Insomniac Player

The name meant nothing to Damien. The reaction it produced meant considerably more.

Elder Ren stood at the edge of the ruined formation, silver-linked fingers closed tight around the black thread. Physician Su had stopped writing entirely. Mei Lian knelt at the control platform, blood still under her nose, one hand pressed flat against the cracked jade door marker. Even Healer Orr’s internal lights had gone completely still.

Nobody in this pavilion looked happy that Mo Xian was still alive.

Damien sat up on the circular bed, every muscle complaining like he’d spent the night running a marathon, which felt deeply unfair given that most of the actual running had happened entirely inside his own head. The Seven-Night Stillness Formation hadn’t given him a single second of real sleep.

It had nearly given someone else permanent residence in his skull instead.

That feels medically counterproductive, he thought.

"Seal the lake." Elder Ren’s voice cut through the room. "No message leaves without inspection. Replace every corridor guardian, and isolate the remaining jade."

Physicians and martial disciples scattered into motion at once.

Damien watched the thread twitch between the elder’s fingers and tilted the mask slightly. "A name that empties a room has been fed for many years."

Elder Ren’s eyes sharpened on him. I meant "who is he," honestly. Apparently that question had shown up dressed for a funeral instead.

"Forty-six years," Elder Ren said. "Long enough for fear to drift out of accuracy. Not long enough for it to stop meaning something real."

Healer Orr sealed the thread inside a cylinder of blue ice, the inverted crescent still visible through the frost.

"Mo Xian was once a physician of this pavilion." Elder Ren’s voice stayed level. "He designed three of the stabilizing methods we still use on damaged consciousness. He could enter a fevered dream, find a memory wound, and close it without ever disturbing the patient’s sense of who they were."

Damien glanced at the black mirrors. Sounds useful. Also sounds like the exact reason everyone here hates him.

"He stopped believing consent mattered medically," Su said.

There it was.

Elder Ren’s expression hardened. "He decided unconscious patients couldn’t appreciate the value of what he learned from them. He started recording their memories. Then removing them. Then transplanting fragments from one patient into another, purely to watch what happened."

Mei Lian rose with a disciple’s help. "How many?"

"Confirmed, twenty-three. Suspected, more than that."

"Deaths?"

"Five bodies. Seven minds that never came back. Eleven survivors who couldn’t tell which memories still belonged to them."

Silence sat over the whole pavilion. Damien looked at the black thread again. Mo Xian had wanted the moon jade, yes, but he’d also wanted a way into Mei Lian’s physician anchor, and if Damien had ignored that foreign presence, the man could have gotten into every patient domain wired into that corridor.

He wasn’t stealing medicine. Damien’s stomach turned over. He was collecting doors.

He spoke before deciding whether to keep the thought to himself. "A healer who starts counting patients as rooms eventually forgets which door leads back outside."

Physician Su lowered her brush slowly. "That was the exact conclusion of the exile tribunal."

I built that in about thirty seconds off two facts, Damien thought, and inclined his head like he’d carried the idea for decades. Maintaining a mysterious identity, it turned out, required very little actual knowledge and an unreasonable tolerance for accidentally being right.

Elder Ren walked to the edge of the silver lake, dawn starting to lighten the mountains beyond it while the water still held onto the dark shapes of the pavilions.

"We destroyed Mo Xian’s research, cut his cultivation channels, and drove him out. Three escorts died before he even reached the provincial boundary. His body was never recovered."

"You assumed he’d died," Mei Lian said.

"We hoped he lacked the strength left to stay dangerous."

I understand that particular flavor of hope, Damien thought. The kind you lean on because confirming otherwise costs too much.

"The reversed crescent?" he asked, keeping the mask’s measured tone. "A moon facing away still belongs to the same night."

Elder Ren’s gaze sharpened again. "That was the mark he burned into forbidden instruments after his exile. You recognized the connection."

I recognized that they were both moons, Damien thought. That felt like a safe guess. He said nothing and let the silence do the rest of the work for him. He’d already noticed silence tended to make other people finish his sentences better than he could.

Elder Ren turned to Mei Lian. "The attack on your shipment wasn’t isolated. Two other medicine caravans vanished in the last eight months. One courier turned up alive but missing six years of memory. We blamed bandits, or dream beasts."

