Insomniac Player

Damien answered the question by kicking the wall, which looked unimpressive right up until the ceiling agreed to disagree.

Back before they’d entered the channel, he’d clocked old tool marks around the supporting stones. Nothing about this passage had been fully natural. Someone had widened it years ago and braced the weakest stretch with fitted rock, and while he’d been setting up that useless little tripwire earlier, he’d also quietly loosened one of those supports without fully deciding why.

Turned out he’d known exactly why. His heel drove it free, and the whole ceiling groaned in protest.

The wounded pursuer looked up. "You."

Damien ran. Stone crashed down into the passage between them, water surging around his legs, carrying dust and roots and the broken length of black chain along with it. He threw himself through the narrowing gap a half-step ahead of the final support giving way, and the channel disappeared behind a solid wall of rubble.

He crawled out into daylight coughing red-root powder from his lungs.

The travelers waited in a wooded hollow beyond the ravine. Mei Lian knelt over the wounded formation attendant. The merchants clutched improvised weapons. The four spear disciples stood ready to defend the passage, though there wasn’t much passage left to defend.

Every eye turned to Damien.

"Is he dead?" the scarred disciple asked.

Damien listened for a second. Faint but unmistakable, a string of creative threats drifted through the rubble from the other side. "No."

The disciple looked genuinely impressed. "You judged the collapse perfectly."

I judged the man would probably survive it, Damien thought. That’s a slightly different skill.

He wiped water off the mask instead of correcting anyone. "A closed road is often kinder than an open grave."

Several merchants bowed at that. He had absolutely no idea what he’d just said to earn it.

"Move." His own voice, plain and flat. "The archers will find another way around."

They pushed into the forest without a formation, a map, or anything resembling a proper road. The cedar canopy swallowed the sky whole, moss softening every footstep beneath them. Mei Lian led at first, tracking the mountains by their angle in the distance, and Damien noticed quickly that she kept choosing speed over cover every time the two conflicted.

Speed made sense for a courier running a normal route. It made a lot less sense when the men hunting her already knew exactly where she was headed.

He called a halt half an hour in, at a fork in the game trail. The northern path ran broad and dry, hoofprints pressed all through it, every set pointing toward the Dreaming Moon Pavilion. The eastern path dropped down into ferns and standing water.

"North," one spear disciple said. "The Pavilion’s less than a day off that way."

Damien crouched near the northern trail instead of taking the bait. A branch had been cut clean six feet off the ground, sap still shining pale along the wood. Three stones beside the path sat darker than the surrounding dirt, the way soil looks after something recently flipped it over. Birds called from the eastern trees. None called from the north.

He caught the faint edge of lamp oil on the air. "The north road’s watched."

The scarred disciple frowned. "I don’t see anyone."

"That’s generally how they prefer it."

"The eastern trail costs us hours."

Every traveler’s eyes landed on him at once, and he could feel them waiting for the masked stranger to speak, not the frightened Level 20 kid underneath it.

He gave them the version they wanted. "A road offered by an enemy has already chosen your destination for you."

Silence sat there for a moment.

The elderly merchant nodded slow, like he’d just been handed scripture. "Ancient wisdom."

It’s about six seconds old, Damien thought, and said nothing to correct him either.

They took the eastern trail. It sank into a marshy basin where standing water threw back cedar reflections in every direction, leeches climbing boots the second anyone stopped moving. The blue-scaled pack animal was nowhere in sight, though distant metallic ringing suggested Bluebell remained alive, furious, and possibly outrunning the entire attacking force on principle.

Damien kept the merchants sandwiched between the spear disciples and Mei Lian near the group’s center. Every stop by a spring came only after he’d checked upstream for tracks, poison residue, disturbed stones. Food came from sealed provisions rather than anything growing wild nearby. When evening closed in, shelter came before speed every time.

They found a shallow cave behind a curtain of roots, two exits, a dry floor, enough height that smoke wouldn’t trap anyone if a fire got lit. Damien marked the approaches with thread and hung tiny metal bowls under the leaves nearby. Anything moving through would ring a note the forest itself never made.

The disciples watched him work in silence. "What sect teaches methods like these?" the youngest finally asked.

