The name did not fade.
Li Xiao Bai had dealt with countless methods that invaded the mind. Some were crude and loud, like a hammer against a bell. Some were subtle, like poison mixed into tea. The most dangerous ones were the ones that did not announce themselves at all, the ones that convinced you they had always been there.
This was worse than poison.
It was clean.
It was quiet.
It sat inside his thoughts like a single grain of sand that refused to be swallowed, refused to be spat out, and refused to grind down with time.
Asterion.
Li Xiao Bai did not repeat the name. He did not roll it on his tongue, did not test how it sounded in the mind. Testing meant touching, and touching meant giving it room.
He remained motionless above the Moon's haze and let the silence stretch.
On the gray surface below, the astronaut stood in the mist, unmoving. The posture did not shift. The suit did not stir. Yet attention remained. Not like eyes. Like a hand resting lightly on the back of his neck, patient and certain.
Waiting.
Li Xiao Bai refused to react. Reaction became signal. Signal became leverage.
Instead, he compressed his will until his thoughts turned sharp enough to cut, then examined himself.
Not with wide sensing. Not with layered killer moves. Not with mortal Gu that might die the moment he activated them. He examined himself the way a veteran checked a wound in darkness, by touch and memory, by measuring what was different.
The seed was there, but it had no shape.
It was not a foreign thought pushing through his mind like an intruder.
It was not a voice whispering commands.
It was simply a point of certainty that had not existed before.
If he tried to deny it, the denial slid off it.
If he tried to ignore it, the ignorance bent around it.
If he tried to stare at it directly, his attention slipped, as if the mind refused to hold it the way it held normal concepts.
Li Xiao Bai understood the danger.
It was not forcing him.
It was redefining what 'forced' meant.
Asterion's voice returned inside his skull, calm and certain.
'You are trying to cut it out.'
Li Xiao Bai did not answer.
The voice continued, mild as water, heavier than iron.
'You cannot cut out a name once it becomes true to you.'
Li Xiao Bai replied with controlled coldness, his mental voice flat.
'Nothing is true by default.'
A soft ripple passed through his mind. Not laughter. Not exactly. More like amusement at something predictable.
'Then make it false,' Asterion said. 'Go ahead.'
Li Xiao Bai did not move.
Instead, he tried to forget.
It was not ordinary forgetting, not the weak act of pushing a memory aside. He knew how to seal information, how to erase traces, how to bury thoughts so deep that even wisdom path investigators struggled to dig them out.
He applied that skill inward.
He wrapped the seed of the name in a layer of emptiness, a mental vault with no doors.
For half a breath, it worked. The seed dimmed, as if slipping behind a curtain.
Then it returned.
Not stronger.
Not hostile.
Just present again, as if the attempt to hide it had been noted and dismissed.
Asterion spoke, almost gently.
'You are disciplined. That is rare.'
Li Xiao Bai answered, 'Survivors are common.'
Asterion's tone stayed mild, but the pressure behind the words increased.
'Refusal is not.'
Refusal.
Not a shield. Not force. Refusal.
Li Xiao Bai did not like being described like an object on a table. He asked the only question that mattered.
'Why put it in me?'
Silence.
Then Asterion answered.
'Because you saw me.'
The astronaut did not move, yet the haze around him curled like something alive.
'Here, sight has weight,' Asterion continued. 'Awareness leaves residue. You already know that. You learned it the hard way.'
Li Xiao Bai's mental voice stayed flat.
'I adapt.'
'Adaptation is still submission to reality.'
Li Xiao Bai did not argue. Arguing was a waste.
He asked, 'So you put your name in me because I saw you. Is that punishment?'
Asterion's voice slid across his thoughts like a whisper over steel.
'It is a connection.'
Connection meant line.
Line meant rope.
Rope meant that in some future moment, the act of remembering Asterion could become a way for Asterion to reach him again. Or worse, the act of trying to forget could become a trigger.
Li Xiao Bai's thoughts did not shake.
Intent was irrelevant. Outcomes were what mattered.
The astronaut stood in the mist, silent, like a statue carved from an idea. The Moon remained wrong in a way that had nothing to do with biology. The haze looked like fog, but Li Xiao Bai no longer believed it was substance.
It felt like a field.
A domain of thought made visible.
Li Xiao Bai decided to leave.
He adjusted his posture, compensating for missing hand and crippled leg. The movement was slow and deliberate, designed to look like drift rather than decision.
Asterion did not chase.
Asterion did not threaten.
But as distance increased, the pressure in Li Xiao Bai's mind changed. It became lighter, not because the seed weakened, but because the attention behind it withdrew a fraction, like a hand lifting off the back of his neck.
Asterion's voice came one last time, quiet.
'If you go to Earth, you will enter a place that does not like foreign patterns.'
Li Xiao Bai answered, 'I already know.'
Asterion replied, 'No. You know the outer rule. You do not know the inner appetite.'
Li Xiao Bai kept drifting. He kept his gaze narrow and controlled. He did not look back at the astronaut again. He did not acknowledge the haze. He did not give the domain the satisfaction of being stared at.
He only moved.
Earth grew larger ahead.
A curve of blue.
A faint white smear of cloud.
A thin halo where light bent around atmosphere.
The sight should have stirred something human.
It did not.
Not because he was numb.
Because he had already spent his humanity as currency long ago.
Months passed.
Time in space did not announce itself. There were no days, no nights, no seasons. Only distance shrinking and the steady rhythm of discipline.
In those months, his mind began to loop.
Not in weakness.
In training.
Like a blade whetted by repetition.
Some thoughts returned because they were useful.
Some returned because the mind, deprived of ordinary anchors, clung to familiar shapes to prove it still existed.
