Li Xiao Bai returned to awareness with one fact already settled.
The chain had tightened, and the world had gone quiet.
Which meant he had been carried.
He did not open his eyes in relief.
Relief was a crack.
He opened them to verify edges still existed.
The first thing he felt was constraint.
The chain around his soul.
Not metal. Not weight. A binding made of permission and denial, links that did not ask whether he agreed. It held him in a shape that could be kept.
He tested his body.
Limbs were present.
Then absence.
His left arm still ended too early. Clean. Unarguable. His immortal body did not surge to repair it.
It did nothing.
As if repair required laws.
As if laws cost too much here.
He tried to breathe out of habit. The breath gave him nothing, but the habit mattered. Habits were identity. Identity resisted erasure.
He turned attention outward.
Nothing.
No ground. No sky. No horizon. Not even darkness in the honest sense.
This was the lack of canvas again.
And yet he was not dissolving.
Not quickly.
The chain was doing that work. Efficiently. Cruelly.
He rebuilt the last stable sequence.
Heavenly Court.
The fruit.
The forming silhouette.
Star Constellation braced for cost.
At the core, a Qi Path clone had been refined into foundation. Not a random ingredient, but the correct origin.
Li Xiao Bai himself was another piece.
Information Path.
Placed inside Heavenly Court under a harmless identity so the environment would ignore him until it was too late.
Borrowed identities were cheaper than corpses.
Then the twist.
Not attack.
Contradiction.
A deeper rule denying the method.
He remembered a single calm gaze in the catastrophe.
Fang Yuan.
Not cruelty.
Control.
He cut morality out of it and left only utility.
Then he tried to extend immortal sense.
It reached a short distance and weakened, as if the surrounding absence refused definition. The attempt returned pressure and emptiness.
But an anomaly existed.
Ahead, in a direction he could not truly name, a jagged seam trembled.
A scar in reality.
A place where rules began again.
Structure.
Opportunity.
The chain tightened and tugged toward it.
Not gently.
Inevitably.
Li Xiao Bai did not resist.
Resistance was waste.
He accepted the pull and turned acceptance into advantage, examining himself as he drifted.
His immortal aperture felt like a sealed room. The door existed. The lock resisted. He could force it briefly, but the cost was ugly and the return thin. Immortal essence remained, but it moved like sludge. He could spend it, but profit was poor.
Concealment did not feel weakened.
It felt meaningless.
Hiding implied a watcher.
This place did not watch.
It corrected.
Then he noticed the true cost.
Definition.
A memory blurred at the edges. Not important ones, not yet. Minor details first. Names. Faces. Patterns.
The surrounding nothing gnawed at what was unnecessary before it touched what was essential.
Efficient.
So he became efficient too.
He pruned.
He chose what to keep.
Fang Yuan's calm.
The fact of the Qi Path clone.
Rules, seams, and the logic of dao marks.
His name.
Everything else could be sacrificed later if it bought time.
The seam grew clearer.
A shimmer became a line like a cut across glass.
Beyond it, lawful space.
Not safe.
Not friendly.
But structured enough for methods to exist.
The chain tightened again as he approached.
The seam resisted, the way reality resisted being touched from this side.
Then his soul brushed the edge.
Pain detonated.
Not physical.
Pain of definition.
As if his existence was being forced to match a template, measured against rules that did not care about preference.
The chain held him together while the seam decided what he was allowed to be.
For a heartbeat, clarity sharpened into a single cold realization.
Worlds were agreements.
Rules were membranes.
Stability was a contract that could be revoked.
Then he crossed.
The transition hit like a verdict.
Distance snapped into meaning. Orientation returned. Cold returned. Light returned.
Starlight.
A field of distant stars scattered across endless black.
His body jerked as if thrown from height, even though there was no ground. He spun, then forced rotation to stop with a controlled burst of immortal essence.
It worked.
Enough proof.
Laws existed here.
Near him drifted a remnant.
A jagged tooth of Heavenly Court that had survived the crossing.
Smaller than it should have been. Most of it had been taken. Inscriptions were missing in places, leaving smooth blank scars where dao marks had once been.
No immortals.
No corpses.
No will.
No trace.
Not dead.
Removed.
Li Xiao Bai stared for one breath, then turned away.
Attachment did not buy survival.
He checked his left arm. Still missing. But his body's dao marks reacted faintly now. Healing was possible again.
Possible did not mean affordable.
He tested his aperture.
A weak response, but a response. He could open it briefly, move materials and essence, then seal it again.
The chain remained.
It had not loosened. If anything, lawful space gave it better grip.
He probed it.
Nothing.
Fine.
A fixed condition did not need cooperation.
It needed exploitation.
He looked back.
The seam was already closing.
A shimmer became a hairline crack.
Then nothing.
Returning was impossible.
So the path was one way.
He let that settle without emotion.
Then the next problem rose, clean and immediate.
Where am I.
He was not in the Gu world. The rhythm of heaven and earth was wrong. Even starlight carried a different history.
Foreign system.
Foreign rules.
Danger and opportunity in equal measure.
He sorted priorities.
Survive.
Stabilize.
Gather information.
Everything else could wait.
He crushed a small immortal material and let essence seep into his body. Bitter. Immediate. His mind cleared by a fraction.
Not enough.
Enough.
He extended immortal sense, searching for structure, gravity, air, a place where the cost of existing would be lower than this graveyard of stars.
He found a distant pull.
An orbital pattern.
A solar system.
Far, but real.
Li Xiao Bai adjusted trajectory with slow, careful bursts of essence.
No waste.
No display.
He began the long drift toward that distant structure.
One thought remained sharp.
Fang Yuan had won, and the world had paid.
Li Xiao Bai had been discarded, not out of hatred, but because discarding was efficient.
He did not hate it.
He recorded it.
As long as he existed, the path had not ended.
It had only changed direction.