Insomniac Player

The Broken Road unit waited down in the lower courtyard.

Twelve men and women stood in dark grey traveling robes reinforced at the shoulders and forearms, no ceremonial weapons anywhere among them, just swords, spears, bows, and hooked chains clearly kept for use rather than display. They stood around three supply wagons while a broad-shouldered man checked through sealed evidence boxes one at a time.

He looked about forty, though Murim’s standards on that were apparently generous. A pale scar split his left eyebrow, and an iron measuring rod hung from his belt beside a sword.

"Captain Wei Jian," Mei Lian said. "Senior field investigator."

Wei Jian faced Damien and let his profile flicker open for exactly one breath.

➤[Name: Wei Jian]

➤[Class: Soul Cutting Sword (Rare)]

➤[Level: 101]

Then the number vanished again just as fast.

On Earth-69, a Level 101 player would be commanding a capital defense force, or running a major guild, or sitting on some national strategic asset list somewhere important. Damien filed that thought away. Here, apparently, he inspects damaged roads.

He inclined the mask. "A mountain wearing a gatekeeper’s coat remains a mountain."

Wei Jian returned the bow with equal seriousness. "And a gatekeeper who forgets he guards others becomes only a mountain sitting in the road."

Damien paused. That answer had somehow carried more actual insight than the riddle he’d just handed over.

For the first time since inventing Earthling, he suspected he’d finally run into someone who could out-nonsense him at his own game.

Captain Wei Jian introduced the rest of the unit while the wagons loaded up. Lin Hua handled formations and transit seals. Qiao Sen tracked internal energy residue. Bao Yu carried a spear taller than Damien and took over battlefield command whenever Wei Jian buried himself in an evidence site. Han Rui was an archer whose bow stayed unstrung inside a narrow bamboo case, patient as a held breath.

The rest, Duan Ke, Pei Shan, Yin Tao, Su Lei, Chen Luo, Wu Kai, Fang Ji, folded in without much fanfare.

Damien memorized names, weapons, walking patterns, preferred hands. Not one of them acted impressed by the mask. That alone set them apart from most of Murim so far.

Then Lin Hua handed him a black evidence tablet. "We were told you identified the Cloudstep sabotage before the formation failed."

He accepted it. "The falling leaf rarely understands the branch’s mistake."

Lin Hua nodded thoughtfully. "So you worked from consequences rather than technical knowledge."

I worked from a suspicious scratch and a reasonable assumption that public transportation wanted me dead, he thought, and let her keep the nicer version.

"A useful distinction." She said it like she meant it, and apparently now she did.

The unit left the pavilion through its lower mountain gate on foot, no Cloudstep transit involved. Every formation nearby had been flagged compromised until the network audit finished, no exceptions. Three wagons rolled south under layered defensive screens, grey horses pulling the first two, the third moving on its own, tracking Lin Hua’s formation flags along the road.

Damien rode beside Captain Wei Jian and disliked every second of it. Horses combined the height advantage of a wall with the decision-making habits of a frightened piece of furniture, and his own mount had already clocked the mask and spent the first half hour twisting its head around to confirm the demon was still riding it.

Wei Jian noticed. "The animal senses something unusual."

"Wisdom sometimes begins by distrusting the face presented to it."

The captain considered that. "You respect its instincts."

I respect its ability to throw me into a ravine, Damien thought. "Fear sees cliffs before pride does."

Wei Jian patted the horse’s neck, and it settled almost immediately.

His own nonsense and a horse were both outperforming me today, he thought, not thrilled about the math on that.

The first Broken Road site sat beyond the cedar ravine where the Cloudstep formation had collapsed. Pavilion guards had preserved the platform under a transparent barrier, the engraved stone still cracked, dried blood marking where the injured merchants had landed.

Lin Hua removed the barrier and split the investigators into teams without asking Damien for a single instruction.

That’s reassuring, he thought.

Qiao Sen collected soil samples from four separate distances. Fang Ji measured the scratch running through the formation symbol. Chen Luo reconstructed every passenger’s position off the impact marks alone. Wei Jian questioned the attendant a second time, rearranging the order of his questions on the fly. Damien stood near the damaged ring and did his best impression of a man permitting the work to happen.

In reality, he followed maybe a third of it.