The seed of the name returned, always quiet, always present, never asking permission.
The image of the astronaut in the haze returned, not as fear, but as a warning burned into instinct.
And then there was the paragraph.
It came back whenever Earth entered his field of view, stubborn and exact, like an old scar that refused to fade.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his remaining eye as the blue curve of Earth grew a little larger ahead of him. He did not allow any warmth to enter the thought. He did not tame the sight. The planet was not a homeland. It was a coordinate with air, structure, and a chance to stabilize his condition.
And yet, every time Earth entered his field of view, that old paragraph returned.
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.
For months in the void, that paragraph had circled back again and again, like a stubborn habit of the mind.
At first, it had returned as mockery.
Knowledge. Charts. Names. Distances. Clean rules written by people who had never tasted a world where rules could bite back. He had once believed that understanding the heavens was a kind of victory, that if he learned enough, the universe would eventually open its doors.
Then he had been dragged into a world where a single insect could rewrite reality.
Then he had lived five hundred years and learned a harsher truth.
Understanding did not grant mercy. Understanding only sharpened the knife.
So why did those lines keep coming back now, when Earth was finally close enough to be more than memory?
Because in the void, that paragraph had stopped being mockery.
It had become a warning.
A reminder of what he had been before power, a man who stared at the sky and believed the sky was safe because it was far. A reminder of how easy it was to confuse distance with protection, and information with control.
Earth was close.
Close meant reachable.
Reachable meant dangerous.
Li Xiao Bai let inertia carry him. His posture stayed tight, his breathing shallow by habit, his immortal essence sealed as much as he could bear. He did not widen his perception.
Then he made a decision.
If he was going to enter a world with air and people, he could not afford hidden rot inside his mind. Not now. Not with a foreign seed already sitting quietly in his thoughts.
He raised his remaining hand and formed a simple seal.
An immortal Gu stirred in his aperture.
Information path.
One of the few he still had.
It responded reluctantly, like an exhausted beast forced back onto its feet. The surrounding resistance did not crush it here the way it had in harsher zones, but it still pressed, making every activation feel heavier than it should.
Li Xiao Bai did it anyway.
He let the immortal Gu's aura spread, not outward, but inward, turning the method on himself.
A careful probe.
A narrow thread.
He searched for irregularities in his own thoughts the way he would search for forged testimony or a hidden flaw in a contract.
At first, there was only silence.
Then something shifted.
A memory surfaced, sharp and sudden, like a shard of glass pushed through skin.
He stopped drifting.
Because the memory was not new.
It was something he should have remembered months ago.
Something he had lived through.
Something that had been missing.
In the deep void, long before the later calamities, there had been a moment when his thoughts felt wrong. Not tired. Not slow. Wrong, as if someone had taken a bite out of a sentence and left the rest intact.
He had noticed gaps.
Not only in cultivation.
In the order of his own recollections.
He had tried to trace them.
He had failed.
Then the wrongness had slid away, leaving only a dull certainty that something was off.
Now, under the immortal Gu's probing light, the hidden shape returned.
Not as an idea.
As a presence.
It clung to the underside of his consciousness, thin and wet, wrapped around the roots of his memories like a parasite around a nerve. It was not large. It did not need to be.
It was feeding.
Every time he reached for something that did not belong, every time his mind tried to recall what had already been cut away, the parasite took a thread.
And every thread it took became a clean absence.
Li Xiao Bai's mind went colder.
He did not panic.
Panic widened openings.
He tightened the probing thread and focused. The parasite reacted instantly, like a leech sensing heat. It tried to sink deeper, tried to smear itself across memory, tried to become part of his own thought so that any attempt to remove it would also remove him.
Li Xiao Bai did not move.
He did not strike.
Not yet.
Because another detail surfaced under the probe, small but decisive.
A stir.
A shift inside the depths of his thoughts.
The seed.
The foreign seed that carried a name.
It did not attack the parasite. It did not defend him. It simply turned, like a stone turning under water.
And that tiny movement outlined the parasite's contour for a heartbeat, forcing it to be seen clearly.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed.
So that was it.
This was why he had felt the loops. This was why certain memories vanished cleanly without leaving even the scent of struggle. This was why the wrongness had slipped away every time he tried to chase it.
He had not failed to notice.
He had been eating blindness.
And the seed had just lifted the curtain.
A single thought formed in his mind, cold and controlled.
It showed me.
Whether that was protection or preparation, he did not know yet.
But he understood the implication.
The seed was not passive.
It could interact with what lived inside his mind.
It could reveal.
It could hide.
It could decide what he was allowed to notice.
Li Xiao Bai kept the probing thread steady, holding the parasite in sight without touching it further. He measured its position, its texture, the way it clung to memory like wet silk.
Then he withdrew the probe in the smallest possible motion.
Not because he was afraid.
Because now the situation had changed.
This was not just a parasite.
This was evidence.
Evidence that the seed was involved.
And evidence had to be handled carefully, or it became a trap.
He resumed his drift toward Earth, his movement smooth and controlled. His expression did not change, but his thoughts sharpened into a clean line.
If the seed could reveal the parasite, it could also conceal it.
If it concealed it before, that meant it had been watching him for months.
If it had been watching him, then his mind was no longer a private place.
Earth grew closer.
The curve deepened.
The halo brightened.
Li Xiao Bai did not look back. He did not slow down.
Inside his mind, the parasite clung quietly to memory, unseen by anyone who lacked the seed's permission.
And the seed rested in the depths of his thoughts like a calm, patient eye.
As if nothing had happened.
As if it had all been planned.
And that calm was the most dangerous thing of all.