Li Xiao Bai came back to awareness the way a drowned man surfaced.
Not with relief. Not with gratitude.
With a single, sharp thought that cut through the numb haze.
I am still here.
There was no wind, no air, no warmth. There was not even the honest cold of a winter night. This place did not bother to feel hostile. It simply did not care whether he existed at all.
The chain around his soul was tight.
Not heavy, not metallic, not something he could describe with any ordinary comparison. Tight, like a conclusion. Tight, like a verdict. It did not comfort him. It merely forced him into a shape that could be held together.
He tested his limbs.
He found them, and then he found the absence.
His left arm ended too early. The edge was clean, not sliced, not burned. A missing sentence in a book. His immortal body should have reacted, should have surged with self-repair and dao marks. Instead, his flesh remained quiet, as if healing required laws, and laws were an expensive luxury here.
He lowered his gaze.
Nothing.
There was no ground. No sky. No up or down. A void that did not even bother to be dark. Darkness was still a color. This was the lack of a canvas.
And yet, he was not drifting wildly.
Something held him in place.
The chain did not let his soul unravel, and the same force kept his remaining body from dissolving into dust. He could not see the anchor, but he could feel the pressure of being restrained, as if someone had tied his existence to a point that the void could not swallow immediately.
Li Xiao Bai inhaled, out of habit.
The breath did nothing, but the habit mattered. Habits were identity. Identity was survival.
He moved his tongue, tested whether he could speak. His voice came out thin, almost swallowed as soon as it formed.
"Good."
The word was not for reassurance. It was a marker. A line drawn across chaos, however fragile.
His mind began to assemble the last moments.
Heavenly Court. The giant qi fruit. The human-shaped core. The seals. The anticipation of revival. The mortal-like sincerity in the eyes of those who believed they were about to witness a miracle.
Then the twist.
Not an external attack. Not a direct interruption.
An internal contradiction.
Something hidden inside the captured Qi Sea clone had turned the recipe into a bomb.
Li Xiao Bai did not need to know the exact method yet. The effect was enough to confirm intention.
Fang Yuan had seen this outcome before it existed.
He had stepped away and let the world punish itself.
Li Xiao Bai recalled the single glimpse. A calm silhouette. No panic. No frantic defense. No righteous anger.
That glimpse was a blade.
It cut through all lingering doubt about the kind of person Fang Yuan was.
A person could weep at death.
A person could rage at death.
A person could grow numb from seeing too much death.
Fang Yuan was none of these.
He did not lack emotion. He simply did not kneel to it.
He used it when it served him, and discarded it when it did not.
Li Xiao Bai's eyes narrowed.
He felt no grief for the immortals who had vanished around him. No pity. No rage.
Their deaths were the same as falling leaves. The same as a fox ripped apart by wolves. The same as a tree struck by lightning.
Equal.
Not because life was worthless, but because the world did not assign special meaning to human noise.
Meaning had to be seized.
If immortality was the only goal that could justify enduring countless deaths, then everything else was a tool. Wealth, reputation, love, hatred, belonging. Tools.
Li Xiao Bai closed his eyes.
For a brief moment, he let himself become empty.
Detached from time. Detached from the idea of "person." Detached from the instinct that screamed for comfort.
Then he opened his eyes again, and his gaze sharpened.
Now.
Assess.
He rotated his wrist, letting immortal sense spread outward.
It reached only a short distance before weakening, like a torch in rain. His senses could not grasp the void properly. They slipped off it.
But there was one thing he could detect.
The scar.
Ahead, far away in a direction he could not truly name, there was a jagged seam. A tear. A wound in reality where laws began again.
It was faint. It trembled like a distant mirage.
The chain around his soul tugged him toward it, not gently, but inevitably, as if it had chosen a path long ago.
Li Xiao Bai did not resist.
Resistance was childish. The chain had saved him, and saving never came without a reason. If he fought it now, he would only waste the little clarity he still possessed.
