A field of comets drifted through the void like a shattered crown.
Ice and stone moved in slow, silent arcs. Each fragment dragged a pale tail of dust that never scattered, because nothing here carried it away. Starlight painted sharp edges and deep shadows across the drifting graveyard.
Li Xiao Bai reduced his speed and slipped into the clutter.
Not because he believed in safety.
Because clutter created interference.
Broken angles. False silhouettes. Sudden occlusion.
In a place where danger could arrive without warning, interference was worth more than comfort. Interference bought seconds. Seconds bought choices.
He chose a large fragment cracked down the middle like a split fang and settled into its shadow. Concealment wrapped around him in layers until he felt less like a living being and more like drifting debris.
Only then did he pause.
Not to rest.
To measure.
His internal world remained intact, but it felt wrong here, like a sealed room whose walls remained solid while the air inside slowly thinned. He probed its boundary carefully. The foreign dao marks did not invade it directly, but they scraped the edges whenever essence moved, as if the environment punished circulation itself.
He tested something else.
Replenishment.
He slowed his heart, steadied his mind, and attempted to let time do its work the way it always had.
Nothing changed.
No familiar trickle.
No natural refinement.
No quiet recovery.
The truth landed with the weight of a verdict.
He was cut off from the River of Time.
Not as a metaphor.
As function.
Without that connection, the flow of time inside his immortal aperture was crippled. And without time flowing properly, the aperture could not cycle as it should. It could not naturally produce and refine what it once produced.
Stored reserves still existed.
What he had brought with him still mattered.
But what he spent would not return on its own.
That was worse than isolation.
It meant every drop was final.
He kept his expression calm and moved to the next test.
Communication.
He formed a small seal and released an information ripple, thin and cautious, searching for something familiar.
Treasure Yellow Heaven.
In the old order of things, it had always been there in the background, like a market hanging in the sky, distant but reachable if you paid the price.
Now, the ripple returned nothing.
No resistance.
No barrier.
Just absence.
Like calling a name into a tomb and realizing the tomb did not even acknowledge sound.
He adjusted the method. Altered sequence. Refined intent. Tried again. He used a second information Gu, then a third, each one more refined, each one more costly.
Nothing.
Treasure Yellow Heaven did not exist here, or the path to it had been severed so completely the difference no longer mattered.
He sealed his essence and stared into darkness without blinking.
Anger produced heat.
Heat did not create exits.
He accepted the conclusion with the same cold clarity he used to accept injuries.
He was cut off from the entire framework he had relied on.
Not only from markets.
From the rhythm that replenished him.
From the channels that anchored distance.
So he reached for the last thread he had hoped would remain.
A contingency link.
Emergency contact layered into his very design, meant to keep a separated piece from becoming useless when distance became extreme.
He triggered it carefully.
A faint pulse moved through the core.
The restraint around his spirit tightened slightly, as if warning him not to expose too much.
He pushed anyway, just enough to test.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
No response.
He tried again, deeper, using a more expensive layer. Pain should have followed. His face did not change as he spent the essence.
Nothing.
No reply.
No direction.
Not even a faint echo.
It was not silence that meant "busy."
It was silence that meant "unreachable."
Li Xiao Bai lowered his hand.
No sigh.
Sighing was fatigue, and fatigue was waste.
He looked through the comet field and sorted priorities again.
If replenishment was crippled, then every experiment was expensive.
Yet ignorance was more expensive than any Gu.
He needed boundaries.
He needed rules.
He needed to understand what exactly was eating him.
So he did what he always did in the face of unknown terrain.
He experimented.
Inside his aperture, he still had test subjects.
Living bodies produced information.
Dead matter lied by omission.
He had kept them earlier the way one kept tools. Not with cruelty. With calculation.
Now, calculation demanded payment.
He opened his aperture slightly.
A thin line of space parted, revealing the faint glow of his internal world. Compared to the void, that glow looked almost warm. Air, light, structure.
He pulled out the first mortal.
A man, middle-aged, thin.
Confusion hit first, then panic when his lungs found nothing. His mouth opened into a scream that could not travel. Hands clawed at emptiness.
Li Xiao Bai watched without blinking.
Suffocation was expected.
What followed was not.
The man's skin began to whiten.
Not frost.
Not cold.
Color drained as if definition itself was being pulled away. His movements turned jerky. His outline softened. Fingers blurred first, as if his edges could not hold.
Fine dust drifted away and vanished before it could spread.
Then he thinned and disappeared.
No corpse.
No residue.
No lingering presence.
Li Xiao Bai pulled out a second mortal.
A young woman.
The sequence repeated with cruel consistency. Breath failed, color drained, outline softened, substance vanished.
He continued, not out of obsession, but to confirm pattern.
A third.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Then he changed variables.
He withdrew one only partially, leaving an arm outside. The arm whitened immediately, blurred, and began to crack. He pulled it back in.
Inside his aperture the arm remained, but it was wrong. Grey-tinged flesh with a texture that did not belong. The mortal screamed in air, but the scream did not reverse damage.
He wrapped the next subject in a thin barrier.
The barrier failed like wet paper.
He tried a stronger method, closer to a small formation.
The subject lasted longer.
Minutes, not seconds.
Then vanished anyway.
He tried stasis, forcing stillness, making the body behave like dead matter.
It bought time.
Then the erosion reached even stillness, and the body disappeared all the same.
When he finished, the remaining mortals inside his aperture were trembling.
Their fear did not matter.
The pattern did.
This environment did not merely lack life support.
It erased.
It erased living things quickly.
Then he moved to the second measure.
Creatures that carried crude traces of dao marks.
He pulled out a wolf.
It resisted longer than a mortal. Its outline held. Whitening spread more slowly.
Then the foreign dao marks gathered around it more densely, as if responding to a richer meal.
The wolf convulsed. Fur flaked into dust. Muscle lost definition. Eyes dulled.
It vanished.
A boar lasted longer. Dense flesh resisted erasure by minutes.
Then it vanished too.
A bird died quickly, almost like a mortal.
The conclusion sharpened.
Living things died here.
And the more dao marks a body carried, even crude ones, the more the environment focused on it.
Like a predator drawn by scent.
That explained his Gu.
That explained why decay accelerated when he used them.
That explained why his body was being filed down while the spiritual core held.
He closed his aperture.
The remaining mortals still trembled inside, but their function was complete.
Now he had enough truth to act.
This place erased life in minutes.
It eroded tools over time, faster with use.
It gnawed at flesh patiently.
It spared the core only because something had drawn a hard line there.
And on top of all that, time itself was no longer an ally.
No natural replenishment.
No quiet recovery.
Every mistake permanent.
He remained in the comet's shadow for several breaths and then moved.
Not rushing blindly.
Not crawling timidly.
Measured bursts. Long stillness. Adjustments chosen like cuts with a scalpel.
He used the comet field as a maze, weaving through drifting stone with the patience of a hunter and the caution of prey.
Behind him, the clutter thinned.
Ahead, emptiness waited.
But his understanding had changed.
Before, the void was darkness that contained predators.
Now, the void itself was hunger.
He continued forward with intention, carrying fewer illusions and a sharper map.
And somewhere beyond the cold starlight, the next boundary waited to decide what it would allow him to keep.