Insomniac Player

The first thing Damien saw when he opened his eyes was John’s mustache, taking up most of his vision, which meant John had leaned his whole face far too close again.

"Are you alive?"

Damien took stock of the pain running through his back, his ribs, his thigh, his shoulder. "Unfortunately."

John let out a breath big enough to stir the privacy curtain around the bed. "Good. The doctor said you were stable, but doctors say stable when they mean ’unlikely to die while I’m personally watching.’"

"I was awake the whole time, you know. Heard all of it." He let a beat pass. "And yeah. That’s a fairly limited kind of stability."

"An incomplete kind."

Damien turned his head. White walls, military healing arrays, a row of sealed medicine cabinets, all of it confirmed Sir Martin had parked him in the medical wing of the Viremont Secretariat. A thin golden field covered his torso, light pulsing into the wound under his shoulder every few seconds, pulling damaged tissue back together one stitch at a time.

It wasn’t comfortable at all. Whoever invented healing magic clearly believed pain was proof the process was working.

A medical officer came in, checked the light hovering above his bed, and told him he’d be staying under observation for another full day.

He left three hours later. Not an escape, exactly, escape implied stealth, and he hadn’t managed anything close to that. John signed the release papers himself after Damien threatened to test his new Doppelganger skill inside the ward. The officer looked at John, looked at the reinforced walls around them, and decided home recovery counted as medically acceptable after all.

The penthouse took them in quietly. Evening light stretched across the lounge, catching furniture expensive enough to make Damien nervous about bleeding on any of it.

John set him down on the largest sofa. "You stay there."

"I know how furniture works."

"You don’t. Beds are for sleeping. You’ve been rejecting that particular function for years."

John produced food, water, three blankets, and a small bell from somewhere, arranging all of it within reach before pointing one enormous finger at him.

"If you move, ring the bell first."

"Why?"

"So I can stop you before you finish moving."

He marched off toward the guest wing. The door closed behind him.

Damien waited thirty seconds.

Then he opened his inventory and pulled out the black manual.

➤[Walk of Night]

The cover swallowed the room’s pale evening light. Xuan Wuye’s instructions still sat there, irritatingly clear. Master the first section. Then find him.

The first section held no attacks at all, just posture, breath, weight, and the circulation of qi through the legs before any movement started. Its opening line read exactly like something Earthling would have invented while trying to avoid answering a real question.

The night reaches every road without taking a step.

He’d assumed, until now, that lines like this existed purely to pad a manual out. Then he read the explanation underneath it. The practitioner had to strip intention out of visible movement entirely. Shoulders couldn’t announce direction. Hips couldn’t prepare before the feet did. Mana, qi, according to Murim, had to gather along the pathways from the lower abdomen down to the soles without ever actually releasing.

He closed the manual, pushed the blankets aside, and stood.

His thigh disagreed instantly. Pain climbed up through the bandaged muscle. The healing field had sealed the worst of it, but his whole body still read like a long list of complaints stitched together with medicine.

He planted both feet on the carpet and copied the first stance. Shoulders relaxed. Weight lowered. Mana circulating, no skill triggered.

It moved into his legs, struck something like a closed door, and drained back upward.

He tried again. The door stayed exactly as closed.

By the fifth attempt his wounded knee had started trembling. By the eighth, sweat had beaded along his neck. On the tenth, a voice spoke behind him.

"The sofa has drifted strangely far from you."

He looked over his shoulder. John stood in the doorway holding a bowl big enough to feed a family, his expression carrying something close to personal betrayal, architectural and otherwise.

"Checking my balance."

"You can check your balance lying down."

"That would give misleading results."

John set the bowl on the table and lifted him with both arms in one motion.

"Put me down."

"You’ve lost floor privileges."

"I’m twenty-one."

"Then you’ve had twenty-one years to practice better decisions and clearly skipped that part."

He landed back on the sofa against his will, John tucking the blankets around him with enough force to restrain something considerably more dangerous than a bruised patient.

"No training," John said.

"I need to get stronger."

For once, John didn’t answer right away. He sat down in the chair across from the sofa, and it creaked hard under his weight.

"Because of what the copy said?"

Damien’s eyes narrowed. "Martin told you?"

"You talked while the healers worked. Most of it made no sense. Some of it was about being weak. About hiding behind people."

He looked toward the windows instead of at John.

The guardian used truth as the actual weapon. John had fought for him through the whole tutorial. The girls had saved him at Tycho. The Broken Road investigators had cracked Mo Xian’s entire trail while Damien walked off with credit he hadn’t earned. Xuan Wuye had pulled him off a table before he became nothing but research notes in someone else’s ledger.

None of that made the guardian wrong about everything it said. It just meant Damien had no interest in staying exactly who he’d been up to this point.

"It wasn’t entirely wrong," he said.

"Of course it wasn’t. A good insult always carries enough truth to actually cut." John leaned forward. "But accepting help doesn’t make you useless. I would’ve died several times over in that tutorial without your plans."

"You’d have died once. The other times you were just doing something stupid."

"That’s comforting."

"I’m trying."

John’s mustache lifted slightly at that. "Get stronger, then. I won’t stop you. Get stronger after your organs agree to stay inside your body."

Damien let his head fall back against the sofa. "Fine."

John eyed him, suspicious. "That was too easy."

"I’m injured. Arguing costs energy I don’t have."

John stayed in the lounge until he looked properly settled, and eventually his own head tipped back against the chair. Within minutes his snoring rolled across the penthouse like distant construction work starting up for the day.

Damien opened one eye.

Shadow Dash had finished cooling down while he was in treatment. Shadow Imitation sat ready too. Practice, he decided, didn’t necessarily require standing if he picked the right method for it.

He focused on the shadow under the far table.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]

The lounge blurred into a single black line. He came out beside the table, failed to catch his own weight, and hit the carpet shoulder-first.

John’s eyes opened.

They stared at each other across the room.

"I fell," Damien said.

"Sideways through darkness."

"It was a complicated fall."

John started to rise.

Damien triggered his newest skill instead.

➤[Doppelganger (Lv. 1) activated.]

➤[Duration: 00:01:00.]

A second Damien appeared between them, same black hair, same tired eyes, same hospital clothes, same total absence of enthusiasm. It looked at John, then copied Damien exactly by slowly pointing toward the guest wing.

John stopped mid-step. "Which one of you is actually injured?"

Both Damiens raised a hand at once.

The behavioral accuracy is impressively unhelpful right now.

John grabbed one under each arm and hauled both of them back to the sofa. Fifty-eight seconds later, the copy dissolved into nothing.

"You’ve now lost skill privileges too," John announced.

Damien checked the notification.

➤[Doppelganger ended.]

➤[Cooldown: 24:00:00.]

"That might be difficult to actually enforce."

"I’m Legendary."

"That’s not a legal qualification."

"Neither is an honorary major, but Martin gave you paperwork for it anyway."

He settled back onto the sofa properly this time, keeping the manual open on his lap instead of trying to stand again. John sat beside him and, once more, refused to actually sleep.

The night went by without rest for either of them. Every time a cooldown finished, Damien found some reason to use the skill attached to it. Sometimes he merged into the sofa’s shadow just to feel the mechanism settle over him. Sometimes he dashed across the darkened lounge and paid for it in pain a second later. John complained through it all, carried him back each time, and kept putting food into his hands regardless.

By dawn, his mana had drained down to almost nothing.

Walk of Night still hadn’t recognized a single successful step from him.

But when he closed his eyes, he could feel the exact path his mana had traced toward his feet, even without the door ever fully opening.

Not progress yet. Just a direction. For right now, that felt like enough to justify trying again.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!