Insomniac Player

Damien walked out of the Peaceful Dream House owing a mountain a visit, carrying zero local currency, and trailing a reputation that had apparently learned to sprint.

"The Dark Master is going north." The whisper chased him straight into the medicine district, and he let it slide right off him, keeping his stride easy and unbothered. Turning around would tell them he’d heard. Speeding up would look guilty of something. Grabbing the whisperer by the collar and demanding an apology would probably be, technically, the expected move for a man in a demon mask, but Damien had a mountain to climb and limited patience for theater today.

He kept moving toward the lotus lake, and somewhere behind the Rakshasa mask, Earthling took a back seat while Damien did the actual work. He counted intersections out of habit. Caught reflections in polished shop windows to check who was still tagging along. And there they were, same two faces, three streets running now, matching blue scabbards on full display, one of them practically vibrating with excitement at having been noticed.

Assassins don’t usually look this thrilled about it, Damien thought, and filed the pair under harmless for the moment.

The Market of Ten Thousand Paths wrapped the lake in layered rings, weapon shops crowding the outer streets, medicine halls bunched up further north, the fanciest buildings staking their claim closest to the water. And rising above all of it, impossible to miss, stood the Thousand Paths Exchange, nine white pillars holding up a roof stitched together from overlapping golden tiles, bronze beasts crouched along the edges with coins clenched in their teeth like they’d earned them personally.

Four doors, four lines. Residents. Sect representatives. Licensed merchants. Outsiders.

The outsider line was, of course, the shortest one in sight. Damien had already learned enough about how the universe worked to know exactly what that meant for the price tag waiting at the end of it.

He walked in under a sign the system kindly translated for him.

➤[THOUSAND PATHS EXCHANGE]

➤[Violence, coercion, and spiritual theft are prohibited.]

➤[The Exchange accepts no responsibility for violence, coercion, or spiritual theft occurring after departure.]

Comforting, he thought, and meant it exactly as much as it sounded like he did.

Inside felt like a bank designed by someone who’d never trusted a wall in his life. Counters floated above shallow pools, jade bridges shifting direction the second a transaction closed, paper charms flying between balconies overhead like a flock of very businesslike birds. A feathered man counted red crystals into a clerk’s waiting hands. Three women with identical faces argued over a box that growled whenever anyone dared touch it. A stone-skinned merchant stood perfectly still while moss-covered coins were weighed on a silver scale, patient as the mountain he apparently belonged to.

Damien joined the outsider queue and let his eyes drift back toward the entrance. The two swordsmen had stayed outside, one pretending very hard to admire the view of the lake, the other openly scribbling a message onto a jade slip without even bothering to hide it.

He thought about confronting them. Curiosity wasn’t a crime, and neither of them had actually swung a sword at him, so walking over would just start a conversation he genuinely didn’t have the energy for. He’d already done enough unpaid acting for one afternoon, and it wasn’t even lunch yet.

The line moved fast. When his turn came, a floating bridge carried him over to a narrow-faced clerk in dark green robes, pupils cut into thin vertical slits, otherwise looking about as human as anyone else in the building. The man’s professional smile stuttered the instant it landed on the mask.

"Welcome, honored visitor. What service do you require?"

"Where gold becomes stone."

The clerk straightened up like he’d just been handed a riddle worth solving. "Of course. You wish to convert system gold into low-grade spirit stones."

Damien inclined his head, and a panel rose off the counter. Murim, it turned out, recognized more currencies than Damien had patience to count, spirit-stone grades, regional notes, sect contribution marks, entire economies from servers he’d never heard of, and his own system gold sat close to the very bottom of the pile. Not worthless. Just not the kind of money anybody here was impressed by.

The exchange rate alone would eat most of what he had left. The outsider tax finished the job.

He looked at the total and felt something in his chest tighten. He’d already handed John’s borrowed thousand over just to walk through this world’s front door, and now it wanted another painful bite just to point him toward the people who might, in the end, simply shrug and tell him there was nothing to be done.

Healthcare, he thought, survived the apocalypse better than dignity did.

"Twenty low-grade spirit stones," the clerk said. "Conversion, verification, and the outsider service charge, already folded into that number."

Damien read through the fine print anyway. Three separate line items, each apparently performing the exact same job under a different name.

