Silence came first.
Not the kind of silence that followed a battle, when dust settled and survivors coughed blood into their sleeves. This was an emptiness that had no patience for sound. No echo. No lingering vibration. The moment the explosion finished tearing the heavens apart, the world behind it stopped behaving like a world.
Li Xiao Bai did not understand it immediately.
His senses still carried the afterimage of the revival chamber, the colossal qi fruit, the human-shaped silhouette forming within it, and the cold, precise control in Star Constellation's movements. He still remembered the way Heavenly Court's immortal formations had tightened like a net around the captured Qi Sea clone, the way seals layered on seals until the clone's body was no longer a body, but an ingredient.
He remembered the last heartbeat of anticipation.
Then something inside that "ingredient" changed.
Not a release. Not resistance.
A twist.
The qi fruit did not fail like a technique failing. It failed like a rule being contradicted.
The moment that contradiction bloomed, the chamber became a mouth.
Light, dao marks, formations, and immortal wills were all swallowed by a single, violent exhale. The shockwave punched through the surrounding layers of reality, tore open a crack in the world boundary, and flung everything it touched into a place that was not meant to hold meaning.
Li Xiao Bai only caught a glimpse of Fang Yuan.
Just a fragment of a figure, a calm silhouette amid a catastrophe that should have erased calm from existence. There was no time to read an expression, no time to interpret intention. The glimpse was enough. A needle of certainty slid into Li Xiao Bai's mind.
This was not an accident.
Then the fragment of Heavenly Court he was standing on lurched, and the world dropped out from under him.
The sensation was not falling.
Falling implied a direction. Falling implied space that agreed to be measured.
This was being removed.
The fragment of white jade floor, fractured formation pillars, broken star inscriptions, and dozens of immortal remnants that had survived the initial blast were pulled through the crack together, like debris sucked into a whirlpool that did not spin.
For a breath, Li Xiao Bai saw the boundary itself.
A thin membrane of "definition," stretched across infinity. It shimmered with countless dao marks, layered like invisible scales. It was the skin of a world. The explosion tore it open. The tear widened.
Beyond it, something waited.
Chaos.
At first, it did not look like anything. That was the first terror. Even the most bizarre phenomena still had a shape, a color, a behavior. This had none. It was neither black nor white. Neither bright nor dim. It did not reflect light. It did not absorb light. Light simply stopped applying.
The moment the fragment crossed the tear, the remaining immortals reacted.
They were not weak.
Any one of them, within a normal world, could flatten mountains, split seas, erase cities by accident. Their apertures held worlds. Their killer moves carried centuries of refinement. They had survived the explosion, survived the collapse, survived the crushing pressure of Heavenly Court's dying formations.
But the second they entered Chaos, that experience became meaningless.
A woman in a torn robe was the first to scream.
She did not scream out of pain. She screamed because her own immortal senses betrayed her. Her dao marks, those loyal scars carved into her existence by cultivation, began to loosen. Like ink dissolving in water. Like a story losing its words.
She raised her hands and activated a defensive killer move. A translucent shell formed around her, layered with water path and earth path, dense and elegant, something that would have withstood a venerable's casual strike for a moment.
Chaos touched it.
The shell did not shatter.
It vanished.
Not broken. Not pushed aside. Not corroded.
Removed, as if it had never been.
Her scream cut off mid-note. Her mouth remained open, but there was no sound, because her throat was gone. Not torn. Not destroyed.
Simply not there anymore.
Then her head followed, and her body, and the space where she had been standing became empty in a way that made Li Xiao Bai's soul recoil.
No blood. No lingering qi. No drifting will.
Nothing.
A second immortal, an old man with star-patterned eyebrows and a face like carved stone, tried to anchor the fragment.
He slapped his palm into the shattered jade floor. A formation activated, sparks of star-light running along broken lines as if refusing to accept death. A grid of symbols rose from the debris, attempting to impose a coordinate system on Chaos itself.
For an instant, Li Xiao Bai felt relief.
The grid created edges. It created distance. It created direction.
Then Chaos seeped between the lines like water through a net.
The star grid dimmed. The symbols blurred. The old man's eyes widened as if he had finally realized what he was attempting. He opened his mouth to shout an order, perhaps to retreat, perhaps to sacrifice someone else, perhaps to do anything that would let him remain himself for one more second.
Chaos reached him first.
His eyebrows disappeared.
Then his eyes.
His expression froze in a look that would never be completed, because the face ceased to exist.
The immortals panicked.
They moved in every direction at once, which only made the fragment feel smaller, more crowded, more doomed. Killer moves erupted like fireworks in a void that refused to be impressed.
Sword light cut. Flame roared. Ice spread. Wind screamed without sound. Space path rippled as someone tried to fold the distance back into the world they had lost.
Nothing held.
Every technique that relied on "laws" failed the same way.
Chaos did not resist them.
Chaos ignored them.
