Insomniac Player

Something bitter sat at the back of Damien’s throat before he even opened his eyes, sharp enough to make him swallow twice. Medicine. He didn’t remember drinking any.

He kept his eyes shut a moment longer and did a slow check instead, the way he always did after waking up somewhere new. Fingers first. They moved fine, though something dry and unfamiliar scratched against his skin when he curled them, fabric he didn’t recognize by feel. Not his cloak.

Someone dressed me while I was out.

That thought alone was enough to sit up for, ribs and all.

His hand went to his face on reflex. The mask was still there, the familiar curve of it under his fingers, and something in his shoulders loosened that he hadn’t noticed tightening. He checked his hip next. The Tang Dao’s sheath, still buckled where it belonged.

Only then did he open his eyes.

Grey robes. Loose, plain, nothing like the black he’d put on that morning, and he had no memory of anyone measuring him for a change of clothes, which bothered him more than it probably should have. Bandages showed at the collar and cuff, wrapped tight enough around his shoulder that lifting his arm pulled at something underneath.

The room gave him almost nothing to work with. A wooden bed under him. A small table nearby with a black teapot, two cups, a burner sending up a thread of the same smoke he could still taste. No window anywhere he could see. He turned his head, slow, looking for a door.

He didn’t find one.

A man sat across the table, and Damien’s whole body went still in the specific way it did whenever the answer to a threat had already walked into the room before he’d finished assessing it.

He knew the voice before the face fully registered. The Dark Lord. Except this was the first time he’d actually seen him under real light instead of moonlight and shattering mirrors, and there was nothing about the face that matched what five dead assassins should have added up to. Brown hair, tied back plain. A jaw that hadn’t seen a razor skip in weeks. Nothing sharp about any of it. The kind of face that could stand behind you in a market line and you’d forget it by the time you reached the front.

That’s worse, somehow, Damien thought, and didn’t examine why too closely.

The man poured tea without looking up. "You were unconscious for three days."

Damien pushed himself upright, and pain crossed his ribs in one clean line and settled there like it planned on staying a while.

"Even a traveller rejected by death must eventually—"

"Speak like that again," the man said, calm as the tea he was pouring, "and I’ll kill you."

Damien stopped mid-word. The room went quiet enough that he could hear the burner hissing on the table.

The man lifted his own cup and drank. "I know you can speak normally."

Damien just looked at him. Nobody in this whole city had done that yet, taken one look at Earthling’s nonsense and refused to dress it up as wisdom. This man had gone straight past that to a death threat.

It felt, strangely, like the first honest conversation he’d had since crossing into Murim.

"You knew?" His own voice this time. No performance in it.

"Immediately."

"Seems unfair."

"You pause before every supposedly profound sentence."

"I like to consider my words."

"You look around the room and build the sentence out of whatever your eyes land on first."

His gaze drifted to the teapot before he could stop it. The man’s eyes followed, unhurried.

"You were about to say something about an empty cup."

"No."

"You were."

He had been. He looked away from it entirely and let the silence answer for him.

The man set his own cup down. "The investigators were genuinely intelligent people. You handed them vague sentences, and they used those sentences to test their own assumptions and solve the whole case themselves. You let them believe you’d led them there."

"Correcting them would have broken the disguise."

"And your pride."

"Mostly the disguise."

Nothing shifted in the man’s face at that. Damien got the sense there was a sense of humor buried somewhere in him, just deep enough that whoever went digging for it probably wouldn’t survive the excavation.

"Where are we?"

"A Shadowless Palace sanctuary beneath Black Reed Gorge."

"Mo Xian?"

"Dead."

"The investigators?"

"Still dead."

That landed harder than the flat tone should have let it. His mind went straight back to Wei Jian standing alone on the broken road. Bao Yu on the ground with blades through her back. Lin Hua’s half-second of hesitation before she wouldn’t strike Qiao Sen, even with a stolen mind swinging at her.

He’d survived because twelve people spent their lives buying him time. This man had watched every second of it and done nothing.

"You could have saved them."

"Yes." No excuse offered. No sympathy either, false or otherwise.

"And you didn’t."

