Li Xiao Bai did not turn back.
Turning your head during retreat was an old habit from a world where distance behaved. Here, time felt like a thin skin over glass, ready to split if pressed wrong.
He drifted forward and fixed direction by calculation. The distant structure remained a faint point of order, useful only because it was consistent.
The restraint around his spirit stayed quiet.
Quiet did not mean safety.
Quiet meant the debt had not been collected yet.
The loss of the immortal Gu left a blank space in his methods. More than once his mind reached for a solution that no longer existed.
So 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 arriving late. Between them was darkness that did not feel empty. It felt like depth that could hide motion without 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 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 from curiosity.
From instinct.
His senses brushed the moon. Solid. Ancient. Scarred. Beneath that, residue of something unfamiliar. Not a readable path. Not a clean arrangement of dao marks.
More like a surface forced to forget what it used to be.
His body did not shiver from cold.
It shivered because his soul recognized danger before his mind named it.
He stopped entirely.
He did not spread perception wide. After the last encounter, he understood the value of being blind.
Better blind than noticed.
He folded concealment inward and stopped circulating essence. His presence shrank until even his own immortal sense felt muffled.
The restraint tightened once, gentle, not a command, more like a line drawn in advance.
He recorded the reaction.
So it responded to proximity, not emotion.
To certain structures.
He activated a small monitoring method, restrained, and let it skim the moon like a fingertip testing a blade.
Then he saw it.
Something clung to the surface.
At first it looked like shadow among broken terrain.
Then the shadow moved, and the moon trembled beneath it.
A creature latched onto the crust like a parasite on a corpse. Its body was slick shifting flesh, neither fully solid nor fully fluid. Tentacles spread outward, digging into stone, 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 smaller than dust. Each moved with the same wet alertness.
Li Xiao Bai remained still.
His calm was not courage.
It was discipline.
The moon cracked as the creature fed. A section collapsed inward, and Li Xiao Bai felt impact through pressure rather than sound.
A world being eaten without ceremony.
The creature's eyes shifted.
A cluster turned toward the void, tasting emptiness for disturbance, for definition, for anything that registered as worth consuming.
Li Xiao Bai did not ripple.
Did not let essence announce him.
Did not let thought become noise.
Seconds passed.
Then longer.
The creature returned to feeding, as if the void offered nothing interesting.
Only then did Li Xiao Bai move.
Not fast.
Not directly.
He slid away with the smallest adjustments and chose a wide curve that avoided both moon and shattered star. Distance was not protection here, but it reduced the chance of touching whatever boundary that thing owned.
As he withdrew, the restraint eased by a fraction.
Not kindness.
Confirmation.
He recorded that too.
Only when the moon shrank into distance did his posture loosen.
The conclusion inside him hardened.
Cruelty did not require intent here.
Destruction could happen as an accident of appetite.
He tightened concealment and continued forward.
Later, new dangers revealed themselves without approaching.
Far away, two giants collided without sound, bodies larger than mountains. Each impact warped space. The void trembled as pressure, and his aperture ached, as if the laws inside him were being rubbed against something incompatible.
The restraint tightened, harder this time.
Not warning.
Restriction.
As if the region ahead taxed definition itself.
A silent explosion followed.
Light that should not exist in emptiness expanded, then collapsed, tearing a hole in darkness that healed a moment later.
Li Xiao Bai did not watch.
Spectacles killed the inattentive.
He adjusted course wider and colder, minimizing exposure, minimizing activation, minimizing everything that could become a ripple.
He felt small for the first time since escape.
Not in status.
Not in cultivation.
In the simplest sense.
Weak.
In a place like this, weakness was not an insult.
It was a prediction.
If he remained here too long, something hungry would pass through.
Not because it hated him.
Because it would not notice the difference.
He continued forward without prayer and without relief.
Only motion, only control, only the refusal to offer the void an easy line back to him.