A spatial tear opened for half a moment, jagged and unstable, and Li Xiao Bai's heart jumped. The immortal who created it poured everything into the move, burning immortal essence like a man setting his own house on fire for warmth.
The tear widened.
Beyond it, Li Xiao Bai saw a hint of familiar reality, a faint shimmer of lawful space.
He almost reached for it.
Chaos licked the edge of the tear.
The opening snapped shut, not violently, but politely. Like a door being closed by a host who did not allow guests.
The space path immortal staggered, coughing, clutching his chest as if his heart had been grabbed. His aperture trembled. The dao marks in his body writhed.
Then he fell backward, and while he was falling, his torso vanished.
His legs hit the broken floor with a wet thud that made no sense, because there was no blood. Just the sound of impact, then the legs were gone too.
Someone tried to hide.
Ghost path, concealment, shadow, whatever they had, they threw it on themselves like a cloak. Their figures blurred. Their presence thinned. Their identities attempted to become "unnoticed."
It did not matter.
Chaos did not "notice" anything in the first place. It did not select targets. It did not hunt. It did not hate. It did not even behave like a natural disaster.
It behaved like a correction.
Anything that crossed the boundary was being corrected into nothing.
Li Xiao Bai stood very still.
That was his instinct, not heroism. He was Information Path. His greatest strength was never the swing of a blade. It was observation, inference, and timing. When others wasted breath screaming, Li Xiao Bai forced his thoughts into lines.
What is this?
Not an element. Not an energy.
A place where dao marks cannot exist.
A place where rules are not broken, because rules are not permitted to be present.
His gaze swept over the fragment. The debris was shrinking, but not because it was being crushed. Portions of it simply ceased. A pillar was there, then it was not. A rune was half-visible, then blank air replaced it.
The immortals died the same way.
One moment, desperation.
Next moment, absence.
A dozen breaths passed, and the fragment was lighter.
A dozen breaths, and half the survivors were gone.
Li Xiao Bai's soul tightened.
He had survived too much already, and yet this was the first time he felt something that was not fear of death, but fear of erasure. Death had patterns. Even destruction left traces. Erasure left no grievance to cling to.
He tried to calculate.
He tried to find a rhythm, a direction of seepage, a "flow" in Chaos that might be exploited. If Chaos behaved like a tide, perhaps one could ride it toward the boundary, back into lawful space.
But Chaos was not a tide. It had no wavefront. It was everywhere the moment they arrived, and it was nowhere in the sense that nothing inside it could be named.
Li Xiao Bai drew a breath that tasted like nothing.
His immortal aperture felt wrong. The connection between his body and his internal world, a relationship that had been carved and refined over centuries, began to loosen. He could sense the seams. He could sense the definition of "self" becoming negotiable.
He had no time.
He activated a protective method, not a flashy defense, but a layered concealment and stabilization technique meant to keep the soul intact. Threads of ghostly concealment wrapped around his spirit like thin mist, and for a moment, the pressure eased.
For a moment, he could still think.
Then he watched a nearby immortal try something similar.
The man's concealment held for two breaths.
On the third breath, Chaos brushed his shoulder.
The shoulder vanished.
The man looked down, confused, as if he had misplaced a sleeve. He raised his other hand to touch the missing part.
His hand vanished too.
Then his head.
Li Xiao Bai's concealment did not feel like protection anymore. It felt like delaying the moment the eraser reached his name.
The fragment lurched again.
Another large section of broken Heavenly Court flooring disappeared, and the remaining survivors slid closer together. Perhaps a dozen immortals remained. Perhaps less. Numbers became slippery in a place that refused counting.
A young immortal with blood on his lips dropped to his knees and began to chant.
His voice did not travel, but Li Xiao Bai could see the movement of his throat. The chant was a plea, a forced activation of some ancient method. The air around him filled with faint golden light. Human path, perhaps. Or something close.
Li Xiao Bai watched closely.
If any path could resist Chaos, it would be a path that dealt with "existence" directly.
The golden light expanded, forming a thin halo around the kneeling immortal.
Chaos touched the halo.
For a heartbeat, the halo did not vanish.
It flickered, held, trembled.
The kneeling immortal's eyes lit with frantic hope.
Then the halo collapsed inward, and the kneeling immortal vanished so completely that Li Xiao Bai's mind stumbled over the memory of his shape.
Even hope was erased.
Li Xiao Bai's stomach tightened, though his body did not feel entirely real anymore. He forced himself to stay calm. He forced himself to stay precise.
If nothing works, then the only path is to find something that is not "nothing."
Something anchored to the boundary.
Something that comes from outside the normal system.
His thoughts brushed against a forbidden memory.
A certain existence. A certain experiment. A certain madness that had once stared at Chaos and refused to look away.
Li Xiao Bai did not allow himself to say the name.
Names carried weight.
In a place that ate definitions, names felt dangerous.