Instead, he examined himself more carefully.
His aperture felt wrong.
In a lawful world, his immortal aperture was a universe nested inside him, stable and obedient, filled with dao marks and resources. Here, it felt like a locked room with the lights off. The door existed, but the key did not fit.
His immortal essence was still there, but it moved sluggishly. He could spend it, but the return was poor. Like throwing gold coins into a furnace to get a single spark.
His concealment methods were weakened.
The void did not hide him, because hiding implied being seen in the first place. The void simply did not acknowledge him. That was worse. If the world did not acknowledge you, then none of your techniques mattered. You could not negotiate with nothing.
He reached toward the chain with his will.
The chain did not answer.
It was not refined by him. It was not his Gu. It was not a tool he could command. It was a shackle that had chosen to keep him alive for reasons that remained opaque.
Li Xiao Bai accepted that quickly.
A true person did not waste time crying at locked doors. A true person searched for another entrance.
He looked toward the seam again.
That was his only direction.
He let the chain pull.
The sensation of motion returned slowly, like waking from deep sleep. There was no wind to measure speed. No stars to mark distance. Only the pressure of being dragged through an ocean of un-meaning.
Time became strange.
A minute could feel like a day. A day could vanish in a blink. Li Xiao Bai did not rely on feelings. He counted with thoughts.
One.
Two.
Three.
He forced his mind into steady rhythm, using calculation methods built over centuries. Information Path was not just gathering secrets. It was building a mind that could remain clear when clarity was expensive.
As he traveled, the void did not change.
But he did.
The longer he remained here, the more he noticed subtle loss.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
A memory would blur at the edges. Not the important parts, not yet. But a minor detail, a name of a lesser immortal, a pattern of a formation line. The void gnawed at the unnecessary parts first.
Like a predator that began by eating fat before muscle.
Li Xiao Bai tightened his focus and began to prune his own mind.
He chose what to keep.
Fang Yuan's face, even as a glimpse.
The methods of concealment and survival.
The key knowledge of dao marks, path interactions, refinement logic.
His name.
If the void wanted to eat him, it could start with useless nostalgia. He would not offer it anything valuable.
He felt no sadness as he let certain memories fade. They had served their purpose. They could die.
The chain tugged again, sharper this time.
The seam in reality grew clearer.
At first it was a faint shimmer.
Then it became a clear line, like a cut across glass.
Beyond it, Li Xiao Bai could sense lawful space. Not friendly, not safe, but structured. A place where techniques could function again.
He did not feel hope.
Hope was a distraction.
He felt opportunity.
The seam widened slightly as he approached, and for the first time since entering the void, Li Xiao Bai saw something that resembled color.
A pale glow, like distant starlight.
The boundary resisted, as if the world itself disliked being touched from this side.
The chain tightened.
Li Xiao Bai was dragged toward the seam like a fish on a hook, and the moment his soul brushed the edge, pain detonated inside him.
Not physical pain.
A pain of definition.
As if his existence was being forced to fit into a template.
The chain held him together, and the seam tried to decide what he was allowed to be.
For a heartbeat, Li Xiao Bai's mind flashed with absurd clarity.
He saw how fragile worlds were.
How thin the membrane of rules truly was.
How everything people called "natural" was merely a stable agreement between dao marks.
Then he crossed.
The transition was violent.
His senses exploded outward, flooding with information. Distance snapped back into meaning. Up and down returned. Cold returned. Sound returned, though there was none immediately to hear.
And light returned.
Not sunlight.
Starlight.
A field of dead stars scattered across an endless black.
Li Xiao Bai's body jerked as if he had been thrown from a great height, even though there was no ground. He spun, vomited nothing, and forced himself to stop the rotation with a burst of immortal essence.
The burst worked.
That alone told him everything.
He was back in a place where laws existed.
He steadied himself and looked around.
Space.
Real space.
A graveyard of stars and distant worlds.
