Li Xiao Bai did not rush the boundary.
Rushing was for people who still believed the universe cared about bravery.
He drifted along the Solar System's outer edge in a slow arc, keeping a cautious distance from the range where his information construct had been erased. He moved like a scrap of dead metal, letting inertia carry him, correcting only when necessary. Every adjustment was calculated. Every activation was weighed.
The void around the Solar System felt different.
Not safer, not gentler, but arranged.
Out in the deeper dark, space had been raw. Foreign dao marks were scattered like sand, scraping at flesh and Gu without pattern or purpose. Here, the dao marks were dense enough to feel like pressure. They gathered in layers, overlapping and interlocking, forming a continuous shell that wrapped around the system like an invisible sphere.
A skin.
A prison wall.
A sieve.
Li Xiao Bai did not yet know which.
He circled for what felt like days. There was no sunrise, no rotation of a horizon, no sense of place other than the map he built in his mind. The sun remained the only fixed reference, its light falling across his face and turning his bloodless scars pale gold.
He used the sun like a compass. He used the distant planets like anchors. He used memory from his first life to estimate positions and distances, even though he understood the cruel truth of space. What he saw was not where things were. Light was delayed. Perspective lied. In the void, a planet could look close and still be months away.
So he did not trust sight alone.
He trusted patterns.
The foreign dao marks around the Solar System did not feel uniform. Some regions were thicker, more rigid, their pressure sharper. Other regions were slightly softer, the shell's resistance fading like a breath held too long.
That difference was faint, but it existed.
Seams.
If the boundary had been made or shaped by a rule, then the rule had edges. Even the most perfect formation had weak points. That was not optimism. That was experience.
Li Xiao Bai had spent centuries watching formations rise and fall in the Gu world. He knew that absolute defenses were myths used to comfort the weak. Everything had a cost. Everything had a flaw.
He just had to find it.
He began with small tests.
Not Gu constructs. Not anything that would enter the killing range. He took pebbles of matter instead, pieces of comet ice and stone he had gathered earlier. He flicked them forward with a subtle motion, sending them toward the shell from a safe angle.
The pebbles drifted.
They crossed the outer layer of pressure.
Nothing happened.
They did not vanish.
They did not explode.
They simply continued forward, slipping into the region where his Gu had died.
Li Xiao Bai watched carefully, forcing himself not to widen his senses too much. He relied on normal sight and the faintest information path readings that did not extend into the lethal range. He wanted to observe without touching.
The pebbles passed deeper.
Some slowed slightly, as if space had thickened.
Some curved, their trajectories bending in tiny arcs.
Then, at a certain distance, the pebbles became hard to see, not because they vanished, but because the shell bent light and interfered with clarity. Their outlines blurred into the sunlit haze.
Still, they remained.
Matter could pass.
Gu could not.
That meant the boundary was not a simple erasure field.
It was selective.
It recognized systems.
It recognized cultivation.
Or it recognized intent.
Li Xiao Bai sent another pebble, this time one he marked with a tiny method, a weak information path imprint that would normally cling to an object like a smell. He did not push the imprint far, only enough to tag the pebble and track it through the relay of his own senses.
The pebble moved.
The imprint survived the outer pressure.
Then, the moment the pebble entered the range where the Gu construct had died, the imprint snapped.
Not slowly.
Not with resistance.
It severed as if someone had cut the concept of connection itself.
Li Xiao Bai stared at the empty space where the imprint had been.
The pebble continued inward, still physically present, still drifting.
But the information link was gone.
He understood then.
The boundary was not killing Gu because Gu were insects.
It was killing the rules behind them.
Information.
Connection.
Dao marks shaped into function.
The shell rejected anything that carried an internal law different from its own.
A formation that denied foreign laws.
A barrier that protected the system by refusing other systems permission to operate.
Li Xiao Bai felt a slow, cold realization settle into his chest.
If he crossed that boundary, his Gu might die inside his aperture the same way. Or worse, they might not die immediately but become useless, their dao marks destabilized, their functions erased.
If that happened, he would not be a Gu Immortal here.
He would be a wounded man with a chained soul and nothing else.
He did not flinch.
He did not retreat.
He kept circling.
