The worst part was not the pain.
It was the silence inside his immortal aperture.
After what happened, the aperture no longer felt like a world. It felt like a wound pretending to be a home. Seventy percent of its internal space was missing. Not shattered. Not burned. Not collapsed into chaotic debris. Missing in the cleanest, most humiliating way possible - as if the portion that did not belong had been judged, cut, and then erased by a law that did not bother to explain itself.
Li Xiao Bai did not mourn it.
Mourning was for people who still believed loss was an exception. He had already paid the price back in the previous stretch of travel, when the foreign pressure crawled into the aperture like invisible teeth. He had already made the only choice available to him - cut first, cut fast, cut clean, even if that meant carving away his own foundation.
Hesitation would have turned erosion into infection.
Infection would have turned the remaining space into ash.
And then his body would have died in the most ridiculous way imaginable for a Gu Immortal - suffocation, trapped inside his own shrinking refuge, choking on the last stale pocket of air because his aperture could no longer hold oxygen.
So he kept moving.
The void did not chase him.
No roaring predator tore through space to finish the cripple that escaped its jaws. No sudden ripple folded reality and snapped his spine. No silent gaze drilled into his skull and demanded payment for existing.
That absence was suspicious. It always was.
But suspicion did not stop the slow bleeding of time. If the universe wanted him dead, it could arrange it without ceremony. The fact that it had not, yet, meant only one thing.
He still had a window.
He used it to stabilize the present.
Two immortal Gu remained.
Only two.
The number sounded absurd in his mind, as if someone had told him a venerable had been reduced to fighting with pebbles. Yet it was not the number alone that made it worse. It was the feeling that came with each activation.
Every time he touched an immortal Gu now, the surrounding laws pressed down on the act itself. Immortal essence did not flow freely. It moved as if it had to negotiate its right to exist. Even the simplest movement method felt heavier than it should, like trying to swing a blade underwater while invisible hands pushed back.
Li Xiao Bai endured it.
He did not waste immortal essence to complain. He did not test fate to see how far it would bend. He moved with patience, letting inertia carry him when it could, adjusting his drift with small, controlled bursts. When he sensed foreign pressure scratching at the edges of his aperture, he cut away the contaminated portion immediately - even if it meant losing more space.
Rot became a tumor only when you allowed it to remain.
His missing left hand and crippled leg forced him into a new rhythm. Every adjustment was slower. Every turn required more calculation. Even forming basic seals and controlling flow felt awkward when the body that performed them was incomplete.
He adapted.
Adaptation was not bravery.
It was survival.
Calm space stretched ahead, and in that calm he encountered creatures that should have been disasters.
Huge silhouettes drifted in the distance, slow and heavy, crossing the dark like moving continents. Some wore asteroid-like shells fused to their bodies. Some looked like pale flesh wrapped around bone, floating with obscene patience. They were not the star-eating horrors he had glimpsed outside the boundary, but they were still large enough to erase him by accident.
Li Xiao Bai avoided them.
He did not challenge them.
He did not watch them longer than necessary.
He had already learned the cost of looking. In this void, attention was a rope, and ropes could become nooses.
That cautious travel created time.
Time created space for thought.
And thought, for him, was both weapon and poison.
He allowed himself to review what remained, not to comfort himself, but to measure himself.
His immortal aperture was damaged beyond what any normal Gu Immortal could tolerate. His resources were crippled. His inventory butchered. His options narrowed to a thin, sharp line.
Yet he was still alive.
That fact alone meant something.
He checked the chain around his soul again.
It remained.
Cold.
Firm.
Wrapped around the core of his spirit like a collar forged from an older law. Its presence was not gentle. It pressed constantly, a silent weight that reminded him that his soul was not fully his.
But the pressure was different now.
Weaker.
Not absent. Not harmless. Still there, still biting, still able to crush him if it decided to tighten.
Yet the controlling arrangements that used to sit on top of it - the subtle patterns that tightened, guided, corrected, and steered - were no longer present.
They were gone.
Not cracked.
Not loosened.
Gone.
Li Xiao Bai froze, and for the first time in a long time, his calm threatened to fracture.
He had felt those arrangements before, even when he pretended not to. They were a hand without fingers on the back of his neck. They were a presence behind his eyes. They were the quiet certainty that, no matter how far he drifted, a higher will still watched the leash.
Fang Yuan.
The main body.
Not physically present, not speaking, not ordering, but always there in the way a blade was always there in the hand of someone who knew how to use it.
Li Xiao Bai had lived with that shadow for so long that he stopped calling it a shadow and started calling it reality.
Now, when he searched for it, he found distance.
Not merely physical distance.
Something deeper.
The connection to the main body felt thin, frayed, and far, as if the universe itself had placed a wall between their wills.
He tested it again, carefully.
He reached for the faint resonance that should have existed, the instinctive sense of being anchored to a greater self.
Nothing answered.
No pull.
