At first, Li Xiao Bai treated every loss as a price paid for survival.
In the Gu world, consumption was normal. Primeval essence was spent, immortal essence was burned, Gu were fed and nurtured, then used until they broke. Even immortal Gu could be lost in a single exchange. One mistake, one hidden move, one misjudged battlefield, and a lifetime of effort turned into dust.
But this was different.
This was not a loss caused by battle.
It was decay.
Silent, constant, and oddly precise.
He noticed it after leaving the moon behind.
The first sign was small. Too small for most people to take seriously.
A rank three Gu, a common tool he had carried for years, began to weaken.
Not in the usual way. Not hunger. Not damage. Not exhaustion.
It simply started to rot.
Li Xiao Bai felt it through the thin thread of connection, like sensing a blade slowly losing its edge without ever being used. The Gu's aura thinned. The instinct inside it became sluggish. Its response lagged by a fraction, then another fraction.
A month.
That was all it took.
A rank three Gu that should have lasted for years, as long as it was fed properly, died in a month.
No struggle. No warning cries. No dramatic collapse.
It faded like a candle in a room with no air.
Li Xiao Bai did not panic.
Panic did not change outcomes. Panic only wasted time.
He observed. He recorded. He tested.
The second Gu followed.
Then the third.
Different types. Different paths. Different feeding methods. The pattern remained.
Each time he brought one out and used it, even briefly, its decline accelerated. Keeping them sealed inside his storage methods slowed the decay, but did not stop it. Once the Gu entered his circulation, once it touched his essence, once it tasted the environment of this void, a countdown started.
He did not know the cause.
But he had an awareness sharp enough to cut through uncertainty.
Dao marks.
Not the familiar dao marks of the Gu world, where heaven and earth acknowledged paths like rules in a scripture. Not the steady weight of refinement path, wisdom path, time path, the ordered structure that cultivators learned to navigate.
These dao marks felt alien.
They did not sit quietly inside matter. They moved.
They were not etched like writing. They behaved like corrosion.
Li Xiao Bai drifted through the void, concealment wrapped around him, and kept his thoughts cold.
If his Gu were being eaten, then something in this environment was feeding on them.
The realization tightened his chest.
Not because he feared losing a few rank three Gu.
Because he understood what came next.
If rank three Gu died in a month, then rank four would last longer but still fall. Rank five might endure, but only temporarily. Immortal Gu would resist the longest, yet even immortal Gu had limits.
And without Gu, a Gu Master was nothing.
A mortal with a fancy name.
In the Gu world, that kind of weakness could be avoided by resources, by inheritance, by force.
Here, resources were meaningless. Inheritance was far behind him. Force belonged to the monsters that ate moons.
Li Xiao Bai did not stop moving. He could not afford to.
He used a small information path method, something subtle, something he could activate for a heartbeat and withdraw immediately, like dipping a finger into boiling water rather than stepping in.
The result confirmed his suspicion.
The moment his Gu circulated, faint traces of foreign dao marks clung to the essence flow, like dust that refused to be brushed off. They did not spread like poison in the usual sense. They did not invade violently.
They simply existed, and their existence caused damage.
As he continued to test, he realized something worse.
The dao marks were not only attaching to his Gu.
They were starting to touch him.
The thought formed quietly, yet it hit like a blade.
He had felt tired. He had felt strain. He had assumed it was the aftermath of the explosion, the loss of resources, the constant tension of hiding among things that could crush him.
Now he suspected another truth.
He was being eroded.
He did not want to waste Gu on unnecessary caution, yet this was necessary.
Li Xiao Bai chose a technique that relied more on perception than power. A mirror method from information path, refined and adjusted, meant to reflect the state of the self.
He activated it for a single breath.
A faint, translucent image formed in front of him, suspended in emptiness like a sheet of glass.
His own body appeared.
Not his flesh body in the ordinary sense. Not skin and bone. The reflection showed his current vessel, his accumulated essence, the outline of his aperture, the faint layer of protective methods woven around his soul.
The image was clean at first glance.
Then his eyes sharpened, and he saw the flaw.
A small region on the side of his body, no larger than a palm, looked wrong.
