Li Xiao Bai returned to awareness the way a drowned man surfaced.
Not with relief.
Not with gratitude.
With a single sharp thought that cut through the numb haze.
'I am still here.'
There was no wind. No air. No warmth. Not even the honest cold of winter. This place did not bother to feel hostile. It simply did not care whether he existed at all.
The chain around his soul was tight.
Not heavy. Not metallic. Not anything his mind could file under ordinary comparisons.
Tight, like a conclusion.
Tight, like a verdict.
It did not comfort him. It merely forced him into a shape that could be held together.
He tested his limbs.
He found them, and then he found the absence.
His left arm ended too early. The edge was clean, not sliced, not burned. A missing sentence in a book. His immortal body should have reacted, should have surged with self-repair and dao marks.
Instead, his flesh remained quiet.
As if healing required laws.
As if laws were expensive here.
He lowered his gaze.
Nothing.
No ground. No sky. No up or down. A void that did not even bother to be dark. Darkness was still a color. This was the lack of a canvas.
And yet he was not drifting wildly.
Something held him in place.
The chain did not let his soul unravel, and the same force kept his remaining body from dissolving into dust. He could not see the anchor, but he could feel restraint, as if his existence had been tied to a point the void could not swallow immediately.
Li Xiao Bai inhaled out of habit.
The breath did nothing, but the habit mattered. Habits were identity. Identity was survival.
He moved his tongue, tested whether he could speak. His voice came out thin, almost swallowed as soon as it formed.
'Good.'
The word was not reassurance. It was a marker. A line drawn across nothing, however fragile.
His mind assembled the last stable sequence it could afford.
Heavenly Court. A fruit. A silhouette. Star Constellation's posture, measured and final. Seals layered until the captured Qi Sea clone stopped being a person and became a component.
Then the twist.
Not an external attack.
Not a direct interruption.
An internal contradiction.
Something buried inside the ingredient had turned the method into rejection.
He did not need the exact mechanism yet. The result confirmed the intent behind it.
Fang Yuan had seen this outcome before it existed.
He had stepped away and let the world punish itself.
Li Xiao Bai recalled the single glimpse. A calm silhouette where panic should have been. No frantic defense. No righteous performance.
That glimpse was enough.
Not because it proved cruelty.
Because it proved control.
He did not waste time assigning morality to it. Morality did not change outcomes.
He tightened his thoughts into a narrow line.
Assess.
He tried to extend immortal sense.
It reached a short distance and weakened, as if the void refused to be grasped. The attempt returned little more than pressure and absence.
But there was one thing he could detect.
A scar.
Ahead, far away in a direction he could not truly name, there was a jagged seam. A tear. A wound in reality where rules began again.
It trembled like a distant mirage.
The chain around his soul tugged toward it, not gently, but inevitably, as if the path had been chosen long ago.
Li Xiao Bai did not resist.
Resistance was waste.
The chain had already decided to keep him intact, and decisions like that never came without price. Fighting it would only spend the little clarity he still possessed.
Instead, he examined himself.
His aperture felt wrong.
In a lawful world, his immortal aperture was a universe nested inside him, stable and obedient. Here, it felt like a locked room with the lights off. The door existed, but the key did not fit.
His immortal essence was still there, but it moved sluggishly. He could spend it, but the return was poor. Like throwing gold into a furnace to get a single spark.
His concealment methods were worse than weakened.
They were irrelevant.
Hiding implied being seen. The void did not see. It did not acknowledge. It simply removed.
He reached toward the chain with his will.
The chain did not answer.
It was not refined by him. Not his Gu. Not a tool he could command. A restraint that had chosen to hold him together for reasons that remained opaque.
Li Xiao Bai accepted that quickly.
A person did not waste time crying at locked doors. A person searched for another entrance.
The seam ahead was the only direction.
He let the chain pull.
Motion returned slowly, like waking from deep sleep. There was no wind to measure speed. No stars to mark distance.
Only the pressure of being dragged through absence.
Time became strange.
A minute could feel like a day. A day could vanish in a blink.
Li Xiao Bai did not rely on feeling. He counted with thoughts.
One.
Two.
Three.
He forced his mind into steady rhythm, using methods built over centuries. Information Path was not just gathering secrets. It was building a mind that could remain clear when clarity was expensive.
As he traveled, the void did not change.
But he did.
The longer he remained there, the more he noticed loss.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
A memory blurred at the edges. Not the important parts, not yet. Minor details first. A name. A formation pattern. A face that had never mattered.
The void gnawed at the unnecessary parts first.
Like a predator that began with fat before muscle.
Li Xiao Bai responded the only way he could.
He pruned.
He chose what to keep.
Fang Yuan's glimpse.
Methods of concealment and survival.
Key knowledge of dao marks, path interactions, refinement logic.