"He was gathering materials," she said.

"Perhaps. That black moon jade was built specifically to detect foreign consciousness moving through linked dreams. He couldn’t let it reach us intact."

Damien turned it over in his head. The sabotaged Cloudstep marker. The ambush in the cedar ravine. The second group waiting further up the northern road. Whoever planned this had known the shipment route, the exact formation sequence, and which case Mei Lian personally carried. That kind of detail came from inside either the pavilion or the transit network itself, and before he could shape that into a question, the mask apparently decided it owed everyone another riddle.

"An exile who keeps the key has only changed which side of the door he stands on."

Elder Ren went completely still. Physician Su’s eyes cut toward the formation attendants.

Mei Lian’s own eyes narrowed. "Access seals."

Damien blinked behind the mask, genuinely caught off guard by how well that had landed.

Elder Ren got there first. "Mo Xian helped design the original courier seals. We changed the active patterns after his exile, but the underlying verification structure never actually changed."

"Then he might still know how to fake an authorized signal," Physician Su said.

"Audit every seal issued in the last five years."

Three disciples hurried off at once. Damien sat very still. I meant they should just change the locks. Somehow that had come out as a full internal security audit, and worse, it sounded exactly right.

Elder Ren faced him again. "Your treatment contract accepted investigative service as conditional payment."

I remember. I was fully conscious when I signed that, unfortunately. "The ink beneath a debt only dries once both hands release the page."

Mei Lian translated for the room. "He’ll honor the agreement."

That had also been what Damien actually meant, minus most of the paper metaphor and about two-thirds of the words.

"You won’t be investigating alone," Elder Ren said. "The Broken Road unit departs after midday. Twelve martial investigators will accompany you."

A translucent panel opened in front of him a moment later, and the system finally decided to make itself useful.

➤[Hidden Quest Generated]

➤[The Broken Road Conspiracy]

➤[A forty-six-year exile has resurfaced, and his reach may extend far beyond one caravan.]

Objectives:

1. Trace the origin of the sabotage inside the Cloudstep network.

2. Recover any stolen moon jade or memory fragments still in enemy hands.

3. (Optional) Locate or confront agents connected to Mo Xian directly.

Reward scales with completion. Bonus reward for direct confrontation with Mo Xian.

Damien read it twice. Finally getting paid in something other than favors and reputation I never asked for. He accepted it without a word.

His whole body still felt like it had been beaten with furniture, his mind spent from a full night fending off a dream thief, and he still had no local money, no working map, and no cure to show for any of it.

Midday sounded, generously, ambitious. He folded his hands inside his sleeves. "A road doesn’t postpone its stones because the traveler’s feet remember yesterday."

Elder Ren nodded with real approval. "Rest until departure, then."

Damien stared at him. That hadn’t technically been a refusal, but it had absolutely contained several open lanes to become one, and somewhere along the way, the Earthling persona had started working against the man wearing it.

Healer Orr walked him to a recovery chamber overlooking the lake, and he lay down on a bed of warm medicinal sand for four hours without sleeping through a single minute of it. At one point Physician Su sent over a calming infusion that relaxed absolutely everything except the specific part of him responsible for staying conscious.

By noon, at least, his headache had organized itself into something manageable.

Mei Lian arrived with his cloak, a Tang Dao blade, and a sealed travel packet. She held the blade out to him. "You’ll want to carry this openly instead."

He understood immediately. The men in the ravine had already clocked the First Blood Dagger as a tutorial relic, and walking back into the field with a weapon that specific practically painted his own history across his chest. A Tang Dao, common enough among the martial investigators here, would draw far less attention.

"You can still withdraw," she said. "The Pavilion Master already approved the treatment expense. We can assign someone else as escort."

Part of him genuinely wanted to say yes to that.

But Mo Xian had already been inside his mind, already knew the exact texture of his consciousness, had already tried turning his own memories against him. Walking away now wouldn’t make the man forget Earthling existed.

"A hunter doesn’t lose the scent just because the wounded animal declines to keep running."

Mei Lian studied him a beat longer than usual. "You think he’ll come after you regardless."

That is exactly what I think, he thought, and found the whole idea more than a little unsettling.

He fastened the Tang Dao openly at his waist and followed her out of the room, the First Blood Dagger already tucked safely away inside his inventory.