Insomniac Player

Damien opened his eyes inside Saint Mary’s Orphanage.

He recognized the second-floor corridor instantly, moonlight pouring through tall windows on his left, classroom doors lining the right wall, their glass panes still covered in paper decorations some kid had made years ago. The old building smelled like floor polish, dust, and the promise of rain. Almost perfect.

The clock above the stairs ticked every fifty-eight seconds. He stood under it and counted three full cycles just to be sure.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight. Fifty-eight.

"You had one job," he told the clock. It kept failing at it anyway.

Other details felt off if he looked closely enough. The third classroom had a brass handle, though the real Saint Mary’s had always used steel. A fire-exit sign displayed lettering pulled from Murim rather than Earth-69. The corridor held eleven doors when his memory swore there’d only ever been ten.

The formation built this out of what I remember, he thought, and just guessed wherever the memory got fuzzy.

He touched the wall. Cold plaster pressed back against his fingertips, the roughness real under his hand, rain approaching somewhere close enough to smell, old pipes vibrating faintly inside the ceiling above him.

His body believed every inch of this hallway. His mind refused to.

A translucent panel bloomed in front of him.

➤[Seven-Night Stillness Formation]

➤[Patient Domain: Stable]

➤[Sleep Transition: Incomplete]

➤[Consciousness Descent: 0%]

"Promising start," he muttered, and checked himself over.

Plain dark clothes, the kind he’d worn during his night shifts at Saint Mary’s. No Rakshasa mask. Short black hair again instead of the red braid. His inventory didn’t respond at all, and the First Blood Dagger simply wasn’t there.

Earthling never made it into this dream. Just me.

He followed the sound of a bell down the corridor. It came from the chapel, and he knew exactly what it meant, the dawn bell that used to mark the end of his patrol and the start of morning prayers. The formation had picked it for his waking anchor without asking.

He reached the chapel doors and looked through the narrow glass. Rows of benches faced a plain wooden platform. A rope hung beside it, running up into the bell tower. Morning light sat beyond the colored windows, despite the moonlit corridor at his back, another small crack in the illusion. He didn’t go in. Ringing that bell would end his first trial before it even properly started.

He turned back toward the eleventh door instead, the one with no classroom number and no real memory attached to it. The handle traced itself in silver light the moment he touched it.

➤[Dream Corridor Access]

The door opened, and Saint Mary’s fell away entirely.

A long white passage stretched out beneath a starless sky. Seven dark doors lined one side, each marked by a different symbol, silver lines running through the floor from every door toward a floating lantern at the corridor’s center. The lantern held seven flames. Six burned low and blue. The seventh, unmistakably his own, burned white.

"Subtle," he muttered.

The door behind him carried the symbol of an open eye. He stepped through into the corridor properly.

➤[Warning: The patient has entered the diagnostic layer.]

➤[Return to assigned domain.]

He ignored it and examined the other doors instead, careful not to touch any of them. A tree split by lightning. A fish swimming through a circle. A child’s handprint. Faint sounds leaked out from behind each one, rain, distant music, low voices, the slow breathing of people asleep. None of the handles moved when he tested them.

Private meant private, apparently.

At the far end of the passage stood an eighth door, made of pale jade, a silver moon marked at its center. Unlike the patient domains, three braided lines connected it straight to the floating lantern, the physician’s guide anchor. Mei Lian had never mentioned entering the formation herself, but somebody had to be monitoring the corridor from inside it. He crossed toward the door and caught the edge of her voice through it, soft, reciting each patient’s status in turn.

"Patient One has crossed the first threshold. Patient Two remains restless. Patient Three..."

Her voice cut off.

One of the lantern’s silver support lines went dark. He watched a stain crawl through it, ink flowing backward under glass at first, then spilling out onto the corridor floor as a thread thinner than a single hair. It slid around the lantern’s base, carefully avoiding the pools of blue light beneath each sleeping patient.

The formation raised no warning for it. This thread wasn’t part of the trial. He followed it at a distance, and it moved straight toward Mei Lian’s jade door.

The silver-moon seal flared bright the second the thread touched it, resisting for one full second before black symbols spread across its surface, the exact same pattern he’d seen scratched into the Cloudstep marker.

Sabotage.

The door cracked open an inch.

He put his hand on the floating lantern. "Foreign presence in the corridor."

No physician answered him. The lantern’s flames bent away from his touch, black mist gathering at its base and cutting the internal guide layer off from everyone monitoring outside.

