Months passed without a sunrise.
Time in the void did not move with light or shadow. It moved with distance and erosion, with the slow shift of gravity lines, with the way a small mistake could shorten the future by an invisible margin. Li Xiao Bai measured those months the way he had learned to measure everything else.
By what remained stable.
By what changed.
By what tried to kill him quietly.
The calm inside the Solar System never became comforting.
Quiet could be mercy. Quiet could also be the pause between a judge's questions, the moment where a rule decides whether the next step is allowed. Here, nothing lunged at him with fangs. Nothing chased him with a roar. Instead, the system watched. It pressed. It examined.
Li Xiao Bai drifted through that examination with the patience of someone who had lived too long to be surprised by cruelty.
His body was a map of losses that refused to become weakness.
The missing left hand forced every seal and adjustment to be done with one hand and ruthless precision. The crippled left leg made balance a constant calculation, not in the sense of standing, but in the sense of controlling posture, angle, and flow whenever he shifted direction. The ruined right eye left him with a narrower world and sharper discipline.
In another place, such injuries could be repaired with time and resources.
Here, they were simply facts.
He did not waste thought on what could not be changed.
The route inward was not straight. He avoided lanes where the pressure felt thick, where the system's invisible skin seemed closer, as if law itself had depth and weight. He used momentum when he could, letting orbit and mass do part of the work, moving like debris when it benefited him, moving like a knife when it did not.
Occasionally, he saw large shapes far away.
Slow moving, indifferent, like continents drifting through dark water. Some looked like rock wrapped around flesh. Some carried shells that resembled asteroid fields fused into bone. They remained at the edges, never approaching the inner orbits.
Li Xiao Bai did not approach them either.
He did not challenge them.
He did not even watch them longer than necessary.
He had learned the cost of looking.
That cautious travel created time. Time created space for thought, and thought was both weapon and poison.
So he allowed himself controlled fragments of it, not to comfort himself, but to check what had become certain.
Earth was ahead.
Not as a promise, not as a home, not as a destination filled with meaning.
As a coordinate.
His first life had begun there.
Before cultivation.
Before Gu.
Before the language of power became dao marks and essence.
He remembered the Solar System from textbooks and charts, from that ordinary science that could explain the sky but could not change fate. He had studied stars because they were distant and untouchable, because knowledge felt like the only ladder a mortal could climb.
The irony had sharpened over centuries.
In that first life, he had wanted more time. More years. A longer span to work, to research, to push forward by another thin line. On Earth, death from aging was treated like an unavoidable law. The best anyone could do was delay it. Extend it. Dress delay in a better name and call it progress.
He had chased that delay once.
He had wasted years.
He had called himself a scientist and believed effort could overcome the wall.
Then the Gu world happened, and the wall cracked.
Not because the world was kind, but because the world offered a ladder.
It offered a path where limits could be refined, where lifespan was not a ceiling but a resource, where the concept of eternity was not a myth told to soothe fear.
After five hundred years of experience, after watching beings who could tilt history with a thought, Li Xiao Bai understood one truth with cold clarity.
Even if there were a way back, he would not return.
Not because he hated Earth.
Because Earth could not hold his dream.
On Earth, immortality was a dream with no foundation. Even a thousand years of research might only produce a longer life. Ten thousand might produce better medicine. A hundred thousand might produce something that lasted, but it would still be bargaining with decay. It would still be a slower death, not the end of death.
That was not what he wanted.
He did not want to avoid aging.
He wanted eternity.
True eternity.
A state that could endure worlds and laws and time itself.
That was the difference between a mortal goal and a cultivator's goal. A mortal accepted the cage and tried to make it comfortable. A cultivator searched for the hinges.
Li Xiao Bai had long stopped being interested in comfort.
If he died on the way, he would not regret it. Dying while chasing the goal was not failure. Failure was abandoning the goal to live a few extra decades and still die anyway.
That was the truth that had hardened into his bones.
Earth grew clearer.
Blue.
White.
Cloud bands twisting across the surface like slow scars.
The moon, pale and close, carried a faint stain that should not have existed.
Mist.
Not the thin suggestion of dust. Not a shadow from craters. A patch of haze that clung to the surface like fog, thick enough to blur the boundary of the ground beneath it.
Li Xiao Bai's caution tightened instantly.
He did not drift closer.
He did not widen perception.
He did not activate a broad information method to analyze it.
He had paid enough for curiosity already.
He shifted his angle slightly, changing his line of approach to view the haze from a different direction without closing distance. The patch remained, unmoving in a way that did not resemble weather. It sat on the moon's surface like a wound that refused to heal.
His remaining eye narrowed.
In this system, quiet had meaning.
Protection had meaning.
If something shielded this place, then something also controlled entry. Control could be automated law. Control could be a presence that used law as a weapon. Either way, the mist did not look like something left behind by nature.
It looked like something placed.
He adjusted concealment with one hand, making the smallest possible shifts, thinning his aura until he felt like dead stone rather than living will. It was not perfect. Nothing was perfect here. But less signal was better than more.
He watched the mist in short glances.
Once, it pulsed faintly.
Twice.
As if breathing.
Li Xiao Bai stopped moving for a moment, letting inertia carry him while his mind stayed still.
That pulse could have been an illusion.
Or it could have been a warning.
He chose to treat it as a warning.
His approach angle changed again, wider now. Earth was the target. The moon was a risk. He did not need to understand the moon to survive the next step. He needed stability first.
He began drifting inward, careful and steady.
The moon remained close in his peripheral view, the haze a stain he refused to ignore. Distance in space could be deceptive. A gap that looked safe could vanish in a heartbeat if something chose to move.
He did not like that thought.
So he kept watching, but never long enough for looking to become commitment.
Then, within the mist, something shifted.
Li Xiao Bai froze.
Not because of fear.
Because of recognition.
A silhouette.
Not a mass of eyes. Not tentacles. Not the obscene geometry of a void horror.
A human outline.
Two arms. Two legs. A torso. A head.
Rigid lines wrapped the body, hard angles and fitted segments, as if the person was sealed inside something manufactured. A round glint suggested a helmet. A faint reflection flashed where a visor might be, catching sunlight and returning it like a cold signal.
The figure stood on the moon's surface inside the haze.
Motionless.
Silent.
Impossible.
Li Xiao Bai did not stare.
He took in the shape in a single controlled glance, then cut his gaze away as if it burned.
His body remained still, drifting in darkness, one hand clenched, one eye focused.
Behind him, the lunar mist did not spread.
The human shape did not move.
A man stood in the fog on the moon, wearing a spacesuit, as if he had been waiting there the whole time.