Insomniac Player

A second mirror joined the first. Pressure built behind Damien’s eyes like two thumbs pressing in. His pulse slowed. His shoulders sagged against the restraints on their own. Everything about his body agreed it was time to sleep.

His thoughts didn’t drift anywhere. He counted the pulses coming off the mirrors instead, because it gave his mind something to hold onto that wasn’t fear.

Six. Pause. Seven. Pause. Six.

"What keeps you awake?" the physician asked, adjusting a dial.

I would pay real money to know that myself.

"The closed eye owes darkness no explanation."

The man studied him a long moment, then wrote faster than before. "Autonomous rejection. The conscious mind doesn’t understand its own defense, because the defense lives beneath consciousness entirely."

No. I genuinely, actually have no idea.

Kang leaned over the ledger to read it. "Can it be copied? Reproduced in someone else?"

"Perhaps."

"Then Shadowless Palace could plant a mind inside any dream network we wanted."

Something flickered across the physician’s face at the sect’s name, gone as fast as it came. He didn’t correct him.

Damien caught it anyway. Kang wore that knife tattoo like a badge. His men matched him in silk. Every single one of them acted like the real palace stood behind this operation. The physician, meanwhile, had reacted to the name like a man hearing someone misuse a tool he’d built for something else entirely.

The investigators already smelled that lie in the fabric. I only got here because Kang can’t stop talking.

A third mirror lit. This one didn’t build Saint Mary’s at all. White filled everything, no floor, no horizon, no texture to hold on to, every familiar detail stripped out on purpose so his mind would have nowhere left to stand. He held onto the feeling of the chair under him instead, the leather biting his wrists, and the white cracked apart around that single point of contact.

He came back into the chamber with blood already warm under one nostril.

The physician touched the crack running through his mirror. "Impossible." A beat, and then something close to delight crossed his face. "You feel the boundary being drawn. Interesting." He turned. "Increase the suppression field."

Kang hesitated. "You promised the outsider would stay functional."

"He survived an unauthorized intrusion inside a Seven-Night Formation. Whatever his limits are, they aren’t ordinary ones."

"And once you understand them?" Kang asked.

The physician rested a hand on the back of the chair, almost gently. "A mind that stays awake inside a dream could walk any linked formation without ever surrendering itself. Physician corridors. Military dream-channels. Sect trials. Every sleeping mind in this world becomes a road, and we’re the only ones who get to walk it."

Kang’s suspicion melted into something closer to hunger.

That’s the whole reason he’s funding this. Armies could hold a wall, a gate, a teleport platform. Almost nobody built a wall for a dream.

He’s trying to build the exact thing that broke my life in the first place.

"A cage copied from a bird," Damien said, "inherits neither the sky nor the song."

The physician’s eyes narrowed. "You think the resistance can’t be separated from the life that shaped it."

I think you’re an idiot for wanting this specific curse. Still, the words landed closer to true than he liked.

Something shifted in the far corner. Damien’s eyes went there on their own, and for a second he thought he’d imagined it, except the shadow settled again exactly where it had been, like it had only leaned forward to listen and then leaned back.

That doesn’t mean I’m volunteering them for the next mirror.

Kang’s hesitation wasn’t kindness, just arithmetic. A dead subject stopped producing results. Eight black stones went down around the chair in a ring, one man kneeling to set each in place.

Damien flexed his fingers under the restraint. A twitch answered him this time, faint, real. Both shadow skills still sat locked on cooldown. His legs might as well have belonged to someone else.

So he listened instead.

Two men left to strip identity tablets off the dead investigators still lying up top. Three more held the passage above. Four stood right here in the chamber with him. Somewhere close by, at least six survivors from the fight nursed their own wounds.

He lost people tonight. Not enough of them.

A fourth mirror lit, and pain rolled through him whole, no warning first.

His awareness split between the chair and the white space at once, stretched thin across both, and the physician’s voice came from every direction simultaneously. "You manipulate shadows. You move between them. Neither explains this. What are you? What’s your Dao?"

He didn’t know Damien’s class. Didn’t know his real name. He had two abilities, one strange refusal to sleep, and he wanted the missing thread connecting all three.

The black stones pulsed once, in rhythm with the mirror.

Something moved in the corner again, and this time it didn’t stop. A shape stood where nothing had stood a breath earlier. Grey robes. Empty hands. No mask, just darkness sitting over where a face should have been.

Damien checked the assassins around him. Nobody reacted. Nobody had seen the doors open.

The shape’s attention crossed the room slowly. The physician. Then Kang. Then, last, Damien himself, and it lingered there a moment on the shadows pooled around the base of his chair.

Damien said nothing. He’d learned that much tonight, at least, that silence was the one thing he could still contribute.

The fifth mirror lit. The shape raised one finger, and all eight black stones split cleanly down the middle at once, a sound like glass cracking under ice.

The suppression field died instantly. Kang spun with his sword already half drawn. "Who’s there?"

A quiet voice answered from the dark. "You carry a knife that never belonged to you."

Kang’s face lost its color. The shape stepped into the mirror light properly this time, a man whose age Damien couldn’t place, plain grey robes, no weapon anywhere on him that Damien could see, eyes sitting darker than the room around them.

Every false assassin in the chamber flinched back from him at once, the way you’d flinch from a name you’d stolen finally showing up to collect it.

His eyes settled on the silver knife tattooed under Kang’s eye.

"Shadowless Palace has come to collect its name."

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