Insomniac Player

Damien stayed at the table after Salma left, and the café felt quieter than it had a minute ago. He rubbed his temples to sooth the headache.

The waitress passed by. "Anything else?"

"One Black coffee."

She nodded and disappeared toward the counter.

A few minutes later a steaming cup landed in front of him. He took a slow sip, bitter, exactly the way he liked it, and let his eyes drift shut for a second.

One. Three. Ten.

The numbers surfaced on their own, uninvited, the way they’d been doing all morning.

He set the cup down. "...Fine. Let’s actually try."

If the parchment was as old as it looked, somebody out there had to know something. He pulled up the system interface and opened the public channels.

➤[Regional Channel]

➤[Population Covered: 2 Capitals, 50 Cities, 500 Towns, 5,000 Villages]

➤[Online: 2,847,391 Players]

Messages scrolled past in a blur, dozens of new threads spawning every second. He scanned for anything about gates, monsters, ancient text, anything useful at all.

Nothing. Just people being people, apparently, whatever planet they woke up on.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #regional-chat ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Doorkicker2: Damn, man. I really liked her.

CallMe_Dad: Bro I told you. She only wanted free carries and levels. She played you.

Doorkicker2: She said I was different.

CallMe_Dad: Yeah. Different wallet.

WannabeShifu12: Women come and go, young disciple. In my youth I was unstoppable.

CallMe_Dad: LMAO HERE WE GO

CallMe_Dad: Shifu about to tell another legendary story

CallMe_Dad: how many girls did you pull

WannabeShifu12: Countless. My charisma was beyond mortal comprehension.

Doorkicker2: you literally told us yesterday you’ve been married since nineteen

WannabeShifu12: Details are the enemy of legends.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FishingKing88: Anyone selling Lv25 fishing rod?

GoblinRights: Stop killing goblins. They’re misunderstood.

BonkPaladin: Shut up.

GoblinRights: Speciesist.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ManaBattery: Looking for healer. Raid starts in ten.

ArrowToTheKnee: Depends.

ManaBattery: On what?

ArrowToTheKnee: Is dying optional? JK lol

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Damien watched the stream keep scrolling. Nobody here was discussing anything remotely useful.

He took a breath and typed.

Sleepless: Hello. Does anyone remember reading or hearing these numbers before? One. Three. Ten.

The message vanished into the flood almost instantly, three seconds and buried under a hundred unrelated conversations.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CallMe_Dad: SHIFU ANSWER THE QUESTION

WannabeShifu12: A true gentleman never counts.

Doorkicker2: because zero is embarrassing

CallMe_Dad: HAHAHAHAHA

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CatMage: anyone know where my cat went

SomeoneElse: did you check your inventory?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He sighed. Not one useful word in the whole feed. "...Feels like shouting into a Discord server nobody reads."

"Wrong crowd." He said it to himself, already closing the tab. Bigger pond, then.

➤[Worldwide Channel]

➤[Online: 3,894,217,043 Players]

The moment it opened, chaos hit. Messages tore past faster than he could read them, a hundred languages folding through translation at once, the feed less like a chat log and more like standing next to a waterfall.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #worldwide-chat ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

DragonTaxEvader: Whoever stole my wyvern, return him.

TeaNecromancer: If it’s undead now, does it still count as stolen?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ElfEnjoyer99: daily reminder elves are overrated

DefinitelyAnElf: meet me outside

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

PotionDealer: Selling Grade A mana potions!

CheapKnight: bro they’re expired

PotionDealer: since when have potions had an expiry date

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

MoonRabbit: Looking for party. Rank 58 dungeon.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

GrandmaCrits: My grandson keeps spending all my gold.

LootGoblinIRL: kill him and adopt me

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CoffeeAlchemy: Coffee should restore mana.

SleepyWizard: for real it restores my will to live

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Damien couldn’t stop the small smile. An entire planet arguing about nothing in particular, and somehow it was strangely comforting. He hesitated, then typed again.

Sleepless: Does anyone know the meaning of these numbers? One. Three. Ten.

Nothing for a moment. Then a wall of replies landed at once.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ChaosMerchant: lottery numbers?

TinyTitan: number of girlfriends you’ve lost

PotionDealer: clearly recipe proportions

GoblinLawyer: prison sentence

ElderLich: password to my basement

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He sighed. "Knew it." Then, someone actually took it seriously.