The void had already forced him into worse positions. A man did not survive a year in that darkness by giving up because the next step was dangerous. Every step was dangerous. The only difference was whether the danger could be understood.
As he moved along the shell, he noticed something else.
The emptiness was too clean.
It was clean in a way that felt maintained.
Out in the deeper void, debris existed. Comets, fragments, dust, the leftovers of collisions. Here, near the boundary, drifting objects were rarer. Not nonexistent, but uncommon, as if something swept this region regularly.
Li Xiao Bai did not imagine a giant broom.
He imagined a predator.
Something that fed on anything approaching.
Not by tearing flesh.
By erasing.
By consuming the very rules that made things powerful.
He remembered his missing right eye.
He remembered the moment his sight had blurred as if something had scraped the concept of perception. He remembered how awareness itself had felt like a rope.
A rope could be pulled.
A rope could be used to locate prey.
If the Solar System had a guardian, it might not be a beast. It might be an effect. A law. A mechanism that targeted attention and power.
Li Xiao Bai lowered his gaze and continued his arc, moving to the side where the shell's pressure felt slightly softer.
Hours passed.
Or days.
Time in the void was measured in endurance.
He reached a region where the foreign dao marks around the shell were strange. Not weaker, not thinner, but different in texture. The pressure there had a faint rhythm, like waves crashing against an unseen shore. Every pulse made his skin prickle. Every pulse made his aperture feel slightly tighter, as if something outside was pressing on its boundary.
He slowed further.
He stopped activating everything except concealment. Even concealment was kept minimal, layered thinly, like cloth rather than armor. He wanted to be hard to notice, not loud enough to challenge whatever rule lived here.
He began another test.
This time, he released a living creature.
From his immortal aperture, he produced a small Gu-world animal he had preserved. It was not a Gu insect, not a refined tool, but a mundane creature that had once lived inside his blessed land. He had brought several for experiments earlier. Most had died in vaporized screams the moment they faced the void. A few he kept sealed, saved as tools for later.
He released one now.
The animal tumbled in vacuum, limbs jerking in panic, mouth opening in silent terror.
Li Xiao Bai watched with expressionless calm.
Within seconds, the creature's body stiffened. Not from cold alone. It began to dry and whiten, as if the void was drinking the moisture out of it. Then it trembled, shuddered, and its flesh turned brittle.
It did not vanish.
It simply died.
The shell did not reach out and erase it. The void did what the void always did. It killed.
Li Xiao Bai nodded faintly.
This did not answer the question.
He released a second creature, this time throwing it gently toward the boundary with a subtle motion.
The dead body drifted forward.
It reached the outer pressure.
Nothing happened.
It passed.
The shell did not reject it.
Then, the moment it entered the pulsing region, the corpse changed.
It did not explode. It did not disappear.
It became soft.
The brittle flesh relaxed as if rewound. The whitened surface darkened. For a heartbeat, it looked almost alive again, as if time had shifted.
Then the corpse crumpled into dust.
Dust that was not dust.
Dust that floated in a slow spiral, drawn into an invisible flow that circled the shell.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed.
A recycling effect.
The shell did not merely block foreign rules. It processed what entered. It broke it down and carried it away along a current of dao marks like a river around a fortress wall.
That current might be why this region was clean.
Anything that drifted too close was processed and swept.
The thought sharpened into certainty.
Something fed here.
Even if it was not conscious, even if it was a mechanism, it behaved like a predator.
Predators had habits.
Habits could be exploited.
Li Xiao Bai continued circling, following the current's direction. He did not chase it closely. He stayed outside the lethal range and observed the way dust and small fragments were guided.
Slowly, an image formed in his mind.
The shell was not uniform.
It was layered, like an onion.
The outer layer slowed movement and distorted light.
The inner layer erased Gu-level information and connection.
The pulsing region processed matter into a circulating current.
If there were seams, they would be where those layers overlapped imperfectly.
Li Xiao Bai moved along the flow until he found a place where the pulse rhythm stuttered.
It was subtle. A pulse arrived slightly late. The pressure dipped for a fraction, then recovered.
A flaw.
His mind sharpened.
He did not rush to exploit it immediately. He tested it.
He took another pebble, marked it with a weak imprint, and sent it toward that stutter point.