It was not injured like a wound. There was no blood, no torn flesh, no bruising.
It looked as if something had been removed.
Not cut out, but erased.
The boundary between that region and the rest of his form was uneven, like paper burned at the edges. A faint grey darkness clung there, and within that darkness, tiny specks of foreign dao marks moved with slow, patient hunger.
Li Xiao Bai stared at it without blinking.
His heartbeat did not change.
His mind did.
He withdrew the mirror method immediately and sealed his essence flow.
For a moment, he only drifted.
In the void, silence was normal. Yet the silence inside his chest felt heavier than the silence around him.
That region of his body was being eaten.
Not his soul.
His soul remained intact, protected.
The chain around his soul tightened as if responding to his attention, and a faint pressure wrapped around his spiritual core. It was not comfort. It was a constraint, a binding that held him together and kept the erosion from reaching where it mattered most.
He understood now.
The chain was not a decoration. It was not a random artifact drifting beside him.
It was a lock.
A seal.
A protective method that cared only about one thing: preventing his soul from being erased.
Everything else was negotiable.
His flesh could be damaged. His essence could be contaminated. His Gu could decay. As long as his soul remained stable, the chain would do its job.
Li Xiao Bai's eyes darkened.
In the Gu world, soul damage was one of the worst things a cultivator could suffer. It was difficult to heal and easy to worsen. Many immortals feared it more than losing limbs.
Here, the chain preserved the most precious part of him.
But the cost was becoming clearer.
If his body eroded too much, his ability to act would collapse. If his Gu decayed too quickly, his ability to protect himself would vanish. If his methods failed, he would be exposed for even a moment, and that moment would be enough.
He had been surviving by caution.
By retreating.
By hiding.
By choosing the smallest, safest options.
In the Gu world, some would call that cowardice.
Li Xiao Bai called it efficiency.
He did not fight monsters he did not need to fight. He did not waste power proving pride. He did not gamble his life for a pointless victory.
He fled because fleeing kept him alive.
Yet now, even survival carried a countdown.
His lips pressed into a thin line.
He could continue as before, conserving Gu and moving slowly, reducing exposure to danger.
But slow travel meant more time in this environment.
More time meant more erosion.
More erosion meant less Gu.
Less Gu meant less ability to hide.
It formed a simple, brutal equation.
Staying cautious would kill him.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled slowly.
He made a decision.
Not emotional.
Not heroic.
Not desperate.
Just logical.
He would accelerate.
He would use more Gu to travel faster. He would burn resources to shorten the time spent in this void. He would accept faster Gu decay in exchange for reducing the total duration of exposure.
It was the same principle as burning a bridge to escape a fire.
The bridge would be lost either way. Only the timing changed.
He adjusted his concealment first.
The monsters he had seen were not the only threats. The void itself was the enemy now. If he increased his speed, he would leave ripples. If he left ripples, something might notice.
Li Xiao Bai layered concealment methods with care. Not heavy, not flamboyant, not the kind that announced itself with power.
Thin, overlapping veils.
A suppression of aura.
A distortion of perception.
A small misdirection technique that bent attention away, like guiding a gaze to the wrong point.
He did not need perfect stealth. Perfect stealth was impossible.
He needed to be uninteresting.
Then he reached into his storage.
He selected a movement Gu.
A rank four, refined long ago, not rare in the grand scheme of the Gu world, but precious now because every Gu was precious now.
He hesitated for a fraction.
Not because he feared using it.
Because he understood that once he used it, it would begin dying.
He fed it a final burst of essence, then activated it.
A ripple passed through his body. His drift shifted into motion. The void did not have wind, yet he felt a kind of resistance as his movement cut through invisible currents of foreign dao marks.
He accelerated toward the distant solar system.
The stars ahead grew slightly brighter. The structure of orbit, of gravity, of familiar celestial order became more distinct.
It was still far.
But the difference between far and unreachable was determined by time.
He could buy time by spending Gu.
He continued.
Minutes passed.
Then hours.
Each time he used a movement technique, he felt the foreign dao marks brush against him like sandpaper. They did not hurt, not immediately. They simply scraped away at the edges of his being.
He checked himself again with a brief mirror method.
The eroded region had widened by a finger's breadth.
