A year passed in the void.
No sunrise marked it. No seasons turned. No familiar sky offered mercy in the form of routine. Time existed only in what it took from him and what it refused to give back.
At the beginning, Li Xiao Bai counted days the way he had always counted costs: cleanly, without emotion. Later, counting became harder, not because he forgot how, but because fatigue began to steal small pieces of attention. He compensated by building habits that did not require comfort. Short rest, frequent checks, strict discipline. He stopped trusting feeling and relied on procedure.
Procedure kept him alive.
He traveled with a new pattern. Motion in sharp bursts. Long stretches of stillness where he shut down circulation and let his presence flatten into debris. He avoided long scans and wide perception nets. He learned to read direction from tiny cues: the way dust drifted, the way distant light bent, the faint pull that revealed mass long before shape.
Even with care, the environment collected payment.
The erosion never stopped.
At first it was a discoloration, faint enough that he could deny it if he wanted. A pale patch along his forearm. A thin smear near his ribs. Later it became undeniable. The edges did not look like injury. They looked like absence trying to grow teeth.
He checked himself daily with methods kept active for only a breath. Every time he saw the same result: slow widening, patient and precise, as if the void was filing him down into a simpler version of existence.
His tools decayed too.
Rank three Gu that should have lasted years with proper care became fragile in months. Some weakened even while sealed. If he used one repeatedly, its decline accelerated as if the act of functioning drew attention. He began treating each activation like lighting a match in dry grass. Useful, but never free.
He built layers of rationing.
Travel Gu went to the front of the line, then emergency, then seed stock kept untouched. He rotated them, sealed them, fed them minimally. It was never enough. He could slow decay, not stop it.
Somewhere around the middle of the year, he stopped thinking of loss as something that happened to him and started thinking of it as weather. Unfairness was irrelevant. The sky did not argue when it rained.
Then the void demanded a harsher lesson, one that could not be filed under slow decay.
He paid for it with an eye.
It happened in a stretch of emptiness that looked harmless. No debris field. No visible disturbance. Just distant starlight and deep black.
He had been moving quietly, concealed, nearly inert between bursts. He needed direction confirmation, not discovery. He released an information method with restrained range, intending to skim, not to pry.
For a single heartbeat, the darkness ahead took shape.
Not a body.
A pattern.
Too many points arranged in a geometry that made the mind want to slide away, like trying to stare at an idea that did not want to be held.
It was far.
Yet it felt close, as if something had leaned toward his skull.
Li Xiao Bai froze. He should have cut the method immediately. He knew that now, but at the time his mind chose an old reflex: obtain detail first, decide second.
Half a breath.
That was all it took.
Pressure slammed into his face, not like impact, but like judgment. His right eye ruptured as if squeezed by an invisible fist. Pain arrived a fraction late, bright enough to turn thought into white.
Blood formed trembling spheres in open space and drifted away like grotesque jewels.
He shut everything down at once.
Concealment folded over him. Essence circulation stopped. He made himself inert, not out of fear, but because fear wasted time and stillness saved it.
The pressure lingered for several breaths, then thinned and vanished.
Only after it was gone did he allow himself to think.
He had not been attacked for existing.
He had been struck for observing.
Awareness was a line. The moment he extended it, something traced it back.
From that point onward, his discipline became stricter. He did not stare at anomalies. He did not widen senses unless the return justified the risk. He accepted that knowing too much could be lethal.
He traveled on with one eye and less arrogance.
Months later, the void took something else.
Not by punishment.
By indifference.
He had begun to sense a shift in the way space behaved. The pull of mass grew clearer. Starlight carried a faint geometry, subtle but coherent. Not proof, but structure. Enough to make him careful in a new way. Possibility was dangerous because it invited speed.
He layered concealment, reduced activations, and pushed forward with controlled bursts.
Then something fast crossed his path.
No roar.
No ripple.
No warning.
One moment he was drifting, the next his left leg was gone from the knee down.
Pain arrived an instant later, sharp and immediate. Blood did not spray. It formed red spheres that floated outward and then thinned as they drifted into regions where the void grew hungry.
The severed flesh whitened at the edges, not from cold, but from the environment biting into open tissue.
Li Xiao Bai reacted without hesitation.
A healing Gu activated and immediately faltered, its response dulled by the same pressure that had been killing his tools slowly all year. He forced essence through anyway, not to regrow the limb, but to stabilize the wound and prevent the whitening from spreading.
He succeeded.
Barely.
Then he stopped himself from doing what instinct demanded next.
He did not cast a wide scan to identify the attacker.
He did not hunt for a shape.
He did not reach outward with anger disguised as investigation.
He tightened concealment. He made himself small. He waited until pain became manageable, then adjusted his posture, recalculating balance and movement vectors with a crippled body.
He found nothing in the dark.
No aura. No trace. No lingering presence.
As if the void had simply shut its mouth for a moment, taken a bite, and moved on.
