Silence did not mean safety.
Inside the Solar System's shell, the void felt cleaner, brighter, almost civilized. Starlight had structure. Mass had weight. Even distance, that cruel joke in the deep dark, began to behave like something measurable.
That was the lie.
A lantern did not become harmless because the air around it was still.
Li Xiao Bai drifted inward with deliberate restraint, missing a hand and a leg, his balance held together by habit and will. Concealment clung to him in thin layers, not as a shield, but as an apology. No wide sensing. No arrogant probing. No greedy reach for detail.
He had already paid for a single careless glance with an eye.
Now he treated perception like a blade held against his own throat.
The sun grew larger.
Not in the dramatic way of a sudden approach, but in the slow certainty of a body crossing a region where gravity began to speak more clearly. The warmth did not reach him in vacuum, but the light did, and the light made the emptiness less forgiving. Shadows became sharper. Distortions became easier to notice.
The planets revealed themselves one by one, not as myths or hopes, but as points of reflected sunlight that slowly gained identity.
Mercury, a bright fleck close to the sun.
Venus, a steadier glow.
Mars, faint and red in memory more than in sight.
Jupiter, heavy even from far away, a presence with invisible hands.
Saturn, a ringed ghost, distant and unreal.
The rest were harder to pick out without daring stronger methods. He did not dare. Not yet.
Earth came later.
A pale dot at first, easy to mistake for another wandering light.
Then his memory aligned with the geometry, and the dot stopped being a dot. It became a coordinate that stabbed straight through the centuries, straight through the Gu world, straight through the absurdity of drifting through a void that could erase rank five Gu like dust.
Earth.
His first world.
The world that had been ordinary, powerless, fragile.
The world whose maps he once memorized without understanding that one day they could save him.
That familiarity did not soften him. It sharpened him.
Familiar things made people careless.
Li Xiao Bai had not survived five hundred years by becoming soft.
He adjusted his drift and watched.
Still no titans crossed the sun.
Still no star eating silhouettes.
Still no battles of giants sending tremors through emptiness.
The absence remained too perfect.
His mind returned to the same conclusion, cold and clean.
A predator lived here.
Not a beast with teeth.
A mechanism with rules.
Yet even mechanisms left scraps.
The first creature appeared like a mistake in starlight.
A thin thread of darkness, drifting at an angle that did not match any natural orbit. It moved against the subtle pull in a way that felt wrong, like a dead leaf swimming against a river without wind.
Li Xiao Bai did not look directly at it.
He let it pass through the edge of his vision and watched its behavior through indirect cues, through the way faint dust around it bent, through the way starlight near it dimmed by a fraction.
More threads followed.
Dozens.
Then more.
They were not large. None of them carried the oppressive presence of the deep void horrors he had avoided by hiding and fleeing. These things were small, almost pathetic, yet their movement had intention.
Scavengers.
Parasites.
Creatures that survived by being close enough to the shell to feed on what it erased, but far enough to avoid being erased themselves.
One brushed against a drifting pebble of comet ice.
The pebble did not break.
It did not melt.
It simply lost a layer, as if something had shaved away its surface without leaving debris behind. The thread thickened slightly, satisfied, and drifted on.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed.
He had no interest in fighting them.
He had even less interest in attracting them.
So he changed course by a degree, minimal enough that the shell's deeper laws would not notice his adjustment as a challenge.
The threads followed.
Not all.
Only a few.
They traced his path like hungry ink lines, attracted to something he carried, something that the shell had not fully processed.
Foreign dao marks.
Gu world's rules.
A moving meal.
Li Xiao Bai did not speed up.
Speed invited mistakes. Mistakes invited erasure.
Instead, he prepared a small, crude response, not a killer move meant to kill, but a method meant to shed attention.
He released a handful of dead scraps from his aperture, the remains of mortal Gu that had already been weakened beyond usefulness. He let them drift outward like bait.
The threads immediately veered toward them.
