Light appeared first.
Not the weak starlight that had followed him for months like a distant rumor, but real light, layered and heavy, the kind that carried warmth even across impossible distance. It should have been comforting. It should have meant safety.
Li Xiao Bai did not relax.
He narrowed his remaining eye and forced his mind to slow down.
In the Gu world, stars were distant ornaments painted onto a dome of heaven. Here, they were real. They were furnaces that could swallow worlds. He had known that once, back when he was still on Earth, back when he had stared at diagrams and photographs and pretended that knowledge made the universe less hostile.
Then he reincarnated into the Gu world, lived five hundred years, climbed over corpses and fate, and stopped caring about anything that did not lead to eternity.
Yet those first memories still existed inside him, not as nostalgia, but as tools. The body he wore might have been a clone, but the experience he carried belonged to Fang Yuan. The knowledge was not his, and at the same time it was.
He used it now.
The light came from a yellow star.
A sun.
Ahead, faint points moved around it in disciplined silence, not drifting like debris, not clashing like beasts, but circling with a stability that felt almost unnatural after the void. Ten planetary bodies. Some large, some small. Some close enough that their outlines could be guessed even from here, others distant and pale like frozen scars.
The Solar System.
He recognized it without hesitation.
Not because he had seen it with his own eyes before, but because he had once lived on one of those planets, and because his earliest life had been filled with images of this exact arrangement. The void had taken his flesh, taken his blood, taken his left hand and his right eye, and still it had not erased that.
A smaller mind would have felt relief.
Li Xiao Bai felt suspicion.
Something was wrong.
It was not a single detail, not one obvious defect like a crack in a mirror. It was the overall sensation, the kind a veteran gained after too many traps. The Solar System looked intact. Too intact.
He had spent a year drifting through regions where predators the size of mountains fought in silence, where explosions bloomed like dead suns, where a single mistake could lead to erasure. He had seen enough to understand a basic truth.
In the void, weakness was not allowed to remain.
Anything that survived did so because it was protected, hidden, or bait.
The Solar System was not hidden.
It shone.
The sun was a beacon, a feast laid out in darkness. Creatures were drawn to it, just like moths were drawn to flame. He had watched beasts curve toward distant stars from far away, their movements slow but inevitable, like hunger given direction.
Yet here, there were no beasts.
No giants circling the sun.
No star-eaters hovering at the edge of its light.
No lurking silhouettes waiting for something to come close.
The emptiness around the Solar System was clean.
Clean enough to be disgusting.
His remaining hand tightened into a fist without him meaning to. The motion pulled at old wounds and reminded him of the limb that was missing. Pain flared faintly, then settled. He did not spare it thought.
He stared harder.
He felt it then. Not with sight, but with the subtle sense that came from countless years reading battlefields and formations.
Dao marks.
A lot of them.
Not the scattered foreign dao marks that had been scraping at his flesh and Gu like sandpaper. Those were random. Those were environmental, a slow erosion that did not care who he was.
This was different.
This was structured.
From a distance, the Solar System looked like a normal arrangement of celestial bodies. But the moment Li Xiao Bai focused his mind, he sensed a pressure, a faint resistance in space itself. It was like an invisible membrane stretched around the system, thin but absolute.
A skin.
A boundary.
It was not a natural phenomenon. Not in the way stars and planets were natural. This was something built, or left behind, or formed through laws that did not exist in the Gu world.
He slowed his drift and stopped using burst movement methods. He let inertia carry him while he observed, careful not to throw out a wide net of perception. He had learned that lesson with blood.
He could not afford to look too deeply.
And still, even with restraint, he sensed it more clearly the closer he came.
Space near the Solar System felt heavier. Not in the way gravity felt, but in the way a formation felt. A structure that guided, rejected, or filtered. The light from the sun bent subtly near the edge, not visibly, not in a way a mortal eye would catch, but in a way his instincts interpreted as interference.
Foreign dao marks, dense and layered, formed a shell around the entire system.
It was a terrifying thought.
In the Gu world, formations used dao marks as foundations. Great formations could change the world inside their range. But even the greatest formation masters could not casually build something that wrapped around an entire world, let alone an entire star system.
This was not a mortal formation.
This was not even an immortal formation in the normal sense.
It felt older, colder, and far more patient.
Li Xiao Bai's heart did not race.
His mind did.
Why was it here?
Why was it protecting this place?
And why did it feel less like protection and more like a trap?
He found the answer to the second question first.
Predators.
They were drawn to stars. They were drawn to mass and heat and energy. He had watched it happen too many times. Yet the Solar System remained untouched.
That meant something else was hunting them.
Not a beast with claws, but a rule.
A rule that punished anything that approached.
A rule that devoured the devourers.
His gaze shifted to the sun again. It burned steadily, indifferent. Ten planets circled it. Everything looked normal.
But nothing was normal.
He could have tried to enter directly.
He did not.
Not because he lacked courage. Fang Yuan's nature did not allow cowardice to become hesitation. But courage without calculation was stupidity, and stupidity was death.
He needed information.
Information path was his foundation. Even now, after the void had been eating his Gu, information path remained the only reason he had made it this far. He did not possess the brute strength to carve through unknown laws. He could only understand, adapt, and exploit.
So he prepared a method.
A killer move.
