Insomniac Player

Wei Jian sketched the connections onto a paper map. "The second ambush on the northern road contradicts the first. If the original team expected to grab the case right here, why stage a whole second force further up ahead?"

Damien remembered the lamp oil and the deliberately obvious tracks left along that road, and figured they’d wanted to funnel any survivors straight into a second trap. He could have just said that. It would’ve been a completely normal sentence.

Apparently normal sentences weren’t allowed anymore. "The fisherman who owns two nets has already decided which current the fish will trust."

Wei Jian stared at the map a long moment. Lin Hua slid the marker for the second team well clear of the northern road.

"The northern force was meant to be found," she said.

Bao Yu got there next. "They expected competent survivors to avoid the obvious trap and cut through the eastern marsh instead."

Qiao Sen unfolded a regional survey. "The eastern trail crosses three abandoned courier stations. One used to belong to the pavilion, before the route changed."

Wei Jian circled it. "Moon-Catching Station."

I know none of this, Damien thought, because nobody bothered mentioning those stations existed until right now.

The captain bowed to him anyway. "You understood that both ambushes belonged to the same channel from the start."

Damien examined the map with all the gravity it deserved. He’d been describing fish.

They camped by the ravine instead of pushing toward the abandoned station at dusk. The investigators built three overlapping alarm fields, hid the wagons, and posted guards in pairs across the perimeter.

Damien sat under a cedar while everyone else worked through evidence reports.

Lin Hua brought him tea. "Captain Wei says your method keeps assumptions from hardening too early."

He took the cup. "A thought praised too soon begins demanding servants."

She nodded like that settled something important. "Exactly."

He drank behind the lower edge of the mask, and started genuinely dreading the day somebody finally asked him to explain his method out loud.

Moon-Catching Station had once served couriers traveling between Ten Thousand Paths City and the northern medicine sects. A landslide rerouted the main road eighteen years back, leaving the station stranded inside an eastern marsh where pale reeds grew taller than horses.

The Broken Road unit approached after sunrise.

Wei Jian sent Qiao Sen and Han Rui ahead first. Lin Hua tested every stone marker along the way for dormant formations. Bao Yu split the rest into three groups, each one kept visible to another.

Nobody asked Damien to lead. They just kept him near the center, the way you’d keep a valuable instrument close and unused.

He hadn’t eaten breakfast. Camp porridge had come with some grey medicinal root mixed through it that smelled like wet cloth, and he’d stared at his bowl a beat too long, which led Pei Shan to quietly conclude the mysterious outsider was fasting ahead of a confrontation with corrupted dreams. Correcting that would’ve meant admitting he simply hated the texture, so instead he was now, apparently, observing a sacred fast entirely against his will.

The station finally emerged through the reeds near midday. Three wooden buildings stood on stone pillars above black water, roofs collapsed, the old courier emblem faded to a pale circle above the gate.

No footprints anywhere in the mud. No insects moving across the water either.

Damien noticed both of those facts. The investigators noticed six more. Qiao Sen found cut reed stems under the surface where someone had cleared a submerged path. Han Rui found small punctures in the gate, the leftovers of a wire trap that had been removed recently and carefully. Lin Hua found fresh oil inside a lantern that had otherwise sat untouched for eighteen years. Wu Kai found a patch of wall where the mildew had been scrubbed clean in the exact shape of a rectangular case.

Wei Jian waited to enter until Chen Luo had sent a paper bird through every room ahead of them. Damien followed him in and quietly revised his whole opinion of what "guard" meant.

Back home, he thought, the word meant someone who stood next to a door and died early enough to prove a villain’s strength. Here it apparently meant a Level 101 forensic commander backed by eleven specialists capable of interrogating moss for a confession.

The main room held a broken desk, rotted shelves, and an empty cooking pit.

Wei Jian turned to him. "What does this room refuse to show us?"

Damien looked around. Nothing suggested a single answer.

His stomach growled beneath the cloak. "The empty table speaks loudest to the man who expected food."

Every eye went straight to the desk. He closed his own eyes behind the mask. Of course they did.

Lin Hua checked the floor underneath it. "The dust runs shallower here."

Bao Yu and Duan Ke moved the desk aside, revealing four concealed metal sockets set into the boards.

"A portable examination frame." Pei Shan crouched over it. "Recently removed." He scraped residue from one socket with a knife, and the sample shimmered black under a testing charm. "Moon-jade dust."

Wei Jian looked at Damien with open respect. The empty table had indeed spoken.

My stomach remains the original speaker on that one, Damien thought.