No correction.
No silent pressure that told him where he should not think.
Only the chain remained, pressing down on his soul like a restraint that had lost its handler.
For a heartbeat, something broke loose inside him.
Relief surged up like a flood.
Not shallow relief. Not the brief relief of escaping death.
A deeper, uglier relief - the kind that came from realizing you were no longer being held as a tool on a chain, no longer being tested as a specimen, no longer being corrected as an error.
His breathing stalled.
His heart struck harder once, then again.
His scalp prickled, hair rising as if an invisible current passed through him.
For an instant, laughter tried to climb out of his chest.
He crushed it.
He sealed his breath. Forced his heartbeat down. Pressed the surge into the depths of his mind and locked it there with the same discipline he used in refinement and battle. Emotion was a fire. Fire could warm you, or it could burn your house down. Right now, fire was dangerous.
Then he smiled.
Thin.
Controlled.
The smile of someone who did not celebrate because celebration wasted energy.
Freedom.
Not complete.
Not safe.
But real.
He did not understand why it happened. He did not pretend he did. In his experience, causes always existed even when you could not see them. The void did not grant gifts. If something changed, it changed for a reason.
He simply accepted the result and adjusted his plans.
Then another thought followed, colder than the first.
He was still a clone.
A tool.
That did not change just because the leash loosened.
The main body had made it clear long ago - clones were used without hesitation, discarded without regret. If a clone became a threat, it would be erased. Li Xiao Bai did not hate that logic.
He understood it.
That logic was Fang Yuan.
And understanding did not remove risk.
A clone that betrayed the main body would become the worst kind of enemy, because it carried the main body's memories. It carried habits, instincts, and knowledge no outsider could ever steal. If Li Xiao Bai ever turned against Fang Yuan, the main body would not hesitate.
And if Fang Yuan ever decided Li Xiao Bai had become inconvenient, the main body would also not hesitate.
Li Xiao Bai did not intend betrayal.
Intent was cheap.
Only position mattered.
So he examined himself again, deeper, and found something that made his mind tighten.
Gaps.
Clean absences in his attainment.
He tried to recall a metal path method and found nothing but the shape of a missing page. He reached for water path and found a blank. Earth path surfaced only as faint outlines, like half-burned paper. Time path was gone. Space path existed as fragments too broken to use. Even refinement path felt distant in places, as if entire sections had been torn out of his mind and thrown into darkness.
This was not forgetfulness.
This was pruning.
Selective.
Deliberate.
Like someone had decided which parts of him were too dangerous, too incompatible, or too costly to maintain under these laws.
What remained stood out sharply.
Blood path - still sharp, still usable.
Information path - his core, intact enough to rely on.
Flying attainment - present, thinner than he liked, but present.
Soul path - only traces, but not erased.
Luck path - faint, like an ember buried under ash.
Li Xiao Bai did not rage.
Rage would not restore attainment.
Complaining would not return lost paths.
He had survived five hundred years by turning damage into calculation.
So he calculated.
With fewer paths, he would rely on fewer methods.
With fewer methods, he would rely on cleaner execution.
With a wounded aperture, he would rely on a safer environment.
And with only two immortal Gu remaining, he could no longer afford to exist in a place that treated every activation as a crime.
That meant one thing.
He needed a world with air.
With structure.
With people.
With resources.
A place where he could hide long enough to dissect his condition properly. A place where his remaining immortal Gu would not die simply from existing. A place where rebuilding was possible, even if the rebuilding looked nothing like the Gu world.
He did not allow nostalgia to rise when he thought of Earth.
Earth was not a home.
It was a coordinate.
A target.
A step.
He had been born there once, long before the Gu world swallowed him. He remembered the Solar System not because of cultivation, but because of ordinary human knowledge - textbooks, diagrams, names learned in a life that had once seemed meaningless compared to immortality.
Now that knowledge became an anchor.
Not because it made him strong.
Because it gave him direction.
He drifted through the quiet, still cautious, but faster than before.
Not because he felt safe.
Because he understood something simple and cruel.
His immortal aperture was still under attack, even now, just slower. Every moment spent outside a stable environment was another cut closer to suffocation. The chain still pressed on his soul. The leash to the main body felt distant, but distance could change again without warning. And the void did not care how many plans he carried if his body ran out of air.
He would reach Earth.
He would secure safety.
He would examine his soul and the chain again with proper time and space.
He would test what could still be cultivated in this world.
And then he would decide how to pursue the only thing that had ever mattered.
Immortality.
The dream was still far.
Still absurd.
Still stained with blood.
But the quiet around him no longer felt like a cage.
It felt like an opening.
Li Xiao Bai moved toward it with cold patience, carrying Fang Yuan's will like a blade that refused to break - and for the first time, carrying it by choice rather than by chain.
The chain tightened once, faintly, as if reminding him that freedom still had a price.
Li Xiao Bai's smile did not change.
He had paid worse.