A year passed in the void.
There was no sunrise to mark it, no seasons to measure it, no familiar sky to remind Li Xiao Bai that time was still moving forward. If he had not carried memories that could count days without needing the sun, he might have believed the universe had stopped and only he continued.
Yet time did move.
It moved in hunger.
It moved in erosion.
It moved in the slow, grinding way his body learned to ache in places he did not know could ache.
The comet field had been a shelter, but shelter never lasted. He left it before it could become a tomb, and for a long time he traveled through emptiness so pure that even drifting dust seemed rare. He slept in fragments, never truly sinking into rest. Every time his eyelids lowered, his senses threatened to dull, and the void punished dullness.
So he learned to rest without surrendering.
He sealed his essence. He reduced his breathing. He slowed his heartbeat with a careful, restrained method that risked as little as possible. Even then, sleep came like a thief, short and shallow, disappearing the instant something felt wrong.
At first, he told himself that exhaustion was simply another cost.
Later, he stopped calling it a cost and began calling it a countdown.
Because the void was not only outside him.
It was inside him.
Foreign dao marks scraped at his flesh in faint, persistent strokes. The damage did not spread quickly, but it spread without pause, a patient rot that did not need wounds or poison. His left forearm had been the first to show the pale discoloration, then a patch along his ribs, then a thin line across the back of his shoulder.
Each day he checked those marks with methods that had once been used to examine cultivation injuries. Each day he found the same truth.
The chain around his soul held steady.
His body did not.
His Gu died faster the more he relied on them. Rank three Gu that should have lived for years with proper feeding became fragile in months. Even when he kept them sealed, even when he did not activate them, the void still pressed against them like a slow tide.
He learned to travel with as little movement as possible, drifting when he could, bursting forward only when needed.
He learned to treat every activation like a sacrifice.
And he learned to treat every soundless shadow in the void like a predator.
Because predators existed here.
Not always in the form of beasts.
Sometimes, the predator was a change in space itself.
Sometimes, it was an absence that moved too quickly to be understood.
He paid for that lesson with an eye.
It happened without warning, in a stretch of emptiness that looked no different from any other. He had been cautious. He always was. Concealment layered over concealment, senses stretched thin, movement measured. One-eyed caution, the kind a veteran learned after too many close calls.
He was scanning the void with an information path method, not searching for prey, but searching for safety. A ripple. A trace. A difference in the flow of light. Anything that could be turned into distance.
Then he saw it.
For a single heartbeat, the darkness in front of him took shape, not as a body, but as a pattern. A cluster of points like eyes, too many to count, arranged in a geometry that made his mind want to slide away. It was not close. It was impossibly far.
Yet it felt close.
It felt like someone was staring into his skull.
Li Xiao Bai froze.
The information path method kept feeding him detail, and every detail felt wrong. There was no aura. No clear form. No movement. Just a presence that did not belong to the rules he understood.
He should have cut the method immediately.
He did not.
Not because of greed or curiosity, but because his mind, for one half-breath, decided that information was always worth the risk.
That half-breath cost him.
The void tore.
Not space, but perception. A pressure slammed into his face, and his right eye ruptured as if squeezed by an invisible fist. Pain arrived a fraction late, sharp enough to turn thought into white noise.
Blood pearls drifted away in slow motion.
He shut down the information method instantly and threw concealment over himself like a shroud. He did not scream. There was no sound in the void anyway.
He simply endured.
When the pain dulled enough for him to think again, he understood the warning more clearly than words could ever teach.
He had seen something he should not have seen.
And the moment he saw it, it had known.
In this void, sight was not a one-way act.
It was a handshake.
It was a rope.
If you looked at something, it could look back. If you perceived something, you gave it a line to perceive you through.
That was the true danger.
Not the monsters that hunted with claws and teeth.
But the things that hunted through awareness itself.
From that day on, Li Xiao Bai treated perception like a weapon that cut both ways. He did not widen his senses unless he had to. He did not stare at anomalies. He did not try to understand what the void refused to explain.
He moved forward with one eye, and he felt the universe watching him through the other.
Then came the second strike, harsher and simpler.
Li Xiao Bai was traveling through a region where the starlight felt subtly different. He could not have explained it to anyone else, but he sensed a faint structure ahead, like lines that almost formed a familiar pattern. The void around him was still empty, yet the emptiness had texture now. A difference in the pull of distant masses. A thin, nearly imperceptible shift in how space carried his movement.
His instincts sharpened.
Solar system.
He did not arrive at that conclusion through instinct alone. Before the Gu world, before apertures and immortal essence, he had once been a man who studied the sky with human eyes. Orbits, resonance, mass distribution, the quiet mathematics behind light and distance, those were not myths to him.
And as a clone, he carried the main body's memories like marrow in his bones. That knowledge did not make the void less terrifying, but it made its patterns readable in moments where ignorance would have meant death.