His name.
If the void wanted to eat him, it could start with nostalgia. He would not offer it anything valuable.
He let certain memories fade without hesitation.
They had served their purpose.
They could die.
The chain tugged again, sharper this time.
The seam grew clearer.
At first, a faint shimmer.
Then a line like a cut across glass.
Beyond it, he sensed lawful space. Not friendly. Not safe. But structured. A place where techniques could function again.
He did not feel hope.
Hope was distraction.
He felt opportunity.
The seam widened slightly as he approached, and for the first time since entering the void, he saw something that resembled color.
A pale glow, like distant starlight.
The boundary resisted, as if reality disliked being touched from this side.
The chain tightened.
Li Xiao Bai was dragged toward the seam, and the moment his soul brushed the edge, pain detonated inside him.
Not physical pain.
A pain of definition.
As if his existence was being forced to fit into a template.
The chain held him together, and the seam tried to decide what he was allowed to be.
For a heartbeat, his mind flashed with brutal clarity.
Worlds were fragile.
Rules were membranes.
Everything people called natural was a stable agreement that could be withdrawn.
Then he crossed.
The transition was violent.
Sensation flooded back. Distance snapped into meaning. Orientation returned. Cold returned. Sound returned, though there was nothing to carry it.
And light returned.
Not sunlight.
Starlight.
A field of dead stars scattered across endless black.
Li Xiao Bai's body jerked as if thrown from height, even though there was no ground. He spun, vomited nothing, and forced the rotation to stop with a controlled burst of immortal essence.
It worked.
That alone confirmed everything.
He was back in a place where laws existed.
He steadied himself and looked around.
Space.
Real space.
A graveyard of stars and distant worlds.
A pale planet far away, cracked like an egg. A comet-like trail of debris. A faint haze like smoke across the void.
And nearby, the remnant.
The piece of Heavenly Court dragged through the seam.
It was smaller now.
Much smaller.
Most of it had vanished inside the lawless void. Only a jagged tooth remained, drifting in silence. Formation inscriptions had been erased in places, leaving blank, smooth scars.
There were no immortals left on it.
Not a corpse.
Not a scrap of will.
Not a single lingering aperture.
They were gone.
Li Xiao Bai stared at the empty remnant and felt nothing.
Then he turned away.
The dead could not help him. Attachment could not help him.
He checked his arm again. The missing portion remained missing, but he could sense faint reaction from his dao marks. Healing was possible again.
It would cost resources he did not have.
He checked his aperture.
Weak response, but response. He could access some stored materials. Not much. The clone had not been carrying a treasury. Heavenly Court had not given him time to prepare.
He was an exile with a knife and a mind.
And a chain around his soul.
The chain was still there.
It had not loosened after dragging him through the seam. If anything, it felt more stable now, as if it had anchored itself in lawful space and decided to remain.
He probed it again with will.
No response.
Fine.
If a shackle would not answer, treat it like a fixed condition.
Like gravity. Like time. Like the inevitability of death.
One more factor to exploit.
He looked back.
The seam was already closing.
The cut in reality shrank slowly, like a wound healing. The edge shimmered, thinned, narrowed to a hairline crack.
Then vanished.
The void was gone.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled.
Not relief.
Calculation.
So the seam was temporary.
So returning was impossible.
So his path forward was one way.
He looked at the star field again, and for the first time, a true problem rose.
Where am I.
He was not in the Gu world.
He felt it immediately. The ambient pressure was wrong. The rhythm of heaven and earth did not match. Even starlight carried a different taste, as if the sky had a different history.
A foreign world.
A foreign system.
A foreign set of rules.
Which meant opportunity, danger, and unknown paths that could devour him if he walked carelessly.
He let priorities settle in order.
First, survive.
Second, stabilize the soul.
Third, gather information.
Everything else came later.
He took out a small immortal material from his aperture, crushed it between his fingers, and let essence seep into his body. Bitter taste. Immediate effect. His mind cleared by a fraction.
Not enough.
Enough.
He extended immortal sense as far as he could, searching for any sign of life, any sign of civilization, any sign of a world with air.
He found a distant orbit.
A faint gravitational pull.
A solar system.
It was far, but it was real.
Li Xiao Bai turned toward it.
He did not rush.
Rushing was foolish when terrain was unknown. He adjusted trajectory with slow, careful bursts of immortal essence, conserving every drop.
Then he began the long drift.
As he moved, one thought remained clean and sharp.
Fang Yuan had won, and the world had paid the price.
Li Xiao Bai had been discarded, not out of cruelty, but because discarding was efficient.
He did not hate it.
He recorded it.
A person did not demand fairness from the world. A person demanded results from himself.
His expression did not change.
As long as he existed, the path had not ended.
It had only changed direction.