The pebble moved inward.
The imprint snapped, as expected, the moment it entered the Gu-killing range.
But something else happened.
For a fraction of a moment, the pebble's trajectory bent differently. Instead of being guided smoothly into the circulating current, it wobbled, as if the current could not decide how to process it.
Then the next pulse hit, and the pebble was caught and swept away.
Li Xiao Bai watched the exact moment the wobble occurred.
His mind replayed it.
The wobble lasted less than a breath.
Less than the time needed for a large movement method.
But it existed.
If he could create a similar disturbance, he might be able to slip through an inner layer before the processing current caught him.
He did not smile.
A trap was still a trap, even if it had a gap.
And if this was a guardian mechanism, then slipping through might trigger something worse.
Yet he did not have a better choice.
He could not remain in the void forever. His Gu were dying. His body was being eaten. His losses were accumulating.
A year had passed. Another might kill him.
If the Solar System was protected, then entering it required risk.
He accepted that without emotion.
Li Xiao Bai began to prepare.
He retreated slightly, drifting away from the shell to a safer distance. He sat in empty space with no chair, no ground, no sky, and performed the only kind of rest he allowed himself now.
He reviewed his remaining resources.
The Gu he still had.
The immortal essence stored.
The methods he could use without relying on a wide information net.
He counted each tool like a butcher counting knives.
Then he built a plan.
He would not push his body through the seam first.
His body could not afford a mistake.
He would push something disposable.
Not a Gu construct.
Not a marked pebble.
Something with mass and momentum, something that could disturb the pulse without carrying foreign rules that would be erased too early.
A chunk of comet ice, large enough to create drag, dense enough to resist the first processing pull for a fraction longer.
A battering ram.
He selected one from his stored materials, a rough block of ice and stone the size of a small boulder. He dragged it out of his aperture and held it with his remaining hand, feeling its cold through the thin layer of immortal essence he used to insulate his skin.
He did not throw it immediately.
He waited.
He watched the pulse rhythm again.
One.
Two.
Three.
The stutter came.
He moved.
He pushed the boulder forward with a careful burst, sending it directly toward the seam region. Not too fast. Too much force might attract attention. Too little would be useless.
The boulder crossed the outer layer.
It slowed.
It bent slightly.
It entered the pulsing region.
For a moment, the shell's current tried to take it. The boulder resisted, its mass forcing the current to strain. The pulse arrived late again, and the boulder wobbled, creating a disturbance, a kink in the processing flow.
Li Xiao Bai acted instantly.
He did not use a large movement method. He did not rely on complex formations.
He used the simplest vector change he could, a restrained burst that shifted his trajectory sideways and inward, aiming for the disturbance window.
His body moved.
The shell's pressure thickened around him.
For a fraction of a second, he felt his aperture tighten as if someone had placed a hand around it.
His concealment flickered.
He forced it to remain stable.
Then he felt it.
Not a strike.
Not an attack.
A question.
A silent pressure that pressed against the concept of his existence, as if something inside the shell noticed an anomaly approaching and reached out to evaluate.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye hardened.
He did not respond with fear.
He responded with stillness.
He shut down all unnecessary activity. He sealed his essence further. He made himself as close to dead as possible.
The pressure lingered.
Then it withdrew, as if disappointed.
Li Xiao Bai continued drifting inward, riding the disturbance created by the boulder.
The boulder began to crumble into dust, caught by the current at last.
The disturbance window was closing.
He was still inside the outer layer.
Not yet past the inner erasure field.
He could feel it ahead, like a blade waiting to cut.
If he crossed it, something in his aperture might die.
If he did not cross it, the current would catch him and sweep him away.
Li Xiao Bai did not hesitate.
He pushed forward into the thickening pressure.
And at that moment, as the shell's inner layer reached for his existence, his immortal aperture shuddered.
Somewhere inside, one of his Gu trembled.
Then another.
A cold sensation slid across his consciousness, not pain, not fear, but the unmistakable feeling of something being judged by a rule that did not belong to him.
Li Xiao Bai clenched his jaw.
He kept moving.
The sun burned ahead, indifferent.
The seam closed behind him like a mouth.
And the Solar System's skin began to decide what it would allow inside.