Whoever this is, they know this formation intimately.

The jade door opened wider. He couldn’t cross into Mei Lian’s private guide domain, the formation would reject him outright even if he tried. He couldn’t reach the intruder physically either, not yet, since right now it was nothing more than a thread carrying someone’s awareness in from somewhere outside.

He needed to give that awareness a reason to make itself solid.

He stepped between the thread and the door. "Wrong room."

The thread froze. Black mist gathered above it and assembled itself into a human shape, feet first, then dark robes, pale hands, a face hidden behind a smooth wooden mask. The figure turned to look at Damien instead of the door.

"A patient?" Its voice came from everywhere in the corridor at once.

Damien said nothing.

"You should be unconscious."

The figure raised a hand, and black threads shot straight for Damien’s skull.

He stepped backward through his own open door. The first thread caught his temple a half-second before he crossed the threshold.

Cold pressure flooded his thoughts, hunting for fear, confusion, the soft surrender that came right before sleep. He felt the foreign awareness latch onto his own mind like a hook sinking into flesh.

He didn’t try to tear it free. He held it in place instead, focused everything on keeping it right where it had landed, and pulled back deeper into Saint Mary’s. The formation followed the movement of an active patient’s consciousness automatically, and his own attention dragged the hooked probe straight along with him into his private domain.

The masked figure crossed the threshold involuntarily, surprise breaking his perfect posture for one full second.

Damien slammed the door behind them both. The eleventh classroom vanished entirely.

Only Saint Mary’s remained now. The intruder stood beneath the faulty clock, one black thread still buried in Damien’s temple, the rest of his shape flickering as the private domain tried its best to reject him outright.

"What did you do?"

Damien stepped away from the thread, and it stretched taut between them. This was his domain now, so he blurred his own face without a second thought.

"You reached for an open mind," he said. "You never asked where it led."

The wooden mask tilted slowly. "How are you awake?"

"Some doors never learned to close."

"Who are you?"

"A patient."

The stranger’s fingers curled, and the thread in Damien’s temple pulled tight.

Pain split across his vision. Saint Mary’s walls bent inward around him, every classroom door swinging open at once, revealing nothing but blackness behind each one.

He stumbled hard.

This man has done this before. I have an orphanage and a lifetime of never sleeping.

"You pulled my probe straight into your own consciousness," the masked man said. "Brave."

Accidental, Damien thought, and kept it there.

The man spread both hands, black needles forming between his fingers. "Also foolish."

He threw them. Damien ran.

The needles struck the wall behind him and turned plaster into crawling shadow. He hit the corner, focused hard on a different memory, and turned left on instinct.

The corridor shifted around the turn, the staircase gone, replaced by a different wing of Saint Mary’s entirely, pulled from another night patrol through the same building along a different route. He’d walked these halls thousands of times while everyone else slept, and his memories overlapped at every junction like layered photographs.

The formation kept picking whichever path held his attention most clearly. He couldn’t invent a hallway he’d never actually walked, but he could always choose which real one came next.

He turned twice more, fast.

The masked intruder followed anyway, cutting straight through locked doors instead of respecting the route, tearing pieces of the dream apart with every strike of his hand. Classroom walls collapsed into fragments of black wherever he passed.

"Your control is crude," he called out.

"First night."

Damien broke into the dormitory wing, rows of identical doors stretching ahead of him. He remembered every room number, every loose hinge, every floorboard that complained under weight. The intruder remembered none of it.

He opened Room Twelve, crossed the small sleeping chamber inside, and came out the other side through Room Sixteen as the formation stitched two separate nights together seamlessly.

The intruder passed the first doorway.

Then stopped.

He looked back, the smooth mask tilting with sudden interest. "A conscious dreamer."

Damien stayed hidden past the next wall, breath held.

The black thread still connected them, running clean through doors and plaster alike, pulsing steady every seventh heartbeat. The stranger could use that thread to hunt him down.

He could use it exactly the same way, right back.

Connections work both directions.

He wrapped the thread once around his hand. Cold burned straight into his skin, and somewhere far beyond the orphanage, something answered it, a second pulse traveling back from the intruder toward the sealed moon jade.

That’s how he got in.

That’s how he’ll get out, too.

He let the thread go and listened to footsteps closing in on Room Sixteen.

The trial had failed to put him to sleep. It had handed him something else to survive instead.