Not a grand immortal killer move that split mountains, but a practical one, something that sacrificed little and revealed much.
He reached into his immortal aperture and selected Gu with the calm of someone choosing tools, not companions.
Several rank three information path Gu.
A sensing Gu.
A recording Gu.
A signal relay Gu.
Two concealment Gu with weakened vitality.
They were not precious in the Gu world, but here they were still value. Any Gu that remained alive after a year in the void was value.
He was willing to spend value to buy certainty.
Immortal essence flowed.
The Gu activated in sequence, their auras linking into a delicate structure. Lightless threads formed between them, invisible to mortal sight, but clear in his mind as data and intent.
A duplicate emerged in front of him.
It was not flesh. It was not a true clone. It was an information construct, a temporary body made of structured signals and will. It carried a fragment of his consciousness, thin enough to be discarded, sharp enough to observe.
If the construct died, he would lose the Gu used to build it and a sliver of will.
If the construct survived and returned information, he would gain something priceless.
He sent it forward.
The construct drifted toward the Solar System's boundary like a silent scout, concealment layered over it, aura suppressed to near nothing. It moved smoothly, too smoothly, like a thought sliding across a mind.
Li Xiao Bai watched without widening his senses. He relied on the relay method to feed him only what was necessary. He did not stare directly. He did not attempt to perceive the boundary with his own mind.
He waited.
The construct traveled.
Distance collapsed slowly. The membrane-like resistance became clearer on the edge of his perception, not as a wall, but as a region where space refused to be space. A thin, unseen curvature that made the construct's movement feel slightly wrong, as if it was swimming through syrup.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained calm.
Inside, he counted.
Not seconds, not minutes. He counted patterns. He counted the way the relay signal subtly changed. He counted the faint increase in interference.
Then the construct reached a certain range.
It did not touch anything.
It did not cross an obvious line.
It simply entered the outermost layer of that invisible shell.
And everything died.
There was no explosion.
No scream.
No warning.
The Gu that formed the construct simply went silent at once, as if a hand had snapped shut around their existence. The relay signal cut off so cleanly that for a fraction of a moment it felt like the connection had never existed at all.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye widened slightly.
His mind ran through possibilities at once.
A suppressive effect?
A killing effect?
An erasure effect?
A rule that targeted Gu specifically?
He tested the link inside his aperture.
Several Gu that had been part of the method were gone.
Not weakened.
Not damaged.
Gone.
Their presence had vanished as if they had never been refined, never been fed, never been raised.
His breath slowed.
His heart did not change rhythm.
That loss was acceptable. It was the cost he had calculated.
The result, however, was worse than he wanted.
He had gained no information.
Not because the construct failed to observe, but because the moment it entered that range, the Gu died instantly.
It was not a battle.
It was execution.
Li Xiao Bai stared at the Solar System again, and for the first time since he reached its vicinity, a genuine chill crawled along his spine.
This boundary was not merely protective.
It was discriminatory.
It did not kill everything. The sun existed. The planets existed. Matter remained stable inside.
Yet his Gu died the moment they approached.
That meant the shell recognized foreign systems.
It recognized Gu.
Or it recognized the concept of "outside."
A barrier that did not allow certain rules to enter.
A barrier that rejected his entire cultivation framework.
His left hand was missing. His right eye was missing. A part of his body was being eaten slowly by foreign dao marks. Even so, his soul remained chained and stable, held by something he still did not fully understand.
Now, he saw the next problem.
Even if he reached the Solar System physically, even if his body crossed that boundary, what would happen to the Gu inside his aperture?
Would they die as well?
Would his methods collapse the instant he entered?
If that happened, he would become a cripple in a world he did not understand, trapped inside a system that might have its own predators.
He remained silent for a long time.
The void around him did not change. No beasts appeared. No shadows moved. No star-eaters came to investigate.
The Solar System remained calm, as if waiting.
As if it had always been waiting.
Li Xiao Bai lowered his gaze slightly and forced himself to think like Fang Yuan.
Not like a man searching for home.
Not like a survivor seeking shelter.
Like a cultivator facing a formation.
If a formation killed his Gu at the edge, it meant the formation had a rule. Rules could be understood. Understood rules could be exploited.
The first attempt had told him one thing clearly.
Sending Gu-based constructs into the boundary was useless.
If he wanted information, he needed a method that did not rely on Gu crossing that range.
Or he needed to approach in a way that disguised Gu as something the shell accepted.
Or he needed to abandon Gu temporarily and rely on something else.
His remaining eye flicked toward the sun again.
Ten planets circled in silence.
One of them was Earth.
His first world.
His first life.
He had died there once already.
He did not intend to die there again, not as a sentimental return, but as a matter of principle.
The void had tried to erase him. It had failed.
Now the Solar System was telling him that his path did not belong here.
Li Xiao Bai's lips curved into a faint, cold smile.
He did not take it as rejection.
He took it as challenge.
Then he turned slightly, adjusting his drift to circle the boundary instead of charging it, choosing patience over impulsive entry.
If there was a skin around this system, then like all skins, it had seams.
He would find them.
And if something truly hunted the beings drawn to the sun, then he would learn what it was.
Either it would become his obstacle.
Or it would become his tool.
He moved on in silence, one-eyed, one-handed, one-legged, and still very much alive, while the sun burned ahead like a promise that did not want to be kept.