A field of comets drifted through the void like a shattered crown.
Ice and stone moved in slow, silent arcs. Each fragment dragged a pale tail of dust that never scattered, because nothing here carried it away. No wind. No warmth. No sound. Only distant starlight, thin and cold, painting sharp edges and deep shadows across the drifting graveyard.
Li Xiao Bai reduced his speed and slipped into the clutter.
He did not call it safe.
Nothing in this place deserved that word.
But the comets created noise for the senses. Broken paths. False silhouettes. Sudden angles. In a void where monsters could appear without warning, cover was worth more than comfort. Cover meant time. Time meant another calculation.
He chose a large fragment cracked down the middle like a split fang and settled in its shadow. Concealment wrapped around him in layered strands, dulling his presence until he felt less like a living being and more like a piece of drifting debris.
Only then did he pause.
Not to rest.
To think.
The emptiness around him remained unchanged. Somewhere behind, Heavenly Court's disaster had already become distant. Schemes among venerables, the revival attempt, the glare of immortal killer moves, all of it belonged to another set of rules. Here, meaning did not matter. Rank did not matter. Pride did not matter.
Here, survival was the only currency.
Li Xiao Bai sat still and reached inward.
His immortal aperture remained intact, yet it felt strange, like a room whose walls stood firm while the air inside grew thinner with every breath. He probed the boundary carefully. Foreign dao marks did not invade it directly, but they pressed against it from outside, scraping along the edges whenever he moved immortal essence through his body.
A world that did not accept him.
A world that did not need to hate him in order to harm him.
He raised a hand and formed a small seal, activating an information path method that should have been effortless.
A thin ripple spread outward, invisible to the eye, searching for something familiar.
Treasure Yellow Heaven.
In the Gu world, that place remained a pillar even when chaos raged. A market. A channel. A lifeline. Countless immortals depended on it, and even when access became difficult, the connection rarely vanished completely.
Now, the ripple returned nothing.
No resistance.
No blockage.
No barrier.
Just absence.
Like shouting into a tomb and hearing the silence swallow the words.
Li Xiao Bai adjusted the method. He changed the sequence, refined the intent, altered how essence flowed through the Gu, then tried again. He used a second information path Gu, then a third, each one more refined, each one more costly.
Nothing.
Treasure Yellow Heaven did not exist here, or his path to it had been severed so thoroughly that the difference no longer mattered.
He withdrew his Gu and sealed his essence.
For a brief moment, he stared into the darkness without blinking.
A weaker mind would have reached for anger. Curses at fate. Curses at the accident that threw him here.
Anger produced heat, not outcomes.
He had lived too long to waste energy on emotions that did not change reality.
He accepted the conclusion with the same cold clarity he used to accept losses in battle.
He was cut off.
Not only from allies.
Not only from resources.
From the very framework of the Gu world.
Li Xiao Bai inhaled slowly and reached deeper, toward the last thread he had hoped would remain.
The arrangements of the main body.
Fang Yuan.
There were methods. Hidden channels. Emergency links that existed for one purpose only: to prevent clones from becoming useless when separated. Fang Yuan never trusted luck. He planned for separation, betrayal, destruction, and worse.
Li Xiao Bai triggered the method with extreme care.
A faint pulse moved through his soul.
The chain around his soul tightened slightly, warning him not to expose too much.
Still, he pushed the pulse outward and waited.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
No response.
He tried again, deeper, using a more expensive layer. Pain should have followed the activation. His expression did not change as he spent the essence.
Nothing.
No reply from the main body. No faint sense of direction. No hint of contact.
It was as if the Gu world had been erased behind him.
Not destroyed.
Simply unreachable.
Li Xiao Bai lowered his hand.
He did not sigh. Sighing was an admission of fatigue. Fatigue was a luxury.
His gaze slid across the comet field around him.
If he could not return immediately, then he needed understanding. The void was not only empty space between worlds. It had rules, even if those rules were hostile. The foreign dao marks were not random. The erosion was not arbitrary. The death of Gu was not coincidence.
He needed to learn the boundaries of this place before it ground him down.
