Light came first.
Not the thin starlight that had followed him for months like a rumor, but real light, dense enough to feel like weight. Warmth seeped into the emptiness from far away, slow and steady, like something patient finally exhaling.
Li Xiao Bai did not relax.
He treated warmth the way he treated kindness: as bait.
Ahead, a yellow star burned with shameless certainty. Around it, points moved in clean, disciplined loops. Not drifting wreckage. Not circling appetites. Orbits. A system that still behaved like a system.
Recognition arrived instantly, clean and useless. A pattern from an older life, stored like a tool in a drawer. He did not reach for nostalgia. Nostalgia did not buy time.
He reached for suspicion.
Because the system was intact.
Too intact.
He had crossed months of silence that was never truly empty, a sky where mistakes did not become wounds but absences. Hunger ruled anything that shone. Yet this sun shone openly, and the space around it stayed clean.
No silhouettes. No pressure. No slow, watchful weight at the edge of the light.
In this place, "nothing" was rarely empty.
It was usually deliberate.
Li Xiao Bai slowed and stopped wasting movement methods. He let inertia carry him and narrowed his perception until it was a needle. He would not pay that old price again. One half-breath of overreach had already taken an eye.
Then he felt it.
Not with sight, but with the instinct that read formations and arrangements, the invisible weight of someone else's handwriting.
Dao marks.
Dense. Layered. Coherent.
Not the blind, foreign residue that scraped at flesh and tools like sand. This was intentional. Built. Woven.
Space itself resisted around the system. A thin membrane, absolute in the way rules were absolute. Not a wall you could point at, but a region where motion became slightly wrong, where light bent into interference instead of physics.
A skin.
A boundary.
Inside that skin, everything stayed stable. Sun. Planets. Orbits. Continuity.
Which meant the problem was not "the void eats everything."
It was selection.
Selection meant criteria.
Criteria meant someone had decided what was permitted.
He did not call it safe.
He called it a trap that had not closed yet.
He could have tested it the obvious way, with Gu.
He remembered what happened when Gu were exposed too boldly out here: decay accelerated, signals became ropes, and ropes invited hands you never saw coming.
He stayed still and let the problem simplify.
He needed information, but the first rule of this place was simple too.
Looking too hard was a rope.
A rope could be pulled from either end.
So he gathered information the way a cautious thief worked a locked door.
Without touching the lock.
He backed away until the pressure of the boundary weakened, then began to circle at that distance, keeping the sun at his side and the membrane at the edge of his awareness. He marked the safe band in his mind, the region where his reserves did not bleed faster than usual. He could not replenish essence here, not truly. Every choice spent something he could not earn back.
He moved in patient arcs, reading changes the way a formation master read air currents.
Interference rose and fell.
Not random.
Periodic.
The shell had layers. Thin strata of rule stacked over each other, shifting in rhythm. It was not a simple barrier. It behaved like an algorithm.
A thought tried to form, and he cut it.
He did not need poetry.
He needed seams.
He reached into his aperture.
Not for Gu.
For trash.
A shard of stone, ordinary, with no cultivated aura. He had picked it up months ago from drifting debris and kept it out of habit. Old habits survived because they sometimes paid.
He pinched it between his fingers and flicked it forward.
No essence.
No Gu.
Just inertia.
The shard drifted toward the boundary.
Li Xiao Bai did not widen his senses. He watched with the minimum, the way a man watched a blade he already knew could cut him.
The shard entered the boundary's range.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No flash. No roar. No erasure.
It did not vanish.
That alone was confirmation.
The shell did not reject matter.
It rejected systems.
The shard continued inward, and only then did something subtle occur.
Its path bent, not like gravity, but like correction. As if the boundary edited the shard's relationship with space, forcing it into a permitted trajectory.
Not destruction.
Normalization.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained flat.
His mind sharpened.
So the boundary was not a wall.
It was a filter that enforced a preferred grammar.
He tried again.