"The sect of not getting stabbed while you sleep."

The boy blinked, thrown by the plain answer. That one had been Damien talking, he realized a beat late, not Earthling.

Mei Lian hid a smile behind her sleeve. Night settled fully over the trees.

The merchants slept in shifts. The spear disciples attempted meditation with varying success. Damien sat near the cave mouth and watched mist gather between the trunks outside.

He never took an actual shift. Every hour of the night belonged to him by default.

Mei Lian joined him after midnight, the injured attendant resting behind them, his poison held in check but not cleared out entirely.

"You never sleep," she said.

"That’s the whole reason I crossed worlds looking for physicians."

"You talk more normally when nobody’s watching."

He turned the mask toward her slowly.

She held both hands up. "Professional observation."

"A professional charges before insulting the patient."

"The bill comes later."

He almost laughed at that.

Her eyes drifted to the black case beside her. "They knew my exact route and the precise formation sequence. Sabotaging that pillar required someone with access to a Cloudstep marker well before it ever reached the market."

"Someone inside your own network helped them, then."

"Probably." Her jaw tightened around the word. "This case holds diagnostic moon-jade. It records the boundaries between consciousness, dreams, and soul activity. Several pieces were headed to our main hall for an urgent investigation."

"Investigation into what, exactly?"

"Patients waking up with memories that aren’t theirs. Dreams that keep going after the dreamer’s already died. Foreign thoughts surfacing inside linked formations that shouldn’t be talking to each other at all."

Damien looked at the case a while longer than he meant to. My insomnia just went from lonely to genuinely unsettling in about four seconds.

"And someone wants that jade badly enough to ambush a whole formation for it."

"Or wants the investigation stopped before it finishes."

A lantern flashed between distant trees. He raised one hand.

Mei Lian went silent instantly. A second flash answered it from the northern ridge. A third appeared further west a moment later. He counted the gaps between them. Five breaths. Seven. Five again.

Signals. The attackers had gotten ahead of them and were already coordinating along the direct road.

He woke the group without lighting a single flame, and they slipped out through the cave’s rear opening, cutting southeast until they hit terraced herb fields carved into the lower slopes. Irrigation channels gave them cover, and the thick medicinal scent hanging over the terraces smothered any trail a nose or a tracking spell might have caught otherwise.

Near dawn they reached a ridge looking down over the northern road.

Grey-clothed attackers waited behind a fallen cart below. Archers held both slopes. A formation trap glowed faintly beneath a scatter of dead leaves, right where the direct road would have marched every single one of them straight through the middle of it.

The scarred disciple looked over at him. "You knew."

"I suspected."

"There’s a difference?"

"A big one."

They pushed on through the terraces instead, and by noon the next day, silver roofs finally appeared along the mountainside ahead of them.

The Dreaming Moon Pavilion wrapped around a lake that held the sky’s reflection even when clouds crossed overhead. Open halls climbed through terraced gardens, connected by stairways and arched bridges. Patients rested under white-blossomed trees while physicians in pale robes moved quietly between them.

Guards met the group at the lower gate.

Mei Lian handed over her emblem, the sealed case, and a heavily compressed account of the ambush. When she finished, she turned and looked straight at Damien.

"We survived because Senior Earthling spotted the sabotage, found us an escape passage, and steered us around a second ambush waiting on the direct road."

Every guard’s eyes went to the Rakshasa mask.

I hate that word more every single time I hear it, Damien thought, watching "senior" land on him for what felt like the hundredth time that day.

The injured attendant added, weak but proud, "He dropped a mountain on their leader and spared his life anyway."

"A section of ceiling," Damien corrected.

Nobody listened to that part either.

Whispers moved through the gate ahead of him.

"The Rakshasa of the Broken Road."

"A wandering Dark Master, this far south?"

"His level’s fake, don’t let it fool you, nobody that dangerous shows a twenty."

He walked into the Pavilion under a dozen respectful stares, and somewhere in the middle of it registered exactly what had just happened to him.

I successfully protected my identity, he thought. Earthling, meanwhile, just picked up a title. Honorable Dark Master.