Slow.
But not slow enough.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained calm.
In his mind, the Gu world began to feel like a memory of comfort.
There, every danger had a reason. A scheme, a person, a path, a rule you could exploit.
Here, danger could be as simple as existing in the wrong place.
He tightened his concealment further and pushed his speed higher.
Not reckless. Just more aggressive.
His rank four movement Gu began to weaken. He could feel it. Its response was slightly delayed, its internal instinct dimmer.
He ignored it.
When it died, he would use another.
He did not like waste, but he hated death more.
A shadow moved in the distance.
Li Xiao Bai stopped instantly.
His concealment tightened until it felt like his own skin was wrapped in cold cloth.
He remained still for a long time.
The shadow drifted past.
He did not know what it was. He did not want to know.
It passed without noticing him.
Only then did he resume.
Each pause cost time. Each pause increased exposure. Each pause made erosion worse.
But rushing blindly would be worse.
He moved with a rhythm.
Accelerate. Hide. Observe. Accelerate again.
A predator without claws, surviving through patience.
As he traveled, he began to understand something else.
The foreign dao marks did not erode him evenly. They gathered where essence flowed heavily, where Gu were activated, where the boundary between his internal world and the external environment became thin.
The more he used power, the more he attracted erosion.
Yet the less he used power, the longer he remained exposed.
Another equation.
Another trap.
Li Xiao Bai smiled faintly, not with amusement, but with recognition.
This was not a battlefield created by immortals.
It was not a formation.
Yet it behaved like one.
A natural formation, vast enough to swallow worlds.
A place where every option carried a cost, and the only skill was choosing which cost you could pay.
In the Gu world, he had lived five hundred years by understanding that truth.
Here, the truth was sharper.
He adjusted again.
Instead of using strong bursts of movement repeatedly, he used smaller bursts more consistently, balancing exposure and consumption. He used information path Gu to monitor his own decay, but only briefly, only when necessary.
He treated each activation like spending blood.
Careful.
Precise.
Unwilling to waste even a heartbeat.
The solar system ahead grew clearer.
He could now see the faint pattern of planets, the structure of orbit.
It was still distant, still separated by stretches of emptiness where anything could hide.
But it existed.
That alone was enough to keep his mind stable.
In his reflection, the eroded region of his body remained small.
It had not reached the soul.
As long as the soul remained protected, he could rebuild later.
He had rebuilt before.
He had lost everything before.
He had crawled out of worse situations, surrounded by enemies, with fate itself pressing down on him.
Here, he had no enemies.
Only hunger.
Only void.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze hardened.
He increased speed again.
His Gu screamed silently through the connection as they began to fail faster, their instincts weakening, their lifespan burning.
Li Xiao Bai did not comfort them.
A Gu was a tool.
A tool existed to be used.
If a tool could not bear the environment, then it would be replaced.
If it could not be replaced, then he would refine a new one.
If he could not refine a new one, he would steal one.
If he could not steal one, he would find another path.
He did not cling to methods. He clung to outcomes.
A faint pressure touched his senses.
Li Xiao Bai froze.
This pressure felt different.
Not the careless weight of a giant monster passing by.
This felt like attention.
Like something turning its gaze toward him.
His heart remained steady, but his mind moved rapidly.
He sealed his essence completely and let himself drift, allowing his momentum to fade. He withdrew every active Gu. He forced his aura down until even he could barely feel it.
The pressure lingered.
Then it passed.
Li Xiao Bai remained still for a long time after it vanished.
Only when he was certain did he move again, slower now, but not because of fear.
Because he had learned something.
The void was not empty.
It was a sea filled with things that could sense ripples.
His acceleration was necessary, but it would have to be controlled.
He accepted the compromise.
He continued toward the solar system, his posture calm, his thoughts sharp, his soul held tight by the chain.
His body was being eaten.
His Gu were dying.
His options were narrowing.
Yet his will did not bend.
As long as he could still move forward, then the path remained.
And as long as the path remained, then immortality remained a possibility.
Li Xiao Bai drifted onward, faster than before, careful as a thief walking across a roof in the dark.
The void did not forgive mistakes.
He did not intend to make one.