Li Xiao Bai did not look back.
In the Gu world, turning your head during a retreat was a mistake people made when they still believed they had time. Here, time felt like a thin layer of frost on glass, ready to crack if he breathed wrong.
He drifted forward, fixing his direction by instinct and calculation, keeping the distant solar system in sight as a fragile point of order.
The chain around his soul remained quiet.
Quiet did not mean safe. Quiet only meant the debt had not been collected yet.
His losses weighed on him. The missing immortal Gu left a blank space in his methods, a silence in the part of his mind that used to reach for certain solutions automatically. He adjusted, reorganized, made new arrangements with what remained.
Adaptation was not talent. It was survival.
The void stretched on.
Stars remained cold and indifferent. Some were bright, some were faint, some were merely memories of light that had taken too long to arrive. Between them was darkness, not empty, but thick with the feeling that something could move there without ever being seen.
Then the darkness changed.
A pale object entered his perception, small at first, then sharpening into shape as he approached.
A moon.
Not a proper moon with a dignified orbit and a loyal planet, but a small, lonely sphere drifting near a shattered star.
The star was broken.
That was the first thought that formed in his mind. It did not glow like a living sun. Its light flickered weakly, like a dying ember trapped inside a cracked shell. Fragments of it hung in the void, slow debris reflecting faint radiance, a halo of ruin.
A system that had died.
Li Xiao Bai slowed. His senses brushed the moon. It was solid, ancient, scarred. He felt traces of something unfamiliar in it, a faint pressure like dao marks, but twisted, incomplete, wrong.
His body shivered.
It was not cold. The void held no wind, no chill that could pierce bone.
This was instinct.
This was his soul recognizing danger before his mind could name it.
Li Xiao Bai stopped entirely.
A long silence passed.
The chain around his soul tightened once, gently, as if warning him.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his eyes and activated a concealed monitoring method, smaller than before, careful and restrained. He did not spread his senses widely. After the last encounter, he understood the value of being blind.
Better blind than noticed.
The moon drifted closer in his perception.
And then he saw it.
Something was on the moon.
At first it looked like a shadow cast by uneven terrain. Then the shadow moved, and the moon trembled beneath it.
Li Xiao Bai's pupils contracted.
It was feeding.
A creature clung to the surface of the moon like a parasite attached to a corpse. Its body was a mass of slick, shifting flesh, neither fully solid nor fully fluid. Countless tentacles spread outward, digging into the moon's crust, tearing it open, pulling chunks of rock into a central maw that rotated like a grinding wheel.
Eyes covered it.
Not two.
Not ten.
Too many to count, scattered across its body in clusters, opening and closing independently, each one staring in a different direction. Some were the size of lakes. Some were as small as grains of sand. They all moved with the same disgusting alertness.
A single glance was enough to make Li Xiao Bai's scalp tighten and his stomach twist.
In his five hundred years, he had seen monsters. He had seen desolate beasts and variant humans and things refined in the depths of apertures. He had watched armies of beasts drown mountains.
But this was not a creature born from a world he understood.
This was a thing that did not belong to the Gu world.
It did not carry the familiar harmony of dao marks, even in madness. It carried only appetite.
The moon cracked.
A section of its surface collapsed inward as the creature pulled, and the sound, if sound could exist here, was imagined by the mind. Yet Li Xiao Bai felt it in his bones anyway.
A slow, grinding consumption.
As if a world was being eaten like fruit flesh.
Li Xiao Bai did not move.
He did not breathe.
His concealment tightened around him like a second skin. He reduced his aura, suppressed his soul signature, even stopped circulating essence for a moment to avoid any ripple.
The creature's eyes shifted.
A cluster of them turned slightly, scanning the void. Not searching in a human way, but sensing, tasting, reading the emptiness.
Li Xiao Bai remained still.
His calm was not courage. It was discipline.
Seconds passed. Then minutes.
The creature returned to feeding.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
Not quickly.
Not directly.
He slid away with the smallest adjustments, choosing a path that curved wide around the moon, refusing to approach the shattered star any further.
Only when the moon shrank into the distance did his body loosen.
His heart remained steady, but something inside him had changed.
He had thought the Gu world was cruel.
He had thought chaos and venerables and fate itself were the height of terror.
Now he understood a different truth.
This place was worse.
It was not ruled by schemes or factions or morals. It was ruled by things that could eat worlds without even noticing.
Li Xiao Bai continued forward.
He did not slow his pace out of despair. He did not drift aimlessly. He held the solar system as his anchor, the only familiar structure in an unfamiliar sea.
If he was alive, then there was opportunity.
That was not hope. That was calculation.
The void did not allow complacency.
As he traveled, dangers revealed themselves like silent storms.
He saw giants in the distance, not one, but two, colliding without sound. Their bodies were larger than mountains, their movements slow, but each impact warped space around them. When they struck, the void trembled. Not with noise, but with a strange pressure that made his immortal aperture ache.
An explosion followed.
A burst of light that should not have existed in emptiness. It expanded, then collapsed, tearing a hole in the darkness that healed a moment later.
Li Xiao Bai felt the shock in his soul.
For the first time since entering the void, he felt small.
Not in the sense of status. Not in the sense of cultivation.
In the simplest sense.
Weak.
In the Gu world, weakness could be compensated by knowledge. A low rank could scheme against a high rank. A single immortal Gu could decide the outcome of a battle.
Here, weakness meant something else.
Here, weakness meant being crushed without anyone noticing you had existed.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze remained cold.
His mind remained sharp.
But he could not deny what his instincts whispered.
If he stayed here too long, he would die.
Not because of a plan. Not because of a venerable. Not because of fate.
Because something hungry would pass by.
He tightened his concealment and continued toward the solar system.
He did not relax.
He did not pray.
He moved, and in the silence of the void, the only thing that mattered was that he kept moving.
As long as he was alive, there was a chance.
That was enough.