So he did what he always did when faced with the unknown.
He experimented.
Inside his immortal aperture, he had living test subjects.
Mortals.
Not because he enjoyed it. Not because he considered them beneath him.
Living bodies produced information.
Dead matter did not.
He had taken them during his escape, storing them as one might store tools. He had not killed them. He had not spared them.
He had kept them.
Now, he would use them.
Li Xiao Bai opened the entrance to his immortal aperture slightly.
A thin line of space parted, revealing the faint glow of his internal world. Compared to the void, that glow looked almost warm. It contained air, light, and the subtle stability of the Gu world's laws.
He reached in and pulled out the first mortal.
A man. Middle aged. Thin.
The man did not scream at first. His mouth opened in confusion, then his eyes widened as his lungs failed to find air. Panic arrived like a wave. He tried to inhale and got nothing. His hands clawed at emptiness.
Sound barely existed. In the vacuum, a scream became only a silent shape of terror. Yet Li Xiao Bai could read it anyway, in the trembling limbs, the wide eyes, the frantic convulsions.
The man's skin began to whiten.
Not frost.
Not cold.
Color drained away as if someone had pulled a veil over his flesh.
His veins stood out like dark threads beneath pale skin. His movements grew jerky. His face twisted, then slackened.
Li Xiao Bai watched without blinking.
Suffocation was expected.
What happened next was not.
The man began to lose substance.
Fingers blurred first, as if heat shimmered around them. Then the blur spread across the hands, the wrists, the forearms. Skin cracked, not like dryness, but like brittle shell. Fine dust drifted away from him and vanished into the void.
The foreign dao marks responded.
Li Xiao Bai could not see them directly, but he could sense their disturbance, the way they gathered around the mortal like invisible insects. They clung to him. They fed.
The man's silent flailing slowed.
Then stopped.
His body remained for a heartbeat, then began to evaporate.
Not burning.
Not exploding.
Evaporating.
Flesh turned to dust, bones to powder, blood to nothing. The process was smooth, almost gentle, like snow melting under sunlight, except there was no sunlight here.
Within moments, the mortal was gone.
Nothing remained.
No corpse.
No bones.
No residue.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his eyes.
He opened his aperture again and pulled out a second mortal.
A young woman. Her hair floated slightly in the void, giving her the appearance of drowning. She did not even have time to form a scream. Her mouth opened, her eyes widened, and her face twisted into raw horror.
The same pattern followed.
Loss of breath.
Loss of color.
Loss of substance.
Less than a minute later, she vanished as well.
He continued.
A third. A fourth. A fifth.
Each time he changed a detail.
He withdrew one partially, leaving only an arm outside. The arm whitened immediately, then blurred, then began to crack.
He pulled it back in.
Inside his aperture, the arm remained, but it looked wrong. Grey tinged flesh. A texture that did not belong. The mortal screamed inside the aperture, now with air to carry the sound, but the scream did not reverse the damage.
He brought out another and wrapped him in a thin protective barrier, the kind used against weak winds, poison fog, minor attacks.
The barrier failed as if it were paper.
The mortal still evaporated. The barrier faded, weakened, and died faster than it should have, like a torch placed under water.
He tried a stronger method, one closer to a small formation.
The mortal lasted longer, but the end did not change.
He tried an old trick, suppressing the body's activity and forcing it into a stasis like state.
The mortal lasted longer still.
A few minutes.
Then vanished anyway.
Li Xiao Bai sat in silence when he finished.
Fear leaked from within his aperture. The remaining mortals were still alive, but they had seen others disappear. Their minds were breaking under the unknown.
Li Xiao Bai ignored their minds.
He cared about the pattern.
The conclusion was clear.
This void did not merely lack life supporting conditions.
It erased.
It erased life fast.
Then, because mortals were only one measure, he moved to the second.
Creatures of the Gu world.
He had kept animals in his aperture for many reasons over the years. Food. Experiments. Resources. Some were ordinary beasts, some carried traces of dao marks from their environments, shaped by blessed lands and grotto heavens.
He chose one that would not matter if it died.
A wolf.
