Silence came first.
Not the kind of silence after a battle when dust settled and survivors coughed blood into their sleeves. This was an emptiness with no patience for sound. The moment the explosion finished tearing Heaven apart, the world behind it stopped behaving like a world.
Li Xiao Bai did not understand it immediately.
His senses still carried the afterimage of the revival chamber, the fruit, the silhouette forming within it, Star Constellation's cold control. He remembered seals layered until a person stopped being a person and became an ingredient.
Then something inside that ingredient twisted.
Not release.
Not resistance.
Contradiction.
The fruit did not fail like a technique failing.
It failed like a rule being denied by a deeper rule.
The chamber became a mouth. Light, dao marks, formations, and immortal wills were swallowed by a single violent exhale. The shockwave punched through reality, tore open a crack in the world boundary, and flung everything it touched into a place not meant to hold shape.
The fragment of Heavenly Court lurched, and the world dropped out from under him.
The sensation was not falling.
Falling implied direction.
This was being removed.
He saw the boundary itself for a breath.
A thin membrane of definition stretched across infinity, shimmering with countless dao marks layered like invisible scales.
The explosion tore it open.
The tear widened.
Beyond it, Chaos waited.
At first, Chaos did not look like anything.
Even the strangest phenomena still had shape.
This had none.
It was neither black nor white. Neither bright nor dim.
Light simply stopped applying.
The surviving immortals reacted the moment the fragment crossed.
They were not weak. Any one of them could flatten mountains in a lawful world.
Here, their strength turned into fuel.
A woman activated a defensive killer move. A translucent shell formed around her, layered and elegant.
Chaos touched it.
The shell was gone.
Her scream cut off mid-note because her throat was gone too.
Then her head.
Then the rest.
No blood.
No qi.
No trace.
An old man tried to anchor the fragment with a star grid, forcing coordinates onto the unplaceable. For an instant, the grid created edges.
Then Chaos seeped between the lines.
Symbols blurred.
The man vanished in pieces so cleanly Li Xiao Bai's mind refused the sequence.
Panic spread.
Killer moves erupted like fireworks in a void that refused to be impressed. Sword light, flame, ice, wind, even space path.
Nothing held.
Chaos did not resist.
It ignored.
A space path immortal burned immortal essence until a jagged opening formed. Beyond it, a shimmer of lawful space.
Li Xiao Bai's mind tightened.
Chaos brushed the edge.
The opening snapped shut as if the concept of passage had been revoked.
The immortal staggered and vanished mid-collapse.
Someone tried to hide. Ghost path concealment, shadow, anything.
Their presence thinned.
It did not matter.
Chaos did not notice.
It corrected.
Anything that crossed the boundary was being corrected into nothing.
Li Xiao Bai held still.
Information Path did not need screaming.
It needed seconds.
What is this.
A place where dao marks could not persist.
A place where rules were not broken because rules were not permitted to be present.
The fragment shrank without being crushed.
A pillar existed, then did not.
A rune half-existed, then blank air replaced it.
Immortals died the same way.
One moment, desperate motion.
Next moment, absence.
His immortal aperture felt wrong. The connection between his body and his internal world began to loosen. The outline of self became negotiable.
He acted.
Not with a grand defense.
With stabilization meant to keep the soul intact.
Thin concealment wrapped his spirit.
For a moment, the pressure eased.
For a moment, he could still think.
A nearby immortal tried something similar.
It bought him two breaths.
On the third, his shoulder was gone.
Then his hand.
Then the rest.
Li Xiao Bai understood.
Seconds were the only currency here.
The fragment lurched again. More of it ceased, and the survivors slid closer together.
A formation master stitched broken inscriptions into a cage, bleeding essence into lines to declare a safe zone.
It lasted long enough for three immortals to crawl inside.
Then Chaos erased the corner.
Then the edge.
Then the inside.
The three vanished mid-crawl.
The formation master stared, hands still outstretched.
Chaos reached him.
His left hand disappeared first.
Then his vision blurred, as if the concept of sight itself had been scraped.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
Not toward the panicking cluster.
Toward a broken boundary inscription embedded in the debris.
A rune that carried closure, this side and not that side.
He pressed his palm to cracked jade.
A faint vibration ran up his arm.
For an instant, he felt the boundary again, distant, like a memory of skin.
Chaos pressed closer.
His concealment frayed. His essence felt like sand in a fist.
Chaos touched his sleeve.
Cloth was gone.
Then skin.
Pain arrived late, confused, as if it had to ask permission to exist.
He poured will into the boundary rune.
If there was even a fraction of limit left, he would use it as a nail.
Chaos crept up his arm like gentle correction.
Thought began to fragment. Memories blurred. Before and after loosened.
He felt the moment where he would stop being Li Xiao Bai.
Then something cold wrapped around his soul.
A chain.
Not metal.
Not weight.
A binding.
It snapped tight with brutal clarity. The tightening hurt more than erasure, because pain meant definition.
Symbols flared along the chain, too fast to read, too alien to belong to Heavenly Court.
They did not fight Chaos.
They did not push it back.
They held his name in place.
The missing portion of his arm did not return.
The world did not become safe.
But the erasure slowed, as if forced to take smaller bites.
Seconds.
Only seconds.
The chain tightened again, compressing his soul into a narrower shape, sealing it into a coffin made of rules he did not understand.
In that coffin, he could still think.
Then even thinking began to slip.
The last conclusion that remained sharp was simple.
If this chain had not appeared, he would not have died.
He would have never existed.
Then even that thought slid away, and the world went quiet.