The pressure thickened.
It was not wind. Not gravity. Not heat.
It was a law.
A rule pressing down from nowhere, sliding across him like a cold blade searching for the seam between what he was and what this place allowed. The moment Li Xiao Bai drifted deeper, the Solar System's invisible skin stopped behaving like a boundary and began to behave like a verdict.
His immortal aperture shuddered.
Inside, the Gu stirred.
Some trembled like animals sensing fire. Some went rigid, instincts screaming even through seals. Their reactions were not random. It was recognition, the instinctive fear of creatures born under one set of rules when another set of rules reached in to judge them.
Then came the first deaths.
Rank one Gu went first.
Not one. Not two.
Dozens at once.
They did not burst. They did not rot. They did not even die in a way that left a corpse. Their auras flickered like candles in a sealed room, and then the flame was simply removed from existence. The connection threads snapped so cleanly that for a heartbeat Li Xiao Bai wondered if he had imagined them.
He had not.
He felt their absence as a silent subtraction inside his mind. A hollowing out that came without pain, yet carried an unsettling finality.
He did not flinch. He only observed.
The shell was not killing life.
It was killing permission.
Rank one Gu carried the simplest rules, thin fragments of dao marks too weak to defend themselves. The Solar System's skin touched those fragments, compared them to its own law, and decided, with perfect coldness, that they did not belong.
So it erased them.
The void inside his aperture rippled again.
More rank one Gu vanished, this time in waves. A hundred. Then more. Minor support insects, residue feeders, scent markers, storage helpers, disposable servants he had once kept because it was easier to have them than not.
They were reduced to nothing in silence.
Li Xiao Bai's expression did not change.
He had seen extinction before. He had caused it. He had stood above countless deaths with a heart unmoved.
This was different only in method.
Here, death was not a blade or a fire.
It was a simple correction.
Rank two Gu trembled next.
Some cracked, their essence unraveling into faint gray dust that had nowhere to go. Others lost shape entirely, melting into lightless motes before vanishing. A few resisted for a breath longer, their auras flaring in instinctive defiance, then folding inward as if crushed by a hand that did not exist.
He kept still.
His immortal essence remained sealed. His breathing remained minimized. His body remained as close to dead matter as a living will could become.
Resistance would not save the Gu.
Resistance would only make the shell notice him more.
The deaths climbed.
Rank three followed.
A cluster of information path Gu bound together in a small internal formation died simultaneously. Their disappearance was not a cascade. It was a clean severing, like someone cutting the foundation out from under a building and watching it collapse without sound.
A hollow pressure formed inside his aperture, like a tooth pulled from the jaw of his cultivation foundation.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed slightly.
This was not ordinary erosion like the void outside. This was targeted. Efficient. Personal in the way a mechanism could be personal.
He pushed forward another inch.
The pressure tightened.
And rank four Gu began to collapse.
One died first, abruptly. He felt it as a sharp pull behind his heart, a twisting that turned into absence. Its dao marks warped, fractured, and then broke apart with the distant sensation of thin glass shattering.
A second rank four Gu fought longer. It flared once, bright and desperate, then dimmed. Its entire function was erased so completely that the space it occupied in his thoughts went blank for a moment.
Then came the fifth rank.
The shell reached deeper.
Rank five Gu were not weak insects. They were power made flesh, refined through centuries of effort. Their dao marks were rich, layered, interwoven. In the Gu world, they were tools that could change battlefields, alter destinies, carve survival out of hopelessness.
Here, they struggled like fish thrown into a burning sea.
The shell's judgment did not crush them with force.
It tore logic apart.
One of them weakened rapidly, its aura shuddering as if the laws inside it were being peeled away layer by layer. Another spasmed, its dao marks bleeding out like veins leaking light. A third tried to stabilize itself, instinctively folding inward, suppressing its presence like prey pretending to be dead.
It did not matter.
The law did not need to see.
It only needed to compare.
And the comparison was absolute.
One rank five Gu vanished.
A breath later, another followed.
Li Xiao Bai felt each death as a deeper cut than the loss of rank one insects. Rank one and two were tools. Rank five were structure. They were infrastructure, pillars within the ecosystem of his aperture. When one died, it did not simply remove a method. It destabilized the whole foundation that method was tied to.
A weaker mind would have panicked.
Li Xiao Bai remained cold.
Loss was not tragedy.
Loss was accounting.
He shifted his momentum sideways.
Not fast. Not careless.
He followed the faint seam where the pressure stuttered, where the shell's pulse had a tiny irregularity. The disturbance was subtle, barely more than a change in how his instincts clenched. Yet in a place like this, subtle differences were the only doors.
If he moved too fast, the remaining Gu would be processed.
If he moved too slow, the shell would finish stripping him clean.
He moved with the precision of a blade sliding through the narrow space between ribs.
The pressure hunted him as he drifted.
Hundreds of rank one Gu continued to perish in waves. The shell did not stop at dozens. It kept going as if trimming weeds, removing anything too small to justify preservation. Their deaths created no sound, no burst of energy, only absence.
Within seconds, his aperture felt cleaner, too clean, like a garden cut down to bare soil.
