The drift was not travel.
Travel implied intention, a road, a destination that felt real. This was something else. This was being carried by an indifferent ocean, where direction was a suggestion and distance was slow punishment.
Li Xiao Bai moved through the void with measured bursts of immortal essence, correcting his course whenever the distant solar system shifted in his view. The stars did not change. They only watched. Their light looked clean from afar, but the longer he stared, the more he felt that the darkness between them was not empty.
It was patient.
The chain around his soul remained.
Sometimes it tightened. Sometimes it loosened. It never left. It was like a hand resting on the back of his neck, neither pushing nor releasing, reminding him that his life was borrowed.
He did not waste time cursing it.
Curses were for the powerless.
He focused on survival.
Every movement cost essence. Every mistake cost more. He could not afford panic, could not afford exhaustion, and could not afford to assume that silence meant safety. Silence only meant the blade had not been drawn yet.
He continued forward.
Hours became days. Days became a blur of repeated adjustments and careful calculation. He slept in short fragments, waking on instinct before his mind could sink too deep. Even sleep felt like a risk.
He kept scanning.
Not with eyes alone. Eyes were crude. They could be deceived by distance and darkness.
Information Path was different.
He released small, disposable Gu into the void, letting them drift ahead like scattered ink. Mortal things, weak and cheap, but their function was simple. They carried fragments of his perception outward, turning emptiness into a map, piece by piece.
No hostile response.
No disturbance.
Nothing.
That was the worst kind of result.
Either the void truly held nothing, or whatever existed out there did not need to react.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his eyes.
His calm did not change, but his vigilance sharpened. He fed more essence into the monitoring move, widening its range.
The Gu trembled. The farther they drifted, the more pressure they suffered, as if the space itself resisted being observed.
The chain tightened by a fraction.
Not as a warning.
As a constraint.
Li Xiao Bai ignored it and continued.
Then the map broke.
Not slowly. Not with warning. It tore apart in a single instant, like paper ripped by an invisible hand.
Several scouting Gu vanished outright.
Not destroyed.
Erased.
Li Xiao Bai stopped moving.
His body hovered in the darkness. The remnant of Heavenly Court behind him was far now, reduced to a jagged absence in the distance. Ahead, the solar system remained small and pale.
Between them, something had shifted.
Li Xiao Bai did not turn his head immediately. He did not react like prey.
He listened to what the information left behind.
The void had changed.
There was pressure where there should have been none. A distortion in the cold, like a deep current moving beneath still water. His senses brushed against it and recoiled, not from fear, but from recognition of scale.
This was not a beast.
This was a disaster shaped like something alive.
Li Xiao Bai finally looked.
At first he saw nothing.
Only darkness.
Then the darkness blinked.
Two enormous shapes opened like eyes in the void, each larger than a mountain range, each carrying a faint, alien gleam. They did not shine. They drank light and returned only a sickly suggestion of reflection, as if reality refused to reveal them cleanly.
It was too far to see clearly, and yet his mind insisted on describing it.
A silhouette like a continent tearing free from the sea floor.
A body that did not obey any familiar geometry, too long, too wide, too wrong. Layers of armor, or flesh, or something that had never needed names drifted around it in slow rotations, as if gravity could not decide what belonged where.
It moved without sound.
But movement was not the right word.
The void bent around it. Space folded. Distance stopped behaving.
Li Xiao Bai had faced terrifying beings before. Ancient desolate beasts. Variant humans with bloodlines that could crack the sky. Immortal experts whose killing intent could freeze thought.
This was different.
This was not power displayed.
This was existence made heavy.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained steady.
He did not scream. He did not flee blindly.
But he understood immediately.
He was not hidden.
Concealment meant nothing if the creature did not need sight. If it sensed soul, dao marks, or simply the disturbance of an intruder passing through what it considered its own.
The chain tightened again.
A cold suspicion surfaced.
Was this another test.
Or was this simply the cost of drifting through a sky the Gu world had never truly owned.
The creature shifted.
One of its limbs, or tendrils, or structures moved slightly.
That small motion erased another patch of space. A clean disappearance, like ink wiped from a page.
Li Xiao Bai did not wait for the next one.
He acted.
A cluster of Gu rose from his aperture, spiraling around him. Some vanished instantly, consumed to activate a killer move. Others layered into thin defenses, paper-thin, stacked in dozens.