Its fur was thick, its body lean and strong, eyes sharp with wild intelligence. In the Gu world, such a beast could survive harsh wilderness, fight other predators, and endure hunger for days.
Li Xiao Bai pulled it out.
The wolf's paws kicked reflexively, trying to find ground that did not exist. Its body twisted in panic as it searched for scent, sound, direction, then found nothing.
It did not die as quickly as the mortals.
That difference mattered.
Its lungs still failed, but its body resisted erasure for longer. The whitening spread more slowly. The blur took longer to appear. For a brief moment, Li Xiao Bai sensed the faint structure of dao marks within the beast, crude and natural, not refined like Gu, but present.
Those dao marks did not protect it.
They drew attention.
The void pressed harder.
The foreign dao marks gathered more densely around the wolf than they had around the mortals, as if responding to a richer meal.
The wolf convulsed. Its fur began to flake into dust. Its muscles lost definition. The animal's eyes, once fierce, became wide with animal terror, then dull.
Minutes later, the wolf evaporated into nothing.
Li Xiao Bai did not look away.
He brought out a second beast.
A boar, large and heavy, one he had once raised for meat inside his aperture.
The boar lasted longer than the wolf.
Not by hours.
By minutes.
Its flesh resisted erasure. Its bones held shape for longer before they too dissolved.
Li Xiao Bai noted the timing, the sequence, the way foreign dao marks reacted. The pattern repeated. The stronger the natural dao mark structure within the creature, the more the void seemed to gnaw at it, not less.
A third beast followed.
A bird.
It died quickly.
Its light body offered little resistance. It vanished almost as fast as a mortal.
Li Xiao Bai continued until he had enough.
The beasts confirmed two things.
First, living bodies from the Gu world were not safe here. Mortals, beasts, all were erased.
Second, the more a body carried traces of dao marks, even crude ones, the more the void seemed to focus on it. Like a predator attracted to scent.
That explained more than animal deaths.
It explained his Gu.
It explained why the insects decayed faster when used.
It explained why his body began showing signs of erosion while his soul remained stable.
His soul was chained.
His soul was sealed.
His soul was anchored.
His body was exposed.
He closed his aperture.
The remaining mortals inside still trembled, but their fear no longer mattered.
Now he had enough information.
The void erased mortals in minutes. It erased beasts in minutes. It eroded Gu over time, faster with use. It gnawed at his body slowly. It spared his soul because of the chain.
That meant one thing.
This place did not need monsters to kill him.
This place itself was the monster.
Li Xiao Bai checked his Gu again.
Several rank three Gu had weakened just from being used in the barrier experiments. Their aura thinned. Their instincts dulled. Decay accelerated exactly as before.
He stored them carefully and sealed his essence.
Waste was death.
Yet ignorance was also death.
Now he understood the minimum truth required to move forward.
This void erased.
It erased quickly.
It erased patiently.
It erased without emotion.
So his path remained unchanged.
Leave as fast as possible.
Reach structured space.
Reach a world with stable laws.
Reach the solar system.
He stood in the shadow of the comet fragment, his silhouette barely distinct from the debris.
His eyes remained calm.
Not hopeful.
Hope depended on kindness from fate.
He did not rely on hope.
He relied on decisions.
Li Xiao Bai began to move again.
He did not rush blindly, and he did not crawl cautiously.
He moved with intention.
Each burst of movement was measured. Each concealment layer was adjusted. Each pause was calculated. He used the comet field like a maze, weaving through drifting stone with the patience of a hunter and the caution of prey.
The comet field slowly fell behind.
The void remained the same, yet his understanding of it had changed.
Before, it was just darkness filled with monsters.
Now, it was hunger that never slept.
Far ahead, faint and distant, the pattern of a solar system waited like a thin line between death and possibility.
Li Xiao Bai moved toward it without hesitation.
Inside his aperture, the remaining mortals trembled, pressed against invisible walls, unaware that their fear had already served its purpose.
Outside, the void watched with silent patience.
And somewhere in that silence, the foreign dao marks stirred, as if aware that their prey was trying to escape.