Behind the wall they found medical restraints, broken dream needles, and six blank identity tablets, each one carefully wiped without damaging the underlying system-recognition layer at all.

"Mo Xian," Lin Hua said.

Wei Jian didn’t accept it outright. "Evidence."

She pointed to the restraints. "Dreaming Moon manufactured these before the exile."

"Old equipment gets stolen all the time." Pei Shan lifted a needle. "The hollow point still holds memory-binding lacquer."

"Other physicians know that formula too." Qiao Sen opened the cooking pit and pulled out a metal disk wrapped in oilcloth, an inverted crescent etched clean into its surface.

Wei Jian frowned at it anyway. "A personal mark left conveniently under loose ash feels a little too easy."

Damien agreed with that instinct completely. These people aren’t just intelligent, he thought. They actively resist finding exactly what they expected to find.

Qiao Sen smiled slightly. "Then we keep going."

They did. Yin Tao found the station’s old supply ledger sealed inside a roof beam. Fang Ji restored three burned pages using a vapor technique, and the final surviving entry recorded a delivery of calming herbs six weeks back, authorized under the name of a physician everyone in the pavilion had long since assumed dead.

Lin Hua compared the authorization pattern against the residue from the false freight token.

"Same copied foundation," she said. "Different surface identity layered over it."

Wei Jian finally wrote Mo Xian’s name into the official report. Nobody credited Damien for any of it, and for almost seven full seconds, that felt like a genuine relief.

Then Bao Yu found a strip of black silk caught under the outside stairs, a silver emblem stitched into it, a knife casting no shadow.

The whole unit went quiet at once.

"Shadowless Palace," Han Rui said.

Damien waited for someone to explain. Nobody did, since everyone had already assumed Earthling knew exactly what that meant.

He read their faces instead. Even Wei Jian handled the silk more carefully than he’d handled the dream needles a minute ago.

He turned the cloth without touching it directly. "A shadow that carries a famous name has already stepped too close to the lamp."

Wei Jian’s eyebrows rose. What Damien had actually implied was that a well-known assassin sect, famous enough that even he’d heard of it before today, probably employed more competent killers than whoever left that cloth behind.

Lin Hua studied the emblem. "He’s warning us not to trust the mark at face value."

Good. Someone should. She examined the stitching through a lens next. "The outer thread’s genuine grave-spider silk, but the inner backing is common northern weave."

Han Rui turned the knife over. "The blade points down. Records disagree on whether the Palace mark’s supposed to point down or toward the wearer’s heart."

"They disagree because confirmed witnesses are rare," Wei Jian said.

"Borrowed robes wrinkle where their owner never learned to bend."

Getting hungry enough that robes feel safer than food to think about, Damien admitted to himself.

Bao Yu tapped the cloth. "Proxies, then. Mo Xian may be using hired killers permitted to wear the palace name without knowing its actual customs."

Wei Jian considered it. "Or someone wants us to believe exactly that."

Impostors. The correct conclusion sat right there in front of all of them, and the investigators circled it from every angle and stopped one step short of grabbing it.

Damien couldn’t fault them for that. Twenty minutes ago he hadn’t even known Shadowless Palace existed.

The unit spent the rest of the afternoon tracing the missing examination frame. Drag marks vanished right at the submerged reed path, but Qiao Sen recovered oil from a stone half a li east, oil that carried powdered night-bloom pollen, a plant that only grew on higher ground.

Maps narrowed it to three possible destinations. Lin Hua ruled one out, its bridge couldn’t have carried the frame’s weight. Bao Yu ruled out a second, a patrol had blocked that road the night in question. That left Black Reed Gorge, where an abandoned shrine looked down over the Broken Road.

Once again, Damien contributed nothing measurable. Once again, Wei Jian thanked him for keeping the team from settling on conclusions too fast.

"The closed mouth leaves room for truth to sit."

I’ve finally found the most accurate description of my role in this whole unit.

They reached the gorge before sunset and held there instead of pushing in. Wei Jian set a concealed camp along the western ridge, the old shrine visible between rows of black pine from that angle. No smoke rose off it. No sentries showed themselves.

Lin Hua detected three dormant formations and one deliberately empty alarm line, arranged specifically to make intruders believe they’d already found every defense the place had.

"We wait for daylight," Bao Yu suggested.

Han Rui shook his head. "If Shadowless Palace is backing Mo Xian, the night belongs to them."

Damien glanced at the sinking sun. ’Night belongs to a lot of things. Some of it belongs to me too.’