He did not know how far he still was. Distance in the void was a cruel joke. You could see a star and still take years to reach the space where its light was born. Yet the pattern was there. The same kind of structure he once observed in charts and calculations, the same kind of order that did not exist in random drift.
It was not proof.
But it was hope, and hope was dangerous.
He slowed down, layered concealment over himself, and pushed forward with controlled bursts.
Then something fast crossed his path.
There was no roar.
No ripple.
No warning.
One moment he was moving, and the next his left leg was gone.
Not severed by a blade he could see. Not crushed by an impact he could feel coming. It simply vanished from the knee down, and a heartbeat later his body understood the truth and sent pain like fire through his nerves.
Li Xiao Bai's expression did not change.
But his breath stopped for half a second.
In the vacuum, blood did not spray. It formed a trembling bloom of red spheres that floated outward, shining like grotesque rubies in starlight. His severed flesh whitened immediately at the edges, not from frost, but from the void's erasure beginning to bite into open tissue.
He reacted without thought.
A healing Gu activated, then faltered, its aura thinning as foreign dao marks scraped across it. He forced immortal essence through it anyway, not to regenerate the limb, that was impossible under these conditions, but to stabilize the wound and stop his body from losing more than it already had.
His body shuddered. Pain tried to climb into his mind.
He suppressed it.
An information path method rose, then paused.
He stopped himself.
One-eyed and bleeding, he remembered the first lesson.
Seeing could invite being seen.
He searched with smaller means, with narrower methods, with less arrogance. Even so, he found nothing. No shape. No aura. No lingering presence.
It was as if a piece of the void had snapped shut around his leg and stolen it.
He sealed the wound further and adjusted his movement.
He could not walk in space. Walking did not exist here. Yet his body still depended on balance, on muscle memory, on the subtle corrections that kept his posture stable when he activated Gu.
Without his left leg, every movement felt wrong.
He tested it.
He rotated his body slowly, then stopped.
He moved forward, then corrected.
He discovered that his center of gravity changed enough that certain killer moves became less stable, certain methods that relied on posture now required extra effort.
It was not fatal.
But it was a warning written in blood.
The void had reached out and taken a piece of him in an instant.
He did not even know what had done it.
A weaker mind would have panicked.
Li Xiao Bai did not panic.
He did something worse.
He adapted.
He reduced his signature even further. He minimized activations. He moved like a dead fragment, letting inertia carry him when possible. He accepted that the void could strike without reason and planned around that truth.
Then, for the first time in a long time, he allowed himself a thought that felt almost human.
I am close.
Not because the pain demanded meaning, but because he needed a reason to accept the loss without wasting time on rage.
The pattern of space ahead felt more structured now. The pull of mass was stronger. The distant starlight carried a faint geometry, as if the void itself was beginning to bend toward a familiar orbit.
He continued forward with a crippled body and a calm mind.
The worst experiences did not end there.
There were days when he sensed giants fighting far away, their clashes sending faint tremors through space. He never went near them. He never even looked too long. In this place, attention was a rope around the neck.
There were moments when sudden flashes lit the void, silent explosions that blossomed like dead suns and vanished. Some were battles. Some were natural disasters of space. Some were things he could not name.
Once, he drifted near a region where the void seemed to thicken. His senses felt heavier, as if thought itself slowed down. He left that place immediately, sacrificing speed to escape, because he suspected that staying longer would not only erode his body but erode his mind.
He did not sleep properly for weeks after that.
His immortal aperture remained his only true refuge, yet he did not dare retreat into it fully. If he entered too deeply, if he sealed himself away too long, a predator might drift close and he would never know until too late.
He lived on the edge of consciousness.
And in the end, the void presented him with a trap that did not need a beast.
A wormhole.
He did not recognize it at first.
He had learned long ago that space could lie. Light did not travel straight when gravity or distortion bent it, and the worst traps were the ones that looked ordinary. In his first life, wormholes were theory and equations. In this life, the same idea wore a real mouth.
There was no swirling tunnel of light, no dramatic distortion. It was a subtle, unnatural curve in space, like a wound that had healed wrong. Starlight near it bent in a way that made his one remaining eye want to slide away.
It was not a visual trick. It was geometry being forced into a shape it should never take. A distortion that reminded him of diagrams from a life that felt impossibly distant, except the diagram was now trying to swallow him.
His senses protested, and for a brief moment, his mind struggled to assign meaning to what it was seeing.
Then he felt it.
A pull.
Not the gentle pull of gravity, but suction.
A force that did not care about mass or distance.
A force that grabbed at space itself and tried to drag anything nearby into an exit that might not lead to the same universe.
Li Xiao Bai immediately tried to reverse direction.
He burst backward with controlled force, spending essence in a restrained movement method.
The suction intensified.
His speed slowed as if invisible hands clutched his body. The severed end of his left leg throbbed, and the foreign dao marks along his wound flared in response, as if the void grew hungrier near this distortion.
