission. Sixty-three stairs. Two iron doors. One long curving turn. A final room hidden behind a curtain of hanging roots.

They think the dark is hiding this place. It isn’t hiding it from me.

His legs refused to hold his weight. His eyes refused to close. Whatever was wrong with him tonight, it had picked its two battles and was winning both.

The room they carried him into had once been a burial chamber; he could tell that much from the shape of the walls, the old grooves cut for coffins that someone had since filled with jade tubing and black mirrors instead. A chair sat waiting in the center, restraints already open along the arms and legs, more built into a headrest shaped for a throat and two temples.

They put him in it. Leather closed around his wrists. Then his ankles. Then his neck.

A man crouched in front of him and peeled off his own cloth mask, revealing a square jaw, a shaved scalp, a small silver knife tattooed under one eye.

"The Dark Master looks smaller tied down."

Damien didn’t answer. He let his silence sit there instead, aimed at the man’s face, and hoped it read the way a glare would have.

Footsteps crossed the stone behind him. A man in physician’s robes set the cracked wooden mask down on a side table, next to the confiscated Tang Dao, and began laying out six thin needles on a strip of silver cloth, one at a time, unhurried.

"Don’t threaten my assistants," he said, not looking up.

"A worm beneath the physician’s blade doesn’t become an assistant just because the physician dislikes working alone."

The shaved man’s hand twitched toward his sword hilt.

The physician actually laughed at that. "He’s understood your relationship faster than you have, Kang."

Kang’s hand dropped away from the sword. His face didn’t relax, though. Whatever he was owed, he was clearly planning to collect it later.

I hadn’t understood anything, Damien thought. That one was a guess.

Two cold disks pressed against his temples, moon-jade by the faint light bleeding through them. Silver crossed the mask and slid off without ever touching what was underneath.

"Your face doesn’t interest me," the physician said. "Bodies wear faces the way rooms wear paint. I want what’s underneath the paint."

Something pressed against the edges of Damien’s thoughts, testing, not pushing through yet, just running a hand along a locked door to feel where the hinges were.

"In the Dream Corridor, every mind kept a rhythm." The physician’s voice stayed even, almost fond. "Patients drifted along theirs. Physicians anchored themselves to their own. And there you were. Awake. Rigid. Walking the corridor like it was a road built for your feet specifically."

He pressed the first needle into the chair, an inch from Damien’s throat.

"When you threw my projection out, some of that rhythm stayed stamped into the tether on the way. That’s how I found you."

Not my face. Not my name. Not even my class. Just the shape of a mind that had never once learned how to rest.

"The bell remembers the hand that pulled it," Damien said. "Memory doesn’t make the bell a hunter."

The physician went still. His eyes moved to the broken mask on the table. "You used the waking anchor to make the formation hunt whatever consciousness was still attached to it."

I meant getting kicked out doesn’t make you clever. You heard a confession instead.

He wrote something down. Damien watched the brush move and thought, distantly, that this might be the actual flaw in wearing a mask that talked in riddles: a smart enough man could turn any sentence into whatever he needed it to mean.

A mirror lit up on the wall. A low hum crawled into Damien’s skull, and for half a second the burial chamber wavered and became Saint Mary’s hallway, moonlight, tall windows, gone again before he could blink.

➤[External sleep induction detected.]

➤[Synchronization failed.]

➤[User consciousness remains active.]

"Again," the physician said, and something in his voice had brightened.