Now, knowledge was only the first rung.
Everything beyond it was blood, will, and the ability to keep moving forward even when the universe tried to peel you apart.
Li Xiao Bai drifted toward the edge of the world with one eye, one hand, and a mind that no longer trusted its own quiet.
He did not look back.
He did not slow down.
The seed rested in the depths of his thoughts like a calm, patient eye.
And that calm was the most dangerous thing of all.
Earth filled more of his vision with every passing hour.
The blue curve did not inspire awe. Oceans and clouds did not soften him. The planet was not beautiful. It was functional. Air. Gravity. Heat. A place where he could stop drifting like debris and start making choices again.
Yet the closer Earth became, the more his mind returned to the same passage.
Stubborn. Exact. Uninvited.
As if it had been stamped into him.
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.
He had thought that sentence many times in the void.
Too many.
At first, he dismissed it as habit.
The mind grabbing old anchors when the universe offered none.
A reflex. A comfort. A leftover piece of a weaker life.
Then it returned again at the same angle of Earth's curve.
The same timing.
The same rhythm.
Once could be coincidence.
Twice could still be coincidence.
The third time felt arranged.
Deja vu.
Not the cheap human sensation from his first life. Not a fleeting illusion.
This was structured repetition.
A loop that arrived cleanly, without friction.
Like a mechanism running a program.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed.
He finally understood what the repetition meant.
It was not that his mind liked those words.
It was that something inside his mind liked what those words exposed.
A loop was not just repetition.
A loop was feeding.
The seed had shown him the parasite before.
Not killed it. Not driven it away.
Shown it.
He had seen it clinging under memory like wet silk, quiet and patient.
And he had withdrawn the probe, because evidence mattered. Because the seed's involvement changed the meaning of every move.
But now Earth was close.
Close meant atmosphere.
Atmosphere meant pressure.
Pressure meant that small failures turned fatal.
If he let the loop continue during descent, the parasite would have time to nibble at the worst possible moments.
Not enough to erase him.
Only enough to shave away judgment.
Timing.
Caution.
The kind of small loss that turned survival into a mistake.
That was unacceptable.
Li Xiao Bai did not hesitate.
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 pressure did not crush it here the way it had in harsher places, but it still pressed. It made every activation feel heavier than it should.
Li Xiao Bai did it anyway.
He let the immortal Gu's aura spread inward, turning the method on himself.
A careful probe.
A narrow thread.
He did not search blindly.
He went straight to the place the seed had allowed him to see before.
And there it was.
The parasite.
Still clinging.
Still quiet.
Still pretending that quietness meant innocence.
Li Xiao Bai held the probing thread steady, keeping it in sight. He measured its position, its texture, the way it fused to the underside of memory like it belonged there.
Then he acted.
Not with elegance.
Not with a long, refined killer move.
With a brutal, short decision.
Time was oxygen.
Time was aperture.
Time was life.
He pinned it first.
A simple information path fixation.
A nail through a writhing thing.
A forced definition.
The parasite reacted instantly.
It tried to blur.
It tried to sink.
It tried to smear itself across his thinking, turning itself into the act of thought so that any removal would remove him with it.
Li Xiao Bai did not allow it.
He compressed his will into a thin edge of discrimination.
And he cut.
The sensation was disgusting.
Not pain.
Something worse.
Like tearing a living strip off the inside of his skull.
For a heartbeat, his mind flashed with stolen fragments. Half-finished recollections. Broken sequences. The faint afterimage of loops that were never meant to be noticed.
Then the parasite snapped.
It did not die like flesh.
It unraveled like a rule that had lost permission to remain.
A smear of coldness slid through his thoughts and vanished.
Li Xiao Bai kept still for several breaths, letting the probing thread sweep the wound it left behind.
Nothing.
No wet presence.
No hidden strand.
Only the raw edge of missing pieces where it had fed.
He withdrew the probe.
He sealed the immortal Gu again.
He did not feel relief.
Because this did not make him safe.
It only clarified the hierarchy.
The parasite had been a tool.
The seed had been the hand that decided when the tool could be seen.
And he still did not know why.
Earth drew closer.
The halo brightened.
And the pressure returned.
Not the boundary that had erased Gu like dust.
This was different. Smaller. More intimate.
Like a thin layer of judgment wrapped directly around the world.
Testing anything that approached.
Deciding what it would allow to touch its sky.
Li Xiao Bai had no interest in arguing with that judgment.
His immortal aperture did not have the strength for a prolonged standoff.
After months of cutting away contamination, what remained was barely ten percent. A patch of space the size of a small soccer field. Cramped. Scarred. Held together by stubbornness. It still contained air. It still contained a handful of resources. It still contained the last pieces of his survival.
But it was not stable.
Not here.
Not this close.
He felt it before he saw it.
A faint shiver in the aperture walls. A pressure crawling along the edges of space. Like unseen fingers tracing cracks in glass, searching for the weakest point.
