The drift was not travel.
Travel implied roads, intention, and destinations that felt close enough to matter. This was endurance. An indifferent ocean, where direction was a suggestion and distance was a slow punishment paid in essence.
Li Xiao Bai moved with measured bursts, correcting course whenever the distant structure shifted in his view. Stars did not guide him. They only existed. Their light looked clean from afar, but the longer he watched, the more he sensed that the darkness between them was not empty.
It was patient.
The restraint around his spirit remained. Sometimes it tightened, sometimes it eased, never leaving. Not a companion, not a blessing. A condition. A hand that reminded him the shape of his existence was temporary.
He did not curse it.
Curses changed nothing.
He counted resources instead.
Every adjustment cost essence. Every mistake cost more. He could not afford panic, could not afford exhaustion, and could not afford the mistake people made in quiet places.
Assuming quiet meant safe.
Hours became days. Days blurred into controlled motion and shallow rest. He slept in fragments, waking on instinct before his mind sank too deep. Even sleep felt like a gamble, because dullness was a signal, and signals traveled.
He kept scanning.
Eyes were crude. Distance and delayed light could lie.
So he used cheaper tools.
Small disposable Gu drifted ahead like scattered ink. Mortal, weak, almost worthless. Their function was simple: extend perception outward, turn emptiness into a map.
At first, nothing answered.
No disturbance.
No reaction.
That result was never comfort. It was poison.
Either the void held nothing, or whatever existed did not need to react to him at all.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his focus and widened the monitoring range by a careful margin.
The Gu trembled. The farther they drifted, the more pressure they suffered, as if space itself disliked being observed. The restraint around his spirit tightened slightly, not warning, not guidance, simply friction, as if the environment taxed definition.
He recorded it and continued.
Then the map snapped.
Not slowly.
Not with a warning tremor.
It tore in a single instant, like paper ripped by an invisible hand.
Several scouting Gu vanished outright.
Not destroyed.
Erased.
Li Xiao Bai stopped moving.
Behind him, the remnant he had escaped from was a jagged speck now, too far to matter. Ahead, the distant structure remained pale and small.
Between them, something had shifted.
He did not turn like prey.
He listened to the absence.
Pressure existed where pressure should not exist. A distortion in the cold, like a deep current moving beneath still water. His senses brushed it and recoiled, not from fear, but from recognition of scale.
This was not a beast.
This was a disaster wearing a shape.
Li Xiao Bai finally looked.
At first, he saw nothing.
Then the darkness blinked.
Two vast openings appeared, each larger than a mountain range, each holding a faint alien sheen. They did not shine. They drank light and returned only a sick suggestion of reflection, as if reality refused to reveal them cleanly.
It was impossibly far.
And it felt close.
His mind insisted on describing what it could not properly resolve.
A silhouette like a continent tearing free from a sea floor.
A body that did not obey any geometry he recognized. Layers of armor, or flesh, or something that did not require names, rotated around it in slow halos.
It moved without sound.
Movement was the wrong word.
Space bent around it. Distance stopped behaving.
Li Xiao Bai had faced ancient horrors before, but those horrors still lived inside rules. This did not.
This was existence made heavy.
He understood the real problem at once.
He was not hidden.
Concealment meant nothing if the thing did not rely on sight. If it sensed disturbance, essence flow, or the simple fact of a defined life passing through its reach, then his tricks were only delays.
A cold thought formed.
This might be a test.
Or it might be the price of crossing a sky that did not belong to him.
He did not waste time deciding which.
The creature shifted.
One limb, or tendril, or structure moved slightly.
A patch of space disappeared. Clean. Complete. Like ink wiped from a page.
Li Xiao Bai acted.
A cluster of Gu rose from his aperture. Some burned instantly to form a killer move. Others layered into thin defenses, not walls, but interference. Wrong answers forced onto the world.
He released a distortion move that blurred the meaning of his presence, turning his signature into noise.
For a heartbeat, it worked.
The creature paused.
Then the gaze focused, and Li Xiao Bai felt pressure touch him.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
Like an intelligence testing a small object, deciding whether it mattered.
His concealment shattered.
The creature did not chase like predators he knew.
It moved, and space folded.
A distance that should have taken hours collapsed into seconds.
Now he saw detail.
Patterns drifted across its surface, resembling dao marks but matching no path he recognized. They were not carved into flesh. They floated in rings around its presence, slow halos of foreign order.
Beneath those rings was something colder.
Boundary being rewritten by force.
Its mouth was a rift filled with rotating darkness, a spiral that looked capable of swallowing worlds.
This thing did not hunt.
It consumed the way a law consumed.
Li Xiao Bai triggered another move.
False positions scattered. False trajectories. False bodies built from misdirection alone. Dozens, then more.
The gaze shifted.
One by one, the duplicates vanished.
Not because it identified them.
Because the space around them was erased.
Information meant nothing if the enemy erased the page itself.
He needed distance.
He needed time.
He needed something he could not afford.
So he paid anyway.
He forced an escape method into shape and launched forward on recoil. The creature answered with a slow motion that felt casual. The spiral widened. A pull formed.
Not wind.
Not gravity.
A suction that dragged at essence and spirit alike, inhaling the concept of approach into itself.
His surge faltered. Forward thrust became struggle.
He could not outfight it.
So he outpaid it.
He reached for an immortal Gu.
A true core piece of his methods. Losing it would cripple him for years.
Years meant nothing if he died here.
He flooded it with essence until its aura flared, then collapsed its refinement structure on purpose. Dao marks detonated into raw uncontrolled information.
The void flashed.
A storm of meaning erupted. Truth and falsehood shattered outward together, turning nearby space into a field of conflicting definitions.
The pull stuttered.
For the first time, the creature reacted sharply. Not fear.
Irritation.
Li Xiao Bai seized that breath of imbalance.
He burned essence. Burned disposable Gu. Carved a narrow channel through the storm and threw himself into it, forcing his body through warped space before the consumption could tighten again.
For a fraction of a second, he felt the edge of erasure scrape him.
The restraint around his spirit snapped tight.
Not comfort.
Enforcement.
A lock closing around a definition that refused to vanish.
Li Xiao Bai did not look back.
He did not need to.
The pressure faded, slowly and unwillingly.
The creature had stopped following, not because it could not, but because he was no longer worth the effort.
He drifted onward, breathing steady but deeper.
His reserves were thinner. His methods felt lopsided. The absence of the immortal Gu left a hollow ache like a missing tooth.
He did not regret it.
Regret was a luxury.
He checked course again.
The distant structure still existed, faint and stubborn. He treated it as direction, not hope.
Then he moved on, quieter than before, with fewer tools and a sharper understanding.
In this place, the only winning condition was not being worth noticing.