Rank two Gu followed.
Connection threads snapped like strings in a storm. He felt the losses in his gut, not with emotion, but with clarity. Some of these Gu he had raised for decades. Some had been refined through countless experiments. Some had survived wars, ambushes, disasters.
They died here without dignity, not because they were weak, but because the law refused their logic.
Rank three held longer, then fell.
Rank four flickered under strain.
Rank five shuddered like mountains under an unseen quake.
Li Xiao Bai's immortal aperture shook with cumulative loss. Internal formations collapsed. The balance between resources and functions snapped in small places, then spread. A structure built over centuries began to hollow out from the inside.
Yet he did not stop.
Turning back would mean the same death, only slower.
He pushed forward.
The shell surged once more, furious and exact.
His aperture clenched like a fist closing around a heart. Every Gu still alive shivered on the edge of erasure. Rank four Gu bled dao marks. Rank five Gu strained, their auras thinned, their internal rules peeling like skin.
Two rank five Gu ruptured almost together.
Not with explosion.
With disappearance.
Their stored memories flared across his consciousness in broken fragments, then dissolved. Disconnected images. Cold starlight. Silent void. The feeling of being watched. The sensation of rules snapping.
Then nothing.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled once, slow and controlled.
That one hurt.
Not emotionally.
Practically.
Each lost rank five Gu was a chunk of his ability to survive in a place where survival required options.
He pushed one more inch.
The pressure peaked.
For a heartbeat, he felt the shell's judgment touch him directly, not his Gu, not his tools, but the outline of his existence, as if deciding whether to erase the intruder instead of merely stripping him.
He did not resist.
He did not plead.
He did not even tighten his will outward.
He did the opposite.
He became smaller.
He folded his presence inward until he was barely more than drift and stubbornness.
Then the law withdrew.
Not fading.
Stopping.
Like a blade pulled away because the cut was complete.
The pressure vanished so suddenly that Li Xiao Bai almost felt weightless, even in the void.
He was inside.
He did not relax.
He stabilized himself immediately. He checked his body with the smallest internal method he dared.
His left hand was gone, the stump sealed and scarred from earlier damage. His left leg was missing below the knee. His right eye was a sealed ruin. The pain had long been ground down into something dull, something he could carry without wasting thought on it.
He had endured worse in the Gu world. Refining failures that cracked souls. Battles where minds broke. Schemes that consumed everything except the will to keep moving.
This was not the worst.
It was simply relentless.
He checked his aperture.
The losses were brutal.
Hundreds of rank one Gu were gone.
Dozens of rank two and three were erased or dead.
Several rank four were processed into silence.
And more than one rank five had been removed as if the universe had reached in, pointed, and said, You do not get to have this here.
The survivors hid deep, suppressing their auras as if pretending to be dead. Even sealed, they felt fragile. Some did not respond properly when he nudged them, like blades dulled by unseen corrosion.
Li Xiao Bai nodded faintly.
High price.
Not fatal.
He forced himself to look outward.
The sun hung ahead.
For the first time in a year, it felt closer in a way that was not only visual. The pull of mass was stronger. The structure of space was clearer. Orbits existed here. Patterns. A familiar geometry hidden beneath this foreign law.
The light filled his remaining eye, dazzling after endless darkness.
The planets glimmered like faint ghosts along their paths.
He knew those paths.
Not because of the Gu world.
Because before the Gu world, there had been another life.
Earth.
He had been born there once. He had studied this arrangement in ordinary textbooks, on maps that were meant for children, in a science that felt powerless compared to cultivation, and yet held one advantage cultivation often forgot.
It was honest about distance.
It was honest about emptiness.
Now that knowledge became an anchor.
Not proof.
Not comfort.
An anchor.
His gaze tracked the faint points that were not stars but planets catching sunlight. He watched the thin scar of the asteroid belt. He measured the spacing by instinct, comparing it to memory, to what should have been.
And then his mind tightened.
There were no monsters.
No titanic silhouettes drifting near the sun.
No star eating giants circling the planets.
Nothing like the battles he had sensed in deeper void, where collisions between colossal beings made space tremble.
A system this bright should have been a feast.
Yet it was quiet.
Too quiet.
Li Xiao Bai did not believe in miracles.
So he believed in predators.
This shell was not merely protection.
It was a system.
A structure that refused foreign dao marks, devoured incompatible laws, and left nothing behind but emptiness.
That was why void beasts did not approach.
That was why nothing else survived near the sun.
This place did not repel them.
It digested them.
Li Xiao Bai's lips curved, barely.
Not a smile of relief.
A smile of recognition.
He had passed a boundary that erased rank five Gu like dust, and he was still moving.
That meant the system was not perfect.
Or it had not finished judging him.
Either way, there was a path.
He adjusted his drift, compensating for missing limb and hand, ignoring the discomfort, letting practice replace balance. Then he turned his gaze toward the faint blue world circling the sun, the planet that had once been home in his first life.
"Earth," he whispered.
The word carried no longing.
No fear.
Only coordinates.
He had entered a realm where Gu could die in silence.
Now he would learn what kind of power survived under this law.
And what kind of predator lived in the quiet.