Information Path defenses were not walls.
They were interference.
Mislabeling.
Wrong answers forced onto the world.
He released a killer move designed to blur his presence by distorting the meaning of his existence, turning his soul signature into meaningless noise.
For a heartbeat, it worked.
The creature paused.
The void held still.
Then the eyes focused, and Li Xiao Bai felt something press against him.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
Like a vast intelligence testing a small object between its fingers, deciding whether it mattered.
His concealment shattered.
The creature did not chase in any way he could name.
It moved closer, and space folded.
A distance that should have taken hours collapsed into seconds.
Li Xiao Bai tensed.
Now he saw detail.
Its surface was layered with patterns that resembled dao marks, yet did not match any Path he knew. They were not carved into flesh. They were embedded into its presence, drifting in rings around it like slow halos.
Rules, but wrong.
Order, but foreign.
And beneath those rings, something even colder: a sense of boundary being rewritten by force.
Its mouth, if it could be called that, was a vast rift filled with rotating darkness, a spiral that looked capable of swallowing worlds.
Li Xiao Bai understood.
This thing did not hunt.
It consumed like a law that had learned to wear a body.
He triggered another move.
A burst of Information Path distortion exploded outward, scattering false positions, false trajectories, false 'Li Xiao Bai' across the void. Ten, twenty, a hundred duplicates built from misdirection alone.
The creature shifted its gaze.
One by one, the duplicates vanished.
Not because it had identified them.
Because the space around them was erased.
Li Xiao Bai felt the edge of his calm tighten.
Information Path did not matter if the enemy erased the page.
He needed distance. He needed time.
He needed something he could not afford.
He sacrificed three more Gu in rapid sequence, forcing an escape method into shape. His body shot forward, riding the recoil of his own killer move like an arrow.
The creature answered with a slow, casual motion.
The spiral opened wider.
A pull formed.
Not wind.
Not gravity.
A force that dragged at soul and essence alike, as if it was inhaling the concept of 'approaching' into itself.
Li Xiao Bai's surge faltered. The void stretched, turning his forward thrust into a struggle against an invisible tide.
He clenched his teeth.
This was not something he could outfight.
He needed to outpay it.
He reached into his aperture and touched an immortal Gu.
A true immortal Gu, refined with time and cost. A core piece of his Information Path. Losing it would cripple him for years.
He did not hesitate.
Years meant nothing if he died here.
Li Xiao Bai forced immortal essence into the Gu until its aura flared painfully, then he broke it.
Not physically.
He destroyed the refinement structure, detonating its dao marks into raw, uncontrolled information.
The void flashed.
A storm of meaning erupted. Countless fragments of 'truth' and 'falsehood' burst outward at once, turning nearby space into a field of conflicting definitions.
The creature's pull faltered.
For the first time, it reacted sharply. The eyes narrowed. The bulk shifted, not in panic, but in irritation, as if an insect had touched something it considered clean.
Li Xiao Bai seized the moment.
He burned essence. He burned what remained of his disposable Gu. He carved a narrow channel through the storm and threw himself into it, forcing his body through warped space before the creature could reassert its consumption.
The void cracked around him.
For a fraction of a second, he felt the edge of erasure, his soul scraping against nothing.
The chain around his soul tightened violently.
Not as comfort.
As enforcement.
Like a lock engaging around a definition that refused to be erased.
Li Xiao Bai did not look back.
He did not need to.
The pressure faded, slowly, unwillingly.
The creature had stopped following.
Not because it could not.
Because he was no longer worth the effort.
Li Xiao Bai continued drifting, his breathing steady, but deeper now.
His aura was weaker. His essence reserves were reduced. His aperture felt as if it had lost a limb. The absence of the immortal Gu was a hollow ache, a missing tooth in his methods.
He did not regret it.
Regret was a luxury.
He let his gaze catch the distant solar system again.
Still there.
Still waiting.
Li Xiao Bai lowered his eyes.
In the Gu world, battles were decided by schemes, calculations, and careful arrangements.
Here, the battlefield did not care about schemes.
It cared about whether you could survive being noticed.
Li Xiao Bai moved on.
And behind him, far in the darkness, the void returned to silence, as if nothing had happened at all.