A scream, silent and horrible, drew his attention.
A remaining formation master had tried to build a new array using fragments of Heavenly Court's inscriptions, stitching them together with his own dao marks, bleeding immortal essence into the lines. The array rose like a cage, attempting to define a "safe zone" inside Chaos.
It lasted long enough for three immortals to crawl inside it.
Li Xiao Bai almost followed.
Chaos seeped through the array's corner like ink into paper.
The cage did not break. It simply lost the corner. Then it lost the edge. Then the interior.
The three immortals vanished mid-crawl, frozen in positions that would never be completed.
The formation master stared at the empty space, his eyes wide, his hands still outstretched, as if his fingers could hold the world together through stubbornness.
Chaos reached him.
His left hand vanished first.
Then his vision blurred, as if something had scraped the concept of sight itself.
Li Xiao Bai finally moved.
Not toward the center of the fragment, where the others clustered in panic. Not toward the edge, where Chaos seemed to take bites out of the world.
He moved toward the one thing that still looked like it belonged to a world.
A broken section of Heavenly Court's boundary inscription was embedded in the debris, half-shattered, half-melted by the explosion. It was not an ordinary rune. It carried a sense of "closure," of "limit," of "this side" and "not that side."
Li Xiao Bai reached it and pressed his palm to the cold, cracked jade.
A faint vibration ran up his arm.
For an instant, he felt the boundary again, far away, like a memory of skin.
Chaos pressed closer.
He could not see it, but he could feel his soul thinning, the way a candle flame thins right before it goes out.
Two immortals remained near him.
One was shaking so hard his teeth would have rattled if sound existed. The other was eerily calm, eyes empty, as if he had accepted that nothing he did mattered.
The calm one took a step.
Chaos erased his foot.
He fell, and the fall never finished. His torso vanished. His head vanished. His last emotion was not fear, but mild surprise, as if even in the end he expected a rule to apply.
Li Xiao Bai's heart, or whatever remained of it, pounded.
He tasted a bitter thought.
So this is the end.
Not death.
Not defeat.
A blank.
His concealment technique was fraying. His aperture connection was almost gone. His immortal essence felt like sand in a fist, slipping away no matter how hard he clenched.
He squeezed the broken boundary rune.
He poured the last of his will into it.
If there was even a fraction of "limit" left inside this fragment, he would use it as a nail.
Chaos touched his sleeve.
The cloth vanished.
Then the skin beneath it.
Li Xiao Bai did not scream. There was no sound anyway. Pain arrived late, confused, as if it had to ask permission to exist.
Chaos crept up his arm like a gentle correction.
His thoughts began to fragment. Memories blurred at the edges. Concepts like "before" and "after" loosened, as if time itself was losing patience.
Li Xiao Bai's eyes widened.
He felt the moment where he would stop being Li Xiao Bai. Not as a metaphor. As a fact.
Then something cold wrapped around his soul.
A chain.
Not a physical chain, not iron, not gold, not any metal that could be named. It was a sensation of linkage, of binding, of being fastened to a point that Chaos could not immediately erase. The chain snapped tight with brutal clarity, and the tightening hurt more than the erasure, because pain meant he was still defined.
Symbols flared along the chain, too fast to read, too alien to be Heavenly Court's work. They did not fight Chaos. They did not push it back.
They did something simpler.
They held his "name" in place.
Li Xiao Bai gasped. The missing portion of his arm did not return. The world did not become safe.
But the erasure slowed, as if forced to take smaller bites.
Seconds.
Only seconds.
Li Xiao Bai clutched the boundary rune harder, and the chain tightened again, dragging his soul inward, compressing it, sealing it into a narrower shape. The sensation was horrifying, like being squeezed into a coffin made of rules he could not understand.
In that coffin, he could still think.
In that coffin, he could still feel the boundary, faint and distant.
In that coffin, he could still see Chaos.
Not with eyes.
With understanding.
Chaos was not darkness. Not light.
Chaos was the place where meaning went to die.
The fragment of Heavenly Court continued to vanish around him. The last remaining immortal nearby disappeared without ceremony. The broken jade under Li Xiao Bai's feet thinned.
The chain held.
For one heartbeat longer than it should have.
Li Xiao Bai's vision, if it could be called vision, filled with the sight of a crack in reality ahead. A tear that looked like a wound in the skin of the world.
The chain tugged him toward it.
And Chaos reached for him again.
Li Xiao Bai tightened his grip on himself, on his will, on the last clean thread of identity he possessed, and let the chain pull.
The world boundary loomed.
Chaos pressed close.
Then the scene snapped into a blur of nothing and definition, and Li Xiao Bai was dragged forward, sealed, bound, and barely alive as the void swallowed the remains of the Heavenly Court fragment behind him.
The last thing he perceived before everything turned into motionless silence was a single thought, sharp and cold.
If this chain had not appeared, he would not have died.
He would have never existed.