His remaining two immortal Gu responded with heaviness.
Not panic.
Not collapse.
Weight.
As if their dao marks were being pressed down by something that did not need to be strong to be final.
Li Xiao Bai kept drifting.
No wasted movements.
No wide sensing.
No arrogance.
When Earth finally occupied his full forward view, he corrected his angle.
He did not aim for the bright side.
He did not aim for cities.
He aimed for distance. Darkness. The kind of place where a falling object could tear into the ground without immediately being surrounded by eyes.
He let gravity take him.
Then he pushed.
A controlled burst. Not elegant. Not complex. Just enough to steepen his descent and shorten the time the world had to grind its laws against him.
The airless black thinned into deep blue.
The first threads of atmosphere touched him.
Nothing dramatic happened at first.
Then the world bit.
Friction arrived like a blade dragging across his skin. Heat followed it, quick, brutal, exact. His concealment method warped instantly, the outer layer thinning as if the air itself rejected the logic it was built on. His aura flared for a heartbeat, exposed in a way that felt obscene.
Li Xiao Bai did not hesitate.
Immortal essence surged through his remaining channels and formed a crude defensive layer around his core. No formation. No refinement. No cleverness. Pure endurance.
The layer held for two breaths.
Then foreign pressure pressed down on it like a hand.
It did not crush the barrier through force.
It crushed it through comparison.
It tested the rule inside the barrier and decided that rule did not belong.
The barrier cracked.
Li Xiao Bai fed it more essence.
The essence flowed slower than it should have, as if it had to push through resistance just to exist.
His immortal aperture shuddered violently.
Space inside it folded at the edges.
He felt the air within thin slightly as the volume shrank.
Not much.
Enough.
His mind calculated without emotion.
If the aperture collapsed fully while he was still outside, his body would lose its last controlled reserve of oxygen. His crippled body could not simply breathe the upper atmosphere like a normal person. He was still an immortal body, battered and incomplete, sealed and strained. He could endure vacuum and radiation.
He could still die from something as simple as not having air in the right moment.
A stupid death.
A meaningless death.
He pushed harder into descent.
The sky around him began to glow.
His defensive layer continued to crack. Each crack carried heat and pressure deeper. His flesh burned. Not enough to destroy him, but enough to remind him that immortality did not mean comfort.
Inside his aperture, the pressure grew worse.
The foreign law did not stop at the atmosphere.
It reached deeper, toward the structure of his aperture itself.
A pulling sensation formed inside his chest, as if something was trying to peel the remaining space out of him. Not through strength. Through inevitability.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his remaining eye.
This was not erosion anymore.
This was extraction.
If he continued like this, the world would take the last ten percent the same way it took everything else. It would strip his refuge, then leave him with nothing but open sky and failing breath.
He made a decision.
He would take a vessel.
Not later.
Not after landing safely.
Now.
A mortal body would not carry an immortal aperture the same way. A mortal body would not be judged by the same rules. A mortal body might slow the extraction long enough for him to hide, breathe, and stabilize.
He did not know if the chain would allow it.
He did not care.
If the chain refused, he would force a solution anyway.
The ground rose beneath him.
Clouds turned into blurred layers. Wind began to scream around his descent, even if he could not hear it properly. The glow of reentry wrapped him like a burning cloak.
Then the defensive layer finally shattered.
Heat slammed directly into his skin.
His clothes burned away.
Flesh charred.
Pain arrived sharp and immediate.
Li Xiao Bai treated it as a signal and moved past it.
He formed a second barrier, smaller, tight around his core and head, designed to keep his mind intact for one more minute.
That was all he needed.
He extended his senses narrowly downward.
Not searching for power.
Searching for life.
A heartbeat.
Warm blood.
A living human.
He found one.
Not in a city.
On the outskirts of something. A road. A broken structure. A small cluster of lights far away. The person was moving slowly, unaware that the sky was about to deliver death.
Li Xiao Bai angled his descent.
He did not slow enough for a clean landing.
A clean landing would cost time.
Time was oxygen.
Time was aperture.
Time was survival.
He slammed into the ground like a meteor.
Earth exploded upward.
Soil and rock shattered. The impact sent a shock through his ruined body, cracking bones that had already endured too much. The crater formed beneath him, shallow but violent.
His barrier collapsed.
He lay in broken earth for a heartbeat.
Then the pulling inside his chest intensified.
His aperture was being taken.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
One hand dug into soil.
His missing leg dragged behind him.
He crawled out of the crater with brutal efficiency, leaving blood behind like a trail of red coins paid to the world.
The human was closer now.
A young man, perhaps. Thin. Dirty. Wearing worn clothes meant for cold nights and hard living. He froze when he saw Li Xiao Bai crawl out of the ground like something that should not exist.
His mouth opened.
Li Xiao Bai did not allow him time to scream.
He reached the man and pressed his palm to his forehead.
There was no elegance.
No mercy.