He accepted the warning written into his flesh.
The year had taught him enough. Some dangers announced themselves. Others did not. He planned for both by becoming less noticeable and less ambitious with perception.
Even injured, he continued.
He moved like dead debris whenever possible, letting inertia carry him. When movement was required, he used short bursts and shut down again. The new imbalance made every correction more costly, but cost was still preferable to being stopped.
There were days when distant giants collided in silence, their impacts warping space in slow ripples that made his aperture ache. He never went near. He never watched long. Far away did not mean safe. In this place, attention traveled.
There were flashes like dead suns blooming and collapsing. Some were battles, some were disasters, some were things he refused to name. He treated all of them the same: as landmarks to avoid.
Once, he drifted near a region where thought felt heavier, as if even intention slowed. He fled immediately, burning extra essence to escape, because he suspected that if he stayed, the void would not only erode body and tools but soften the mind itself.
He did not sleep properly for weeks afterward.
His internal world remained his only true refuge, yet he rarely retreated into it fully. Sealing himself away too long meant losing awareness of the outside, and outside was where sudden bites happened. He lived on the edge of consciousness, sleeping in fragments, waking before comfort could become a trap.
Then the void offered a danger that did not require a predator at all.
A distortion.
At first he did not recognize it. There was no swirling tunnel, no dramatic light. Only a subtle curve in geometry. Starlight near it bent in a way that made his remaining eye want to slide away.
Then he felt the pull.
Not gravity.
Suction.
A force that grabbed at space itself and tried to drag anything nearby into an exit that did not promise the same sky on the other side.
Li Xiao Bai reversed at once, a controlled burst.
The pull intensified.
His speed slowed as if invisible hands clutched his bones. The wound at his leg throbbed, and the whitening along the scar edges flared as the environment grew more aggressive near the distortion.
A barrier rose and bent immediately, not from impact, but from space being pulled wrong. Concealment did nothing. The distortion did not care what he looked like. It cared where he was.
He understood fast.
This was a passage.
If he slipped, he might not die. He might be thrown elsewhere, into a region where the year of progress meant nothing, into a place where time behaved differently, or into a depth where even his soul's restraint would not keep definition stable.
Panic offered no solution.
He needed angle.
The pull wanted him clean. Straight line, easy capture.
So he paid.
One by one, he released Gu into the open and activated them in deliberate sequences. Many of them were useless in vacuum for their intended purpose, but activation still created ripples, friction the distortion had to swallow. The pull grabbed those ripples at once. The Gu whitened, blurred, and died in quick succession.
Yet in their deaths, they bought seconds.
Li Xiao Bai used those seconds to twist sideways, changing vector, breaking the clean line of suction. The distortion fought him. Space tightened. Blood spheres drifted toward the curve and vanished as they entered its reach.
He released more Gu.
He did not romanticize sacrifice. He calculated it.
Twenty percent.
That number formed cold and immediate.
More than that and he would die later.
Less than that and he would be dragged away now.
He cut deeper into his stock, sacrificing functions he had relied on for years: information support, communication, storage convenience. He chained their activations into a violent burst of conflicting signals, not to win, only to clog.
The clog did not hold.
But it slowed the pull for a breath.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
Sideways. Forward. Sideways again.
Ugly motion, broken vectors, anything to deny the distortion a clean capture.
For a moment, the edge brushed him.
A cold positional pressure, as if space tried to rewrite where he belonged.
He forced essence through his movement method and tore himself free.
The pull weakened.
Not because it forgave him.
Because he escaped its reach.
He drifted in silence, body trembling, not from fear, but from the strain of resisting a force that did not need intent to kill. He checked inventory immediately. The hollow spaces inside his aperture were real. Some Gu were dead. Some were damaged. Some remained alive but weakened.
Twenty percent gone.
He looked back once, only long enough to brand the location into memory. The distortion remained, invisible except by what it did to light and space. A quiet trap waiting for the next traveler who believed emptiness was harmless.
Then he turned away.
Ahead, the structure was stronger now.
Not a planet yet.
Not a clear destination.
But the pull of mass grew coherent. The geometry of distant light sharpened. Space began to behave with a faint predictability that the void rarely allowed.
He was close enough for the environment to change texture.
Close enough for new rules to begin.
Li Xiao Bai continued with one eye, a missing forearm, and a leg that ended too early. He moved with fewer tools and a narrower margin for error. His body carried stains of erosion that refused cleansing. His mind carried a year of discipline carved into habit.
And ahead, faint at first, then clearer, an invisible shell of pressure began to outline itself around the distant arrangement.
Not a wall you could see.
A boundary you could feel.
Layered.
Structured.
Selective.
Li Xiao Bai slowed.
He did not rush the edge.
He studied it from afar, letting the shape of that unseen skin settle into his mind as the next problem revealed itself.
The void behind him had taught him how to endure.
What waited ahead would decide what he was still allowed to be.