They wrapped the scraps, drank something invisible, and grew slightly thicker as the scraps vanished into nothing.
Li Xiao Bai continued drifting inward, expression unchanged.
Even scavengers existed under rules.
Feed, grow, survive.
Their hunger was predictable.
His hunger was not.
Earth grew clearer.
The blue was faint, but it was there. A shade that did not belong to gas giants or dead rock. A color that meant oceans, atmosphere, oxygen.
Oxygen.
That word had not mattered in the Gu world, where immortal apertures could sustain worlds and Gu could produce resources beyond mundane needs. Here, oxygen mattered again, not as comfort, but as survival.
Because his immortal aperture was not only a storage.
It was a refuge.
It was the only place he could maintain stable air, stable pressure, stable life support when his crippled body needed rest.
Without it, his body would not simply weaken.
It would suffocate.
Li Xiao Bai drifted on with that awareness anchored in the back of his mind.
Then something inside him shifted.
Not a thought.
Not a sensation of danger outside.
A tremor from within his immortal aperture.
At first it was subtle, a faint pull that felt like an internal imbalance. Then the tremor sharpened, and his aperture clenched as if something inside it had been grabbed and yanked.
Li Xiao Bai froze mid drift.
He did not move. He did not activate any wide method. He turned inward with the smallest possible examination, careful as a surgeon working beside an open flame.
The sight that greeted him was wrong.
Seventy percent of his immortal aperture's internal environment had vanished.
Not destroyed into rubble.
Not burned into ash.
Gone.
Whole sections of land, resource points, stored materials, prepared areas of air and water, all removed as if someone had scooped them out with a spoon and left a clean void behind.
A clean void that did not belong.
His heart did not race.
His mind did not panic.
The first reaction was calculation.
How much.
How fast.
How long until the rest followed.
Then the second reaction came, colder.
This was not damage.
This was digestion.
The shell's law had reached into his aperture through the connection between his body and his internal world. The pressure outside had not only judged his Gu. It had found the seam where his aperture touched the external laws and pushed through.
The rules were invading.
Taking.
Correcting.
Seventy percent was already gone.
The remaining thirty percent shuddered like a living animal sensing a knife.
A slow pull began.
Subtle, steady.
The rest was starting to be eaten.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze sharpened.
He had only two immortal Gu left that could still function reliably under these foreign conditions. Two. After everything that had been erased.
One of them was his last true information path pillar.
The other was a defensive, stability type Gu, used to reinforce structures and boundaries.
He could not waste either.
Yet if he did nothing, he would lose the aperture entirely.
If he lost the aperture, he would lose oxygen.
If he lost oxygen, his body would die.
Not heroically.
Not dramatically.
Not in battle.
Quietly, stupidly, choking in an empty universe.
That outcome was unacceptable.
Li Xiao Bai focused.
He traced the direction of the pull inside his aperture. The loss was not random. The vanished seventy percent formed a pattern, like a bite taken from one side.
A law had entered from a point of contact.
A breach.
A channel.
The same kind of channel that allowed the shell to judge Gu and erase them. Now that channel was reaching inward and judging his internal world.
His immortal aperture had dao marks.
Gu world's dao marks.
Foreign dao marks.
The shell compared.
Found mismatch.
Deleted.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his remaining eye and made a choice.
He would amputate.
Not flesh.
World.
He summoned one of his immortal Gu.
The Gu emerged in his palm, smaller than it should have been, its aura trembling, suppressing itself as if fearing to be noticed. It was alive, but it felt like a tool held beneath a waterfall, constantly under strain.
Immortal essence flowed.
Not freely.
Not wastefully.
Carefully, like pouring water into a cracked cup.
Li Xiao Bai forced his will into the Gu, shaping the simplest version of its function.
Cut.
Separate.
Isolate.
His aperture shook.
The law inside it resisted, not with emotion, but with inevitability. The foreign pressure did not care about his intentions. It continued to pull, continued to erase, continued to chew through his world with patient certainty.
He pushed back.