Archivist_Seven: Context?

Sleepless: Ancient document. Unknown language. Only recognizable part was: One. Three. Ten.

That single reply changed the whole tone of the thread. The channel didn’t literally slow down, but dozens of people started quoting his message back into the stream.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

RuneScholar: Ancient document?

GateHistorian: Interesting...

SilverFox: Where did you find it?

RelicHunterX: Is it authentic?

DungeonArchivist: What material?

MageEngineer: Upload a picture.

AncientGeek: Can you describe the symbols?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He typed fast.

Sleepless: Can’t upload. It’s bound by system restrictions.

Not entirely true. He just wasn’t handing a photo of a legendary relic to a room full of strangers who already smelled money on him.

Replies came almost immediately.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TreasureRat: fake

Bookwyrm: not necessarily, some relics block screenshots

RuinCrawler: true

AbyssProfessor: I’ve seen something similar before

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The discussion spread fast, theories piling on top of each other.

VoidSeeker: Three stages of ascension?

HeroRetired: Number of hidden bosses?

DungeonNerd: Tutorial references?

ManaEconomist: Currency conversion rate?

SwordSaintFan: Secret quest chain?

OracleMaybe: A countdown?

Archivist_Seven: Coordinates?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Hundreds of guesses flooded in, each one stranger than the last. He read through every single one, and none of them landed right.

Then a new name cut through the noise, and it stopped dozens of conversations dead.

LevelUp_When: ...Isn’t that the number of the upcoming update patch?

The channel froze for nearly two full seconds. Then it exploded.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

DragonTaxEvader: WHAT?

RelicHunterX: upcoming patch?? holy fucking shit

CoffeeAlchemy: source??

ChaosMerchant: wait wait wait

DungeonArchivist: explain

Bookwyrm: don’t disappear

TinyTitan: BRO ANSWER

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Thousands of replies buried the message within seconds. Damien had already seen it, though. His pupils contracted. "...Update."

He closed the chat. "Profile." The screen changed, and his eyes went straight to the corner without thinking about why.

Tiny gray letters sat there, easy to miss unless you already knew to look. System Version: v1.3.09.

He stared at it a beat too long. "...There’s a version number." He almost laughed at himself. Right there, the whole time, and he’d walked past it a hundred times without ever once wondering what it meant.

His hand was already moving toward his inventory before the thought finished. The parchment unfolded flat across the table, the poem staring back up at him, still every bit as unreadable as the first night he’d sat with it on his bed.

His finger landed on the three numbers, the only part of the whole thing that had ever made sense.

One. Three. Ten.

"...Huh." He read it again. Then a third time, slower.

"No way." He sat back. "You’re kidding me."

He pulled the worldwide chat back up with one hand, LevelUp_When’s message still half-buried under the flood, and set it side by side against the parchment in his head. Version. Patch. Numbers with no context attached to anything, except that they lined up with exactly the three numbers sitting in front of him on hundred-year-old paper.

"...That guy wasn’t guessing." He said it out loud, just to hear it land somewhere outside his own skull.

He tapped the parchment once. "This isn’t describing something that already happened." His pulse ticked up as the thought finished forming. "It’s describing something that hasn’t happened yet."

"If that’s true—" He dragged a finger slowly along the symbols, like touching them might make them cooperate. "—then whatever this says next is something I actually need to know before it happens, not after."

He sat there a second, equal parts thrilled and furious with himself. A real clue, sitting right under his hand, and he couldn’t read one single word of it.

"Okay." He rubbed his temple. "Who reads dead languages."

The Worldwide Channel had people who might. But handing the actual text to a room full of strangers who already knew he was sitting on something rare felt like begging to get robbed, and there wasn’t an anonymous option in sight anyway.

One name came to mind instead, and stayed there. Daria.

He scrolled to her name in his contacts, thumb hovering over the call button a second longer than it needed to. "...She’s going to laugh at me for this."

He pressed it anyway. The ringing tone hummed softly through the café.

The call connected almost instantly, her voice bright on the other end. "Sleepless!" Genuine excitement in it. "Wondering when you’d finally call."

He smiled despite himself. "I need your help."

A short pause, then her playful tone came back. "Oh? You sound serious. This must be good."

He lowered his voice. "I think I might’ve stumbled onto something tied to the system’s next update."

The laughter cut off completely. Silence sat on the line for a moment before she finally spoke.

"...Where are you?"