He could see a pale planet far away, cracked like an egg. He could see a comet-like trail of debris, perhaps a shattered piece of some world. He could see faint nebula haze like smoke across the void.
And he could see the fragment.
The piece of Heavenly Court that had been dragged through the seam.
It was smaller now.
Much smaller.
Most of it had vanished inside the lawless void. Only a jagged remnant remained, drifting nearby like a broken tooth. Formation inscriptions on its surface had been erased in places, leaving blank, smooth scars.
There were no immortals left on it.
Not a corpse. Not a scrap of will. Not a single lingering aperture.
They were gone.
Li Xiao Bai stared at the empty remnant and felt nothing.
Then he turned away.
The dead could not help him. Mourning could not help him.
Immortality required movement.
He checked his arm again. The missing portion remained missing, but now he could sense a faint reaction from his dao marks. Healing was possible again, though it would cost him resources he did not have.
He checked his immortal aperture.
It responded weakly, but it responded. He could access some stored materials. Not much. The clone had not been carrying a treasury. Heavenly Court had not gifted him time to prepare.
He was an exile with a knife and a mind.
And a chain around his soul.
The chain was still there.
It had not loosened after dragging him through the seam. If anything, it felt more stable now, like it had anchored itself in lawful space and decided to remain.
Li Xiao Bai tried again to probe it with his will.
No response.
Fine.
If a shackle would not answer, then treat it like a fixed condition.
Like gravity. Like time. Like the inevitability of death.
One more factor to exploit.
He turned his gaze toward the void seam behind him.
It was already closing.
The cut in reality shrank slowly, like a wound healing. The edge shimmered, then thinned, then narrowed until it became a hairline crack.
Then it vanished.
The void was gone, leaving only lawful space and the cold indifference of stars.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled.
Not relief.
Calculation.
So the seam was temporary.
So returning through it was impossible.
So his path forward was one way.
He looked at the star field again, and for the first time, a true problem rose.
Where am I.
He was not in the Gu world.
He felt it immediately. The dao marks here were wrong. The ambient pressure was not the same. The subtle rhythm of heaven and earth did not match.
Even the stars looked different, like their light carried a different history.
Li Xiao Bai's pupils narrowed further.
A foreign world.
A foreign system.
A foreign set of laws.
Which meant opportunity, and danger, and unknown paths that could devour him if he walked carelessly.
He floated in silence for a long time, letting his mind sort priorities.
First, survive.
Second, stabilize the soul.
Third, gather information.
Everything else came later.
He took out a small immortal material from his aperture, crushed it between his fingers, and let the essence seep into his body. The taste was bitter, but the effect was immediate. His mind cleared slightly. His senses sharpened. His heartbeat steadied.
Not enough.
But enough to take the next step.
He extended his immortal sense as far as he could, searching for any sign of life, any sign of civilization, any sign of a world with breathable air.
He found a distant orbit.
A faint gravitational pull.
A solar system.
It was far, but it was real.
Li Xiao Bai turned his body toward it.
He did not rush.
Rushing was foolish when you did not understand the terrain. He adjusted his trajectory with slow, careful bursts of immortal essence, conserving every drop. Then he began the long drift.
As he traveled, he allowed himself one thought, quiet and sharp.
Fang Yuan had won, and the world had paid the price.
Li Xiao Bai had been discarded, not out of cruelty, but because discarding was efficient.
He did not hate that.
He respected it.
A true person did not demand fairness from the world. He demanded results from himself.
If he wanted to remain Fang Yuan's clone in more than name, then he needed to inherit more than memories.
He needed to inherit the posture of the soul.
Detachment.
Clarity.
The ability to watch death without flinching, not because he was numb, but because he had stepped beyond obsession.
He looked at the distant star system, tiny and pale.
A new stage.
A new set of pieces.
And he, drifting through the dark, smiled faintly, as cold as the space around him.
Because as long as he existed, even in exile, even in a foreign sky, the path to eternity had not ended.
It had only changed direction.