A line formed inside the aperture, not visible to mortal eyes, but real in the way rules were real. A boundary, crude and violent, drawn across the remaining land like a blade slicing through meat.
Li Xiao Bai did not hesitate.
He cut.
A segment of the remaining thirty percent, the part closest to the breach, turned pale. Foreign dao marks crawled across it like mold. The air in that segment thinned and tasted wrong, even through the barrier.
Contamination.
If he kept it, the law would use it as a handle.
If he kept it, the rest would follow.
Li Xiao Bai severed it completely.
The contaminated segment vanished instantly.
The shell's law took it, satisfied.
For a breath, the pull weakened.
Li Xiao Bai did not relax.
He cut again, smaller this time, shaving away another sliver that showed the faintest sign of foreign pressure.
More immortal essence burned.
The Gu trembled, its aura thinning with each use as if the foreign environment demanded payment in vitality as well as essence.
Li Xiao Bai ignored the cost.
Cost could be repaid.
Death could not.
Another sliver vanished.
The pull weakened again.
The breach remained, but it was no longer chewing freely. It was forced to take only what he offered.
That meant he had bought time.
Time was the rarest resource.
Li Xiao Bai's jaw tightened.
His remaining hand shook slightly from strain, not from fear.
Immortal essence reserves were not infinite.
His two remaining immortal Gu were not indestructible.
If he continued cutting like this without understanding the mechanism, he would eventually run out of essence or break the Gu, and then the law would consume everything.
A time battle.
Not a fight of fists.
A fight of endurance.
He focused again, deeper.
He needed the cause, not the symptom.
He traced the contamination back toward the breach, toward the seam where external law had pierced the boundary of his aperture. The seam was not a physical hole. It was a conceptual link, the connection between his cultivation system and the external rules.
He found it.
A faint, gnawing point, like a worm chewing at a root.
The laws pressing from outside were not simply touching his aperture.
They had penetrated.
They were rewriting the connection.
They were taking ownership.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained calm, but inside, something cold and sharp settled into place.
This place did not only erase Gu.
It could steal worlds.
His world.
His last refuge.
And it would keep stealing until nothing remained.
Li Xiao Bai tightened his will and forced the immortal Gu to function again, not as a knife this time, but as a barrier.
He reinforced the boundary around the remaining land, compressing it inward. He made the surviving thirty percent denser, harder to chew, less exposed.
More essence burned.
His vision blurred for a moment from strain.
He steadied himself.
He could not afford weakness.
Not when every second might cost him a breath.
He cut away another contaminated piece, small and precise.
Then another.
Each cut was an amputation of resources, air, stability.
Each cut reduced what he could rely on later.
Yet each cut also prevented total loss.
He accepted the trade without emotion.
This was not suffering.
This was survival.
The pull did not stop, but it slowed.
For now.
Li Xiao Bai released a slow breath, careful to keep his body stable in vacuum. That breath did not fog, did not show, but it reminded him his lungs still worked.
For now.
He looked outward again.
Earth remained ahead.
The blue dot grew steadier, more distinct.
A promise and a trap at the same time.
If he could reach Earth, he could find people, resources, structure. He could rebuild. He could adapt his cultivation foundation to this world's laws. He could find a way to stabilize his aperture before it was eaten completely.
If he failed, he would die before even touching atmosphere.
Not by a beast.
Not by a venerable.
By suffocation.
His missing hand tightened into a phantom ache.
His missing leg throbbed with old pain.
His sealed eye socket pulsed with dull memory.
None of it mattered.
Only the remaining thirty percent mattered.
Only the air inside it mattered.
Only the time he had just purchased with essence and will mattered.
Li Xiao Bai drifted forward again, moving inward toward Earth, while inside his body his immortal aperture continued to tremble under the slow pressure of foreign law.
He did not know how long the barrier would hold.
He did not know how many cuts he could afford.
He only knew one thing.
This was no longer a journey.
It was a race against the loss of breath itself.