A second shard, this time wrapped with the faintest trace of immortal essence. Not enough to count as a move. Just enough to leave a signature.
The moment it neared the boundary, the trace thinned.
Not gradually.
Decisively.
As if a line had been crossed and the imprint ceased to be allowed.
The stone remained.
The essence did not.
He stored the result.
Essence was treated as foreign input.
Stone was treated as acceptable matter.
He needed one more test to turn pattern into law.
He withdrew a tiny sliver of immortal material. Not precious, but unmistakably cultivated. Even dormant, it carried structured dao marks the way a blade carried an edge.
He released it and let it drift inward.
It lasted longer than a Gu would have, longer than his essence imprint had.
A fraction longer.
Then it went blank.
Not shattered.
Not burned.
Blank.
It did not explode into dust. It did not leave residue.
It simply stopped existing as a meaningful object, as if the boundary had denied the concept that made it immortal.
Li Xiao Bai did not blink.
The shell rejected structured dao marks.
Gu were dense structures of dao marks.
Immortal materials were structured dao marks.
Cultivation was structured dao marks.
An aperture was a world built from structured dao marks.
The answer he had been avoiding arrived anyway.
Crossing might not kill his flesh.
Crossing might kill his framework.
He stayed still long enough to strip emotion out of it.
A cripple inside a permitted space was still better than being erased outside it.
Better did not mean acceptable.
He needed criteria.
Selection required conditions.
Conditions created edges.
Edges created weak points.
He continued circling, slow and patient, mapping behavior without touching the membrane. Light distortion increased near certain arcs. Interference softened near others. Not enough to call a hole, but enough to mark a gradient, like a rule stretched thinner in places.
He tested with more inert shards, always keeping his essence flow minimal, always keeping his methods quiet. He watched which trajectories were corrected more strongly. He watched where the pressure felt sharp, where it felt indifferent.
Then he noticed something that did not belong to physics.
The restraint around his soul tightened once.
Not in alarm.
In alignment.
A small adjustment, like a lock finding the right groove.
Li Xiao Bai paused.
He did not grab for meaning. Meaning was a trap if you seized it too early.
He repeated the same inert test along that arc.
Correction was smoother there.
Not weaker.
Cleaner.
As if the boundary recognized that line as proper.
The restraint tightened again, the same cold sensation he had felt when a closing seam once decided he was still allowed to exist.
Not comfort.
Compatibility.
In that moment, an old suspicion stopped being only suspicion.
This boundary tasted like rules. Like limits enforced without argument. Like edges being measured and made obedient.
And the restraint on his soul carried that same flavor, as if both had been written by a mind that loved borders more than mercy.
He did not say the name aloud.
Names were expensive.
But the shape of it settled inside his mind with quiet certainty.
If this was a boundary built from Rule Path, then it was the kind of work that belonged to someone obsessed with limits.
Someone who treated the universe as a problem to solve, not a home to live in.
Someone who would cage a star and call it research.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze stayed flat.
If something had been left here, then this place was not shelter.
It was a laboratory.
That did not make it worse.
It made it predictable.
Laboratories had protocols.
Protocols had loopholes.
He held position and let the sun burn ahead like an indifferent witness. One world in that system carried the right mass, the right clouded sheen, the right promise of air and weight.
Not home.
A location.
A foothold.
He looked at the boundary again and did not rush.
He had mapped gradients.
Not a seam, not yet, but a direction.
He had confirmed the boundary's preference.
Matter was permitted.
Dao-marked frameworks were denied.
And the one thing that had kept his soul from being edited into nothing reacted to one band of the membrane as if it recognized the rules.
That was enough for the next step.
He adjusted his drift along the compatible arc and continued, patient as a blade being slowly raised.
If the shell selected, then selection had criteria.
If criteria existed, then a method existed.
And if a method existed, it could be exploited.
He moved in silence, one-eyed and worn, carrying a soul held in place by indifferent rules, while the sun burned ahead, bright as bait wrapped in law.