"Saving the first group would have warned the rest of the impostors and scattered them somewhere I couldn’t follow. I needed the whole cell exposed at once."

"So they were acceptable losses."

"They weren’t mine to accept or refuse. I chose my objective. They chose theirs."

Damien didn’t like the answer. He believed every word of it, which made it worse rather than better. Under the blanket, he flexed his fingers, testing. Strength had come back into them properly now. Both skills sat off cooldown, and Shadow Dash could probably put him somewhere in shadow in less time than it took to finish this sentence.

There was still no door in this room that he could find.

And this man had crossed a whole chamber while five trained killers died around him without breaking stride once. His own improved speed hadn’t been enough to beat even the weakest copy of that. Running wasn’t actually on the table, and some part of him had already known that before he’d bothered testing his hands at all.

The man leaned back slightly. "Now we discuss why you’re still alive."

"I assumed you wanted a fifth disciple."

"That was true before I let you see my face."

Damien looked at him properly this time. Plain features. Still posture. Nothing announcing what he was capable of. "Your face is a secret, then."

"Only my disciples, the cult’s highest authorities, and people I intend to kill are permitted to see it."

"Which one am I right now?"

"That depends on your next answer."

There it was. The man poured a second cup and slid it across.

"Become my fifth disciple, or die."

He said it the way someone gives directions through a crowded market, no weight behind it at all, which somehow made it heavier. Damien looked at the cup and didn’t touch it. Poisoned, maybe. Insulting to refuse, maybe. Some tradition attached to drinking it that nobody had bothered explaining to an outsider.

He left it sitting there. "Do disciples usually get time to think it over?"

"You had three days."

"Unconscious."

"Your body was. Your reputation suggests your mind enjoys staying inconveniently active regardless of the state of your body."

"Not enough to hold up a conversation, apparently."

"Then think quickly."

He did. He could refuse and find out, right now, whether Shadow Dash moved faster than a man who controlled shadows themselves. He already knew the answer, given what was currently lying in pieces back in that laboratory.

Or he could accept, and walk into an organization he knew nothing about, run by a man who’d watched twelve capable people die without so much as flinching.

Both were terrible. Only one left him alive to sort the rest out later.

"Fine." Steadier than he expected. "I’ll become your disciple."

The man nodded once, like Damien had confirmed a scheduled appointment rather than sold off his own future. "Get up."

Damien eased off the bed. His legs held this time, though the movement pulled hard at his knee. The man rose and pressed two fingers against a section of blank wall, and a seam of pale light split open where nothing had been a moment earlier.

Beyond it waited a circular hall cut from black stone. A single flame burned at its center, no smoke rising off it, no heat reaching the doorway despite how bright it burned. It threw the man’s shadow across the floor in one long, unbroken line. Damien followed him in. Cold seeped through the thin soles of his robe with every step across the stone.

"Stand before me."

He did.

"Bow three times."

"Is there an oath that goes with it?"

"The bows are the oath."

That sounds dangerously simple for something meant to be permanent. "What do they mean?"

"The first acknowledges the teacher. The second accepts the lineage. The third binds your fate to everyone who came before you in it."

Damien thought of the four senior disciples he’d never met, their descriptions still sitting uneasy in his stomach. "Are they going to try to kill me?"

"Probably."

At least the man was consistent about it.

He pressed both hands together and bowed once, ribs pulling tight through the motion. Nothing happened.

He bowed a second time, teeth set against the ache building in his knee. The black flame leaned toward him, slow, though no wind moved anywhere in the room.

On the third bow, the man’s shadow reached his feet and stopped there. Cold climbed up through his boots like the floor itself had dropped a few degrees.

A notification chimed clean inside his skull.

➤[Lineage recognition completed.]

➤[New Title Earned: Fifth Disciple of the Dark Lord]

He straightened as more text unfolded underneath.

➤[Title Effects] Stat Bonus: None Skill Bonus: None Special Ability: None

He read it twice. The system had gone to real trouble rewarding him with three separate flavors of nothing at all.

Then one final line appeared.

➤[Authority Recognised: Fourth-Highest Standing, Heavenly Demonic Cult]

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