Insomniac Player

"Do people call you the Dark Lord because your actual name wasn’t intimidating enough?"

"People call me the Dark Lord because everyone who tried a less respectful one has stopped existing."

He accepted the request anyway.

➤[Xuan Wuye has been added to your Friend List.]

By a considerable margin, it was the strangest name on that whole list. John sent messages that were mostly capital letters strung together. Rahul sent photos of clothes Damien had no intention of ever wearing. Imran sent maps and warnings written like formal military orders.

Xuan Wuye looked like the kind of man who’d send a single period and expect Damien to know which country needed to end as a result.

"Use the connection once you’ve mastered the first walk," Xuan Wuye said. "Don’t waste it on questions the manual has already answered."

"How will I know it’s already answered them?"

"By reading it."

Damien closed the book. Xuan Wuye set a small iron token beside it, a featureless black circle stamped on one face, nothing at all on the other.

"This won’t identify you as my disciple to anyone who sees it. Break it only if the matter concerns the Shadow Palace’s survival directly. Not because someone stronger than you wants you dead. That will happen constantly if you stay careless."

He stored both the manual and the token away in his inventory. "What happened with the Broken Road investigation?"

Something in the room settled heavier the second the question left him, no visible pressure behind it, just the specific weight of the joke draining out of his own voice without him deciding to let it go.

Xuan Wuye answered just as plainly as everything else he’d said so far. "I sent the bodies of the twelve investigators to Dreaming Moon Pavilion, along with their identity tablets, their weapons, and everything they’d recovered. I sent the impostors’ bodies and marks with them as well."

Damien’s mind went to Wei Jian’s iron measuring rod, to Bao Yu’s impatient grin right before the charge, to Qiao Sen screaming. At the same time, Lin Hua tried desperately to reach whatever was left of him behind Mo Xian’s control.

"Will the pavilion know what actually happened?"

"Enough of it. My report states that Mo Xian built the false cell, captured you as a research subject, and died to it. It states the investigation unit exposed the cell before their deaths."

"You gave them the credit."

"It belonged to them."

Damien looked at him a long moment. This man had let all twelve of them die because saving them would have cost him his objective, and Damien hadn’t forgiven that. He doubted he ever fully would.

But he hadn’t stolen their work afterward either, once they were already gone. That fact mattered, even if it changed nothing about what had happened in that gorge.

➤[Quest Completed: Broken Road Investigation, Closed.]

➤[Final evidence delivered to Dreaming Moon Pavilion.]

➤[Your assigned duty to the investigation unit has ended.]

➤[Mo Xian has been eliminated.]

➤[ Level Up.]

➤[ Level Up.]

He let the words sit there a moment before dismissing them.

Xuan Wuye stood. "Your task with the pavilion is finished. Whether you return to them later is entirely your decision to make."

He reached inside his robe again and drew out a small, dark wooden box, no bigger than his own palm, golden heat visibly leaking from its seams.

He set it down in front of Damien. "A small gift, for my fifth disciple."

Damien eyed it. "Does this one also carry a chance of killing me?"

"Only if your body proves more disappointing than your speech has been."

Xuan Wuye lifted the lid. A single crimson pill sat inside, and the smell that rose off it alone was enough to make Damien’s exhausted muscles tense up on instinct.

"Swallow it."

Damien stared at the crimson pill. Perfectly round, warm enough that a thread of steam curled off its surface, bright enough to throw a faint red glow across the inside of the wooden box.

Three thin gold lines circled it like rings around a tiny planet. It looked expensive. It also looked exactly like the kind of object that killed off an unremarkable protagonist so his more talented brother could inherit the rest of the story.

"What is it?"

"A Nine-Forged Body-Strengthening Pill."

He recognized the name instantly, straight out of every Murim story he’d half absorbed before ever setting foot here, and something in his chest tightened at hearing it said out loud like it was just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon gift. He made himself ask the actual question instead.

"What does it do?"

"Strengthens the body."

"...."

"The name already told me that part."

"Then the question was unnecessary."

He picked it up anyway. Heat pressed into his fingertips without burning them, sitting on his skin like something alive.

"Side effects?"

"Pain."

"How much?"

"Enough that the answer becomes irrelevant."

"You should really consider writing medical labels for a living."

"Swallow it."

The pill dissolved before it even reached his stomach. For half a second, nothing happened. Then a furnace opened up behind his ribs. He folded forward as heat exploded through his chest and gut at once. His muscles locked solid. Every old wound in his body started throbbing simultaneously, including a few he’d genuinely forgotten he had. The warmth spread into his shoulders, his hips, his legs, then shoved its way down toward his hands and feet like it had somewhere urgent to be.

Xuan Wuye moved around behind him. "Sit. Cross your legs."

Damien managed both while quietly wondering whether refusing the disciple offer might have hurt less overall.

"Circulate your qi."

"I don’t have qi."

A palm struck the center of his back, and something inside him surged in response, familiar in a way that startled him more than the impact did. The energy had been living under his skills since the tutorial, pooled in that same quiet reserve every time the system referenced mana.

"You have qi. Your world just calls it mana."

He forced a breath out through clenched teeth.

"Those are the same thing?"

"Names different worlds gave the same energy that supernatural law runs through. Murim’s cultivation calls it qi. Your system translates it based on your origin."

"So cultivation is just mana training with better branding."

Two fingers pressed beside his spine, and his mana jerked hard into a pathway he’d never once sensed before in his life.

"Say that in front of an ancient cultivator sometime and watch an old man discover violence."

Despite everything, he almost laughed.

"What do you call classes here?"

"Dao."

"That can’t be the same thing."

"Not precisely. A class is the system’s own defined shape for a path."

".... while Murim uses the older word for both, because people here enjoy arguments that outlast several generations."

That, at least, sounds believable.

The palm moved higher up his back. "Stop talking. Find the energy under your heart."

He closed his eyes. The pill’s heat made concentrating nearly impossible; nothing about it flowed like water was supposed to. It attacked every weak point in his body one at a time instead, pounding against muscle, scraping across bone, forcing itself through channels too narrow to hold it. Underneath all that violence, he finally found his mana. Normally it sat quiet, waiting for a command. Right now, Xuan Wuye’s influence had already set it in motion, circling beneath his heart, sinking through his stomach, splitting into thin, branching streams he’d never had to think about before.

"Guide it downward."

"How?"

"Intent."

"That isn’t an instruction."

"Then be quiet and focus."

He pushed. The mana rose instead of falling. The pill’s heat chased it up his throat, and he coughed, a thread of grey smoke escaping from behind the mask. Xuan Wuye hit his back a second time, harder, and the energy plunged so sharply his whole body lifted off the stone before it dropped back down.

"Was that necessary?"

"No. It was faster."

He does have a sense of humor. It’s just a violent one.

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