Li Xiao Bai did not look back.
In the Gu world, turning your head during a retreat was a mistake people made when they still believed they had time. Here, time felt like a thin skin over glass, ready to split if he pressed wrong.
He drifted forward, fixing his direction by instinct and calculation, keeping the distant solar system in sight as a fragile point of order.
The chain around his soul remained quiet.
Quiet did not mean safe. Quiet only meant the debt had not been collected yet.
The loss of the immortal Gu left a blank space in his methods, a missing reflex in his thinking. More than once, his mind reached for an answer that was no longer there.
So he adjusted.
He reorganized.
Adaptation was not talent. It was survival.
The void stretched on.
Stars remained cold and indifferent. Some were bright, some faint, some only histories of light arriving late. Between them was darkness that did not feel empty. It felt like a depth that could hide motion without ever revealing it.
Then the darkness changed.
A pale object entered his perception, small at first, then sharpening into shape as he approached.
A moon.
Not a proper moon with a dignified orbit and a loyal planet. A lonely sphere drifting near a shattered star.
The star was wrong.
It did not glow like a living sun. Its light flickered weakly, like an ember trapped inside a cracked shell. Fragments hung around it, slow debris reflecting faint radiance, a halo of ruin.
A system that had died.
Li Xiao Bai slowed.
Not because curiosity pulled him.
Because instinct tightened.
His senses brushed the moon. Solid. Ancient. Scarred. And beneath that, traces of something unfamiliar. Not a clear Path. Not a readable set of dao marks.
More like residue.
A rule that had been applied too many times until the surface forgot what it used to be.
His body did not shiver from cold.
It shivered because his soul recognized danger before his mind could name it.
Li Xiao Bai stopped entirely.
He did not spread his perception wide. After the last encounter, he understood the value of being blind.
Better blind than noticed.
He folded his concealment inward and, more importantly, stopped circulating essence. He let his presence shrink until even his own immortal sense felt muffled.
The chain tightened once.
Gentle.
Not a command.
A boundary.
Li Xiao Bai's eyes narrowed. He did not thank it. He simply recorded the reaction.
So it responds to proximity.
Not to fear.
To certain structures.
He activated a small monitoring method, careful and restrained, and let it skim the moon like a fingertip testing a blade.
Then he saw it.
Something was on the moon.
At first it looked like a shadow cast by broken terrain.
Then the shadow moved.
And the moon trembled beneath it.
A creature clung to the surface like a parasite on a corpse. Its body was a mass of slick, shifting flesh, neither fully solid nor fully fluid. Tentacles spread outward, digging into the crust, tearing it open, dragging chunks of rock inward to a central maw that rotated like a grinding wheel.
Eyes covered it.
Not two.
Not ten.
Too many.
Clusters opened and closed independently, staring in different directions. Some were the size of lakes. Some were smaller than dust. Each one moved with the same wet alertness.
Li Xiao Bai's scalp tightened. Not from disgust alone.
From recognition.
This was not a beast shaped by heaven and earth.
It carried no familiar harmony of dao marks, even in madness. No readable balance of paths.
Only appetite.
The moon cracked.
A section collapsed inward as the creature pulled, and Li Xiao Bai felt the sound in his bones despite the silence. Not noise.
Pressure.
A slow consumption, as if a world were being eaten like fruit flesh.
Li Xiao Bai did not move.
He did not think loudly.
He did not allow his essence to ripple.
He waited.
The creature's eyes shifted.
A cluster turned toward the void, scanning. Not searching like a person, but tasting the emptiness for disturbance, for definition, for anything that registered as worth consuming.
Li Xiao Bai remained still.
His calm was not courage.
It was discipline.
Seconds passed.
Then longer.
The creature returned to feeding, as if the void had offered it nothing interesting.
Only then did Li Xiao Bai move.
Not quickly.
Not directly.
He slid away with the smallest adjustments, choosing a path that curved wide around the moon, refusing to approach the shattered star any further.
And as he withdrew, the chain loosened by a fraction.
Not kindness.
Confirmation.
His course had avoided a boundary it did not want him to cross yet.
Li Xiao Bai recorded that too.
Only when the moon shrank into distance did his posture ease.
His heart remained steady, but something inside him had changed.
He had thought the Gu world was cruel. He had thought venerables and fate were the highest pressure an existence could endure.
Here, cruelty was not personal.
Here, destruction did not require intent.
Things could eat worlds without noticing.
He tightened concealment again and continued toward the solar system.
He did not slow out of despair. He did not drift aimlessly. He used the solar system as an anchor, the only stable structure in an unfamiliar sea.
If he was alive, then there was opportunity.
That was not hope.
That was calculation.
The void did not allow complacency.
As he traveled, dangers revealed themselves like silent storms.
Far away, two giants collided without sound. Their bodies were larger than mountains, their movements slow, and yet each impact warped space around them. The void trembled, not with noise, but with a pressure that made Li Xiao Bai's immortal aperture ache, as if the laws inside him were being rubbed against something incompatible.
The chain tightened.
Harder this time.
Not warning.
Restriction.
As if the space ahead had begun to behave like a place where definition was taxed.
An explosion followed.
A burst of light that should not have existed in emptiness. It expanded, then collapsed, tearing a hole in the darkness that healed a moment later.
Li Xiao Bai did not watch the spectacle.
Spectacles killed the inattentive.
He corrected his course.
Wider.
Colder.
Smaller.
He felt small for the first time since crossing out of Chaos.
Not in status.
Not in cultivation.
In the simplest sense.
Weak.
In the Gu world, weakness could be compensated with knowledge. A low rank could scheme against a high rank. One immortal Gu could decide a battle.
Here, weakness meant something else.
Here, weakness meant being erased without anyone noticing you had existed.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze remained cold.
His mind remained sharp.
He did not deny what his instincts whispered.
If he stayed here too long, he would die.
Not because of a plan. Not because of a venerable. Not because of fate.
Because something hungry would pass by.
He continued toward the solar system.
He did not relax.
He did not pray.
He moved, and in the silence of the void, the only thing that mattered was that he kept moving.
As long as he was alive, there was a chance.
That was enough.