He activated concealment.
The wormhole did not care.
He activated a defensive barrier.
The barrier bent like paper and tore, not from impact, but from the strain of space being pulled apart.
Li Xiao Bai's pupil narrowed.
He understood the danger in an instant.
This was not a monster.
This was a passage.
If he slipped, he would not die immediately.
He would be thrown elsewhere.
A different region of the void, perhaps farther from the solar system, perhaps into a place where even his chained soul would not remain stable.
Worse, he might be thrown into a space where time moved differently.
He might return to nothing.
He might never return at all.
Li Xiao Bai forced his mind to remain still.
Panic was a waste.
He needed distance, but the suction was increasing, and his movement methods were failing under strain.
That meant he needed to anchor himself.
He reached into his aperture and pulled out Gu.
Not the ones he wanted to use.
The ones he could afford to lose.
He had already learned that Gu were consumed by this void. Now he would make that consumption useful.
One by one, he released Gu into open space, activating them in deliberate sequences.
A rank two Gu that manipulated minor airflow inside a closed environment had no meaning in vacuum, but its activation still created a momentary ripple, a pattern that foreign dao marks could latch onto.
A rank three Gu that stored information burned its own essence to release a thin net of signals.
A tracking Gu emitted pulses.
A decoding Gu responded.
Li Xiao Bai linked them together into a crude, temporary formation, not to fight the wormhole, but to create friction against the pull.
The suction grabbed those Gu immediately.
They flashed, strained, then began to decay, their bodies whitening and blurring as the void ate them. Yet in those brief seconds before they vanished, they produced resistance.
Not much.
But enough.
Li Xiao Bai used the resistance to twist his body and push sideways, aiming for an angle where the suction would not catch him as cleanly.
The pull fought him.
His body shuddered.
The wound on his left leg reopened slightly, and droplets of blood floated out and vanished as they entered the wormhole's influence.
He released more Gu.
A cluster of information path insects that he had kept for emergencies. They were not immortal. They were not precious compared to rank six treasures. Yet in this void, even rank three Gu had become precious because they represented options.
He sacrificed them without hesitation.
They activated.
They died.
The wormhole swallowed them.
The resistance increased for a heartbeat.
Li Xiao Bai seized that heartbeat.
He pushed.
He burned essence.
He forced his body to move in a sideways arc, escaping the direct line of suction. Every part of him strained as if he were pulling against chains wrapped around his bones.
The wormhole's pull sharpened again, furious, hungry, relentless.
Li Xiao Bai released more Gu, calculating the cost as he did so.
Twenty percent.
That number formed in his mind with cold clarity.
He could not afford to lose more.
If he spent too much here, he would die later.
If he spent too little now, he would be dragged away and his entire journey would become meaningless.
So he cut deeper.
He sacrificed Gu that had served him for years.
An information path Gu that had once allowed him to read subtle traces in battlefields.
A communication Gu that would have been priceless in the Gu world.
A storage Gu that carried carefully prepared data.
He activated them all in a chain, creating a violent burst of signals that tore against the wormhole's suction like a net thrown over a beast.
The net did not hold.
But it slowed the pull for a breath.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
He surged sideways, then forward, then sideways again, using broken vectors to avoid falling into the wormhole's throat.
His body trembled from the effort.
His senses blurred at the edges.
For a moment, he felt the wormhole's edge brush him, a cold pressure that was not physical, but conceptual, as if space itself tried to rewrite his position.
His heart clenched.
He forced more essence through his movement method, ignoring the strain.
Then the pull weakened.
Not because the wormhole released him.
Because he had finally escaped its reach.
Li Xiao Bai drifted for a moment, body shaking in silence.
He did not celebrate.
He did not laugh.
He did not even exhale in relief.
Relief was dangerous, because relief invited carelessness.
Instead, he checked his inventory.
The losses were real.
A hollow space existed inside his aperture where a fifth of his usable Gu had once been.
Some were dead.
Some were damaged beyond repair.
Some remained alive but weakened, their vitality shaved down by the void.
Twenty percent.
Gone.
He looked back.
The wormhole remained there, invisible and yet terrifying, a wound in space that could steal a traveler and spit him into an entirely different fate.
He did not know if it led to another region of the void or another galaxy.
But he understood one thing.
If he had slipped for even a moment, he would not be here now.
He turned away without hesitation.
Ahead, the structure of space felt stronger.
The pattern of distant light sharpened.
The void still tried to erase him, still scraped at his body, still waited for mistakes.
But he could feel it now.
The pull of a system.
Orbits.
Mass.
A familiar arrangement of stars and darkness.
He was close.
Li Xiao Bai drifted on, one eye gone, one leg gone, his left hand erased, and a fifth of his Gu turned to dust.
The void had tried to throw him away.
He did not allow it.
As long as he remained alive, there was always a chance.
And for someone like him, a chance was enough.