A blunt information path invasion, carried by will and centuries of experience, pierced into the man's mind.
The man's resistance was weak. Instinctive panic, a shallow push.
Li Xiao Bai crushed it.
The man's eyes widened for a single second.
Then the light inside them flickered.
His soul collapsed.
Li Xiao Bai entered.
The world lurched.
His senses shifted violently, like stepping into a body that was too small. Pain changed shape. His burned immortal flesh was gone. His missing limb was gone. His missing eye was gone. For a heartbeat, he felt whole again.
Not in power.
In function.
He inhaled.
Air filled lungs.
Dirty air.
Cold air.
Alive air.
It tasted like survival.
Then the backlash arrived.
Because his immortal aperture did not simply vanish when he changed bodies.
It could not follow cleanly.
A mortal vessel could not hold it the same way.
The moment his soul settled into the mortal body, the remaining ten percent of the aperture convulsed like a wounded beast. Space folded inward. The last reserve of air inside threatened to collapse. If it collapsed violently, it could tear his soul. It could shatter his remaining Gu. It could poison the new body with foreign law.
Li Xiao Bai's mind turned razor cold.
He forced his will into the collapsing space and cut again.
Not removing contamination this time.
Removing instability.
He severed the weakest edges of the aperture, sacrificing more space to keep the core from bursting.
The pressure continued to pull.
Then the chain reacted.
Cold pressure wrapped around the core of his spirit, biting deep.
It was weaker than the control he had felt months ago, but it was still absolute in one thing.
It could seal.
The chain tightened around the collapsing knot of space and dragged it inward.
Not out of him.
Into him.
The remaining fragment of the immortal aperture compressed, folding like cloth being forced through a ring. Space shrank into a dense knot of existence and sank into his soul, sealed by the chain's grip.
Li Xiao Bai felt the seal lock.
The sensation was heavy, a constant weight behind thought, like carrying a stone in the mind. The aperture was no longer a place he could enter freely. It had become a sealed burden fused to his spirit.
Inside that sealed knot, something separated.
A thin sliver of will.
Not his main consciousness.
A routine.
A caretaker.
A piece of intention carved off and left behind to do one job.
Maintain what remained.
Feed what could still be fed.
Manage the air.
Keep the last scraps of space stable.
Li Xiao Bai felt it like a distant thread, weak but present, moving inside the sealed fragment, tending to a tiny world no bigger than a small soccer field.
The chain held it all shut.
And the pressure remained.
Not crushing.
Not shaping.
Just pressing.
A collar that reminded him the seal had a cost.
And the cost was control.
Li Xiao Bai stood slowly, testing the mortal body's balance.
The young man's hands trembled, not from fear, but from shock. Muscles ached in places that did not matter. The mortal body was weak, malnourished, and full of small injuries.
Perfect.
Weak bodies did not draw attention.
Weak bodies could hide.
He turned his head and looked at his own crater.
Smoke still rose faintly from the broken earth. Bits of scorched fabric fluttered in the wind. His old immortal body had already begun to fade from importance in his mind, the way he discarded anything that no longer served purpose.
He looked up at the sky.
Clouds covered most stars.
The moon was visible through a gap, pale and distant.
Somewhere on that lunar surface, mist clung where mist should not exist.
He did not stare.
He did not reach out with senses.
He did not allow curiosity to form a rope.
He tightened his mental discipline and tested his connection to the caretaker will sealed inside the aperture knot.
It responded faintly.
A pulse.
A confirmation.
It was feeding what remained of his Gu with the last scraps of resource he had saved. It was keeping air stable. It was maintaining the tiny internal space so it would not collapse entirely.
For now.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled slowly and began walking away from the crater.
The mortal body's steps were unsteady at first, then steadier. Each movement felt strange after a year of drifting, but the body adapted quickly. Flesh always adapted.
It had to.
He did not head toward lights immediately.
He moved into darker terrain first, away from roads and open sightlines. He needed a moment where no eyes watched him. He needed a place to examine himself properly.
A shallow dip between rocks provided enough cover.
He crouched and pressed his palm against his chest, feeling the new heartbeat.
Weak.
Fast.
Human.
He closed his eyes briefly and checked the chain.
It was still there.
Weaker than before.
But still biting.
Still pressing his soul as if reminding him that even freedom had limits.
He opened his eyes again.
The world felt heavier under gravity.
But it also felt real.
Earth air moved against skin.
Wind carried scent.
Sound existed.
Time had texture again.
Li Xiao Bai did not smile.
Not yet.
Because the seed remained quiet.
And quietness was never free.
He stood, turned his face toward the direction of distant lights, and began walking again.
Not with hope.
With intent.
The atmosphere had not saved him.
It had only forced him to change the battlefield.
Now the battlefield was his mind, his sealed soul knot, his fading Gu, his foreign seed, and the chain that still pressed his spirit.
And he would win that battle the same way he had won every other.
One cold step at a time.