Li Xiao Bai returned to awareness like a man dragged up from deep water.
Not relief.
Relief was for people who believed the surface was safe.
He surfaced with pain, and pain meant edges still existed. It meant he was still defined.
The first thing he felt was constraint.
A binding wrapped around his soul, cold and absolute. Not metal, not weight. Permission and denial, pressed into links that did not ask whether he agreed. It held him in a shape that could be kept.
He tested his body.
Limbs answered.
Then absence answered louder.
His left arm still ended too early. Clean. Final. Not cut, not burned. A missing sentence torn out of the world. His immortal body should have surged to repair it.
It did nothing.
As if repair required laws.
As if laws were too expensive 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 his attention outward.
Nothing.
No ground. No sky. No horizon. Not even darkness in the honest sense. Darkness still belonged to light. This was the lack of canvas itself, a place that refused to host meaning.
And yet he was not dissolving.
Not quickly.
The binding did that work. Efficiently. Indifferently.
He did not waste time asking for mercy.
Mercy was not a currency here.
He rebuilt the last stable sequence in his mind, the way you rebuild a map after a fall.
Heavenly Court.
The colossal fruit.
The forming silhouette within it.
Star Constellation bracing for cost.
At the core, a captured qi path clone had been refined into foundation. Not a random ingredient, but the correct origin. Birth demanded a matching root. Heavenly Court had prepared the correct root and called it victory.
Li Xiao Bai knew better.
He himself was another piece of the board. An Information Path clone placed inside Heavenly Court under a harmless identity, meant to be overlooked until the method reached the stage where only details mattered.
Borrowed faces were cheaper than corpses.
Then the twist.
Not an attack.
A contradiction.
A deeper rule denying the method from inside.
He remembered a single calm gaze where calm should not exist.
Fang Yuan.
Not cruelty.
Control.
Li Xiao Bai cut morality out of the thought and left only utility. Morality did not keep a soul from being scraped clean.
He tried to extend immortal sense.
It reached a short distance and weakened, as if the surrounding absence refused to be held in definition. The attempt returned little more than pressure and emptiness.
But something ahead disrupted the emptiness.
A tremor.
A jagged seam in the nothing, like a scar where rules began again.
Structure.
Opportunity.
The binding tightened and tugged toward it.
Not gently.
Inevitably.
Li Xiao Bai did not resist.
Resistance was waste. Fighting the pull would only burn clarity. If the binding had already decided his direction, then the smartest move was to use its decision.
He examined himself as he drifted.
His immortal aperture felt wrong. In a lawful place, it was a universe nested inside him, stable and obedient. Here it felt like a sealed room. The door existed, the lock existed, and the key did not fit. Immortal essence remained, but it moved sluggishly. He could spend it, but the return was poor, like paying gold for ash.
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.
Not flesh.
Definition.
A memory blurred at the edges. Not the important ones, not yet. Small details first. Names, faces, irrelevant patterns that had once mattered to someone else. The surrounding absence gnawed at what was unnecessary before it touched what was essential.
Efficient.
So he became efficient too.
Not by abandoning memories.
By triaging them.
He drew a hard line through his mind and pushed the essentials behind it, sealing them with repetition and will, anchors hammered into place.
Everything else stayed outside that line.
Still his.
Still present.
Just exposed.
At risk.
Fang Yuan experience.
The logic of rules, seams, and dao marks.
His name.
The seam grew clearer.
A faint shimmer became a line like a cut across glass. Beyond it, lawful space existed. Not friendly. Not safe. But structured enough for methods to have meaning.
As he approached, the binding tightened again.
The seam resisted, the way reality resisted being touched from this side.
Then his soul brushed its 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 binding held him together while the seam decided what he was permitted 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. Sound returned in concept, even if space carried it poorly.
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 once, then forced the rotation to stop with a controlled burst of immortal essence.
It worked.
That alone was proof enough.
Laws existed here.
Near him drifted a remnant, a jagged tooth of Heavenly Court that had survived the crossing. It was smaller than it should have been. Most of it had been taken. Formation inscriptions were missing in places, leaving smooth blank scars where dao marks had once been.
No immortals.
No corpses.
No lingering will.
No trace.
Not dead in the normal sense.
Removed.
Li Xiao Bai stared at that emptiness for one breath, then turned away.
Attachment did not buy survival.
He checked his left arm again. 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 before the cost became ugly.
The binding remained.
It had not loosened after dragging him through the seam. 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 and raised the next question, clean and immediate.
Where am I.
This was not his old world. The rhythm of heaven and earth was wrong. Even starlight carried a different history, a different weight.
Foreign rules.
Foreign danger.
Foreign opportunity.
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 again, careful and narrow, searching for a place with gravity and air, a region where existence would be cheaper than this graveyard of stars.
He found a distant pull.
A faint orbital pattern.
Not close, but real.
Li Xiao Bai adjusted his trajectory with slow, controlled bursts.
No waste.
No display.
He began the long drift toward that distant structure, carrying his losses like facts and his survival like a calculation.
One thought remained sharp, not as hatred, but as record.
Fang Yuan had won, and the world had paid.
Li Xiao Bai had been discarded, not out of spite, but because discarding was efficient.
He did not hate it.
He stored it.
As long as he existed, the path had not ended.
It had only changed direction.