Lin Hua crouched beside the altered symbol. "The scratch interrupted circulation after repeated jumps." She glanced up. "Was the delayed activation what drew your attention?"

He needed an answer. The stone was circular. The crack pointed inward. A dark stain had gathered inside the groove.

"A wounded circle bleeds toward the hand that cut it."

I have no idea what that meant. He’d just said whatever surfaced first.

Lin Hua looked down at the groove, pulled a silver needle from her sleeve, and set it inside the crack. The needle spun against the natural direction of the flow.

"It was carved from inside the maintenance channel," she said.

Wei Jian stepped closer. "Meaning?"

"Whoever did this never touched the visible mark. They fed a calibration needle through the payment housing and reversed the current from inside. Only a licensed formation worker would know that channel exists."

Everyone’s eyes landed on Damien. He looked at the crack again. Apparently, that was what he’d meant.

Wei Jian inclined his head. "You saw the direction of the injury."

Damien let the silence stand in for agreement. Inside his own head, he was busy revising his entire assessment of this unit. Lin Hua had taken a decorative sentence, tested it against a physical mechanism, and traced it back to restricted knowledge in under twenty seconds. Imran would’ve hired her on the spot.

They moved on to the housing itself. Fang Ji found pale dust wedged under the metal lip. Qiao Sen smelled it and shook his head. "Ground shell, maybe. Too little to be certain."

Wei Jian passed the evidence tray to Damien.

He looked at the dust. It looked like dust. Nothing behind the mask improved on that assessment.

"An empty bowl remembers what hunger cannot name."

Qiao Sen’s eyes narrowed at that, and he heated the tray over a blue flame. The dust melted into a thin transparent film. Lin Hua added one drop of spirit-infused water, and a silver crescent bloomed across the surface.

"Courier-token lacquer," she said. "Dreaming Moon issue."

Wei Jian turned to the formation attendant. "Someone used a pavilion freight token after the passenger group had already departed."

The man went pale. "That’s impossible. The shipment token stayed with Physician Mei the entire time."

"The real one did." Lin Hua’s voice stayed flat. "This residue came off a duplicate."

Every head swung toward Damien again, and he was starting to genuinely worry that this group could solve murder cases using weather patterns and a badly improvised proverb.

They combed the platform for another hour, every real deduction coming from the investigators, Damien contributing nothing he could actually measure, and his reputation somehow climbing steadily anyway.

At the ravine, Bao Yu rebuilt the ambush from scratch, placing carved markers where each attacker had stood and using arrow angles to work out their heights. Han Rui studied the recovered shafts and identified three separate archers who’d deliberately matched their draw strength to look like one shooter.

"Why hide their number after the attack already started?" Bao Yu asked, and made the mistake of looking at Damien while she said it.

He thought it was an excellent question. He studied the trees instead of answering right away. Birds called from the western wall, but nothing called from the slope where the first arrows had come from.

"The bird abandons a branch for reasons the branch will never understand."

Qiao Sen climbed the slope immediately. I meant the birds might actually know something, Damien thought, watching him go. The tracker came back holding a strip of bark faintly stained purple.

"Dream-suppressing powder," he said. "Nearly scentless to us, but birds won’t go near it. They coated their sleeves in it so frightened passengers would go mentally sluggish on contact."

Physician Su had mentioned a compound like that during his own exam, though he’d never connected the silence in the trees to any specific cause. Qiao Sen had, in about ten seconds.

"They hid their number," Bao Yu said slowly, working it through out loud, "because confusion was part of the plan. They wanted survivors remembering fewer attackers than actually stood there, contradicting each other later."

Wei Jian added another marker to the map. "Not a robbery, then. A retrieval team, built specifically to handle witnesses."

Damien watched the whole thing assemble itself in real time. Back home, players at their level usually solved problems by hitting them until loot fell out. This unit tested residue, challenged their own assumptions, and revised theories without treating disagreement like an insult. Stronger than most commanders he’d met on Earth. Smarter than most of them too.

For the first time in a long while, he was the least useful person in the room, and the mask hid every single moment of it perfectly.

By late afternoon they’d nailed down four facts. The Cloudstep marker had been sabotaged using licensed technical knowledge. A forged Dreaming Moon freight token had opened the maintenance channel. The attackers had wanted Mei Lian’s case intact, not destroyed. And every part of their preparation existed to produce confused witnesses instead of bodies.