The clerk read his silence as hesitation. "Honored sir, the service charge is negotiable for a guest of your standing. I could shave it down, if you’d like."

The nearby counters went quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when everyone’s suddenly pretending to mind their own business.

Damien understood the offer instantly. Taking it would save him gold today. It would also carve a memorable little exception into the Exchange’s own records and leave this clerk wondering, forever, what a demonic expert might expect in return down the road.

Imran’s advice surfaced in his head, unbidden and annoyingly correct. A disguise survives by giving people fewer reasons to look closer at it.

He set one gloved hand flat on the counter. "Kindness that hides a debt is only a softer chain."

The clerk’s pupils widened. What Damien had actually meant, in plain language, was no, thank you, but apparently Earthling had never once learned how to say a normal sentence in his life.

The clerk bowed low. "Your discernment honors this Exchange. The recorded price stands."

Damien paid. Twenty pale stones formed inside a wooden case, each roughly the size of his thumb’s last joint, faint mist swirling inside every one. Whatever energy leaked off them felt cleaner than mana, but heavier somehow, like it preferred flowing through a set path rather than spreading wherever it pleased.

He pocketed the case and took his stamped transit receipt.

Before leaving, he paused under the Exchange’s public ranking wall, names scrolling endlessly across a slab of black jade three stories tall. The system translated titles for him without bothering to touch the personal names underneath.

Murim’s top natives sat at levels he had to reread just to trust his own eyes. The hundredth name alone explained why the server’s entry cap sat at two thousand. Some of them carried whole cultivation stages layered on top of a raw system level, sect titles, and recorded victories against visitors pulled in from other worlds entirely.

Curious despite himself, he pulled up his own profile.

➤[Earthling]

➤[Level: 20]

The wall showed rankings, not raw numbers, and Damien suspected half the natives up there had ways of hiding their real strength that he’d never spot from down here. The other half, apparently, simply didn’t care who saw. Why would you, he thought, at that height.

He closed the panel before it could draw any more attention his way.

The comparison didn’t scare him so much as it settled something into place. He wasn’t winning a fair fight against anyone serious in this city. He couldn’t afford to assume a friendly shopkeeper was weak, or that some baby-faced disciple hadn’t already buried three rivals before breakfast. What he actually needed was information, a clean route out of any bad situation, and enough self-control to walk past every fight that wasn’t his to have.

In other words, he thought, almost fond about it, Murim wants exactly the version of me that’s kept me alive this whole time.

Outside, the two swordsmen were still waiting, and the taller one nudged the shorter one the second Damien reappeared. Both of them tried, and both of them failed, to look like they hadn’t been watching the door.

He walked past without a word.

"Senior Earthling."

He stopped, mostly to keep them from chasing the name down the street after him.

They hurried over and bowed, younger looking than him though their actual levels stayed hidden behind whatever cloak Murim gave everybody. "We heard you’re heading north," the taller one said. "May we ask which sect has earned your attention?"

Damien had no idea which sects even existed up north. The mask turned toward them anyway, unbothered. "A destination reveals less than the road chosen to reach it."

The two traded a startled glance. What he’d actually meant, again, in plain human language, was I’m not telling you.

"We understand completely," the shorter one said, far too reverently for a sentence that had explained nothing at all.

They really don’t, Damien thought, and kept walking.

The Cloudstep station sat on a raised platform along the market’s northern edge, circular formations carved into white stone, each one ringed by pillars listing destination names. Merchants loaded crates into marked circles while attendants counted tickets and spirit stones with the brisk efficiency of people who’d done this ten thousand times before.

He found the formation for the lower gate of the Dreaming Moon Pavilion.

[Outsider Fare: 20 Low-Grade Spirit Stones]

He fed the case into the payment slot and watched the stones dissolve one at a time.

His entire trip to the Exchange had taken less than an hour, start to finish. He’d walked in owning nothing local. He walked out owning twenty spirit stones. And now, standing on a departure formation with an attendant handing him a wooden transit token, he owned exactly none again.

He stepped onto the formation and let it happen.

Across the lake, the two swordsmen watched him go. The shorter one finished writing and pressed his thumb to the jade slip.

The words dissolved into a pulse of light.

The masked outsider is traveling north.