A year passed in the void.
There was no sunrise to mark it, no seasons to measure it, no familiar sky to remind Li Xiao Bai that time was still moving forward. If he had not carried memories that could count days without needing the sun, he might have believed the universe had stopped and only he continued.
Yet time did move.
It moved in hunger.
It moved in erosion.
It moved in the slow, grinding way his body learned to ache in places he did not know could ache.
The comet field had been a shelter, but shelter never lasted. He left it before it could become a tomb, and for a long time he traveled through emptiness so pure that even drifting dust seemed rare. He slept in fragments, never truly sinking into rest. Each time his eyelids lowered, his senses threatened to dull, and the void punished dullness.
So he learned to rest without surrendering.
He sealed his essence. He reduced his breathing. He slowed his heartbeat with a careful method that risked as little as possible. Even then, sleep came like a thief: short, shallow, gone the instant something felt wrong.
At first, he told himself exhaustion was simply another cost.
Later, he stopped calling it a cost and began calling it a countdown.
Because the void was not only outside him.
It was inside him.
Foreign dao marks scraped at his flesh in faint, persistent strokes. The damage did not spread quickly, but it spread without pause, a patient rot that did not need wounds or poison. His left forearm was the first to show pale discoloration, then a patch along his ribs, then a thin line across the back of his shoulder.
Each day he checked those marks with methods once used to examine cultivation injuries. Each day the result remained the same.
The chain around his soul held steady.
His body did not.
His Gu died faster the more he relied on them. Rank three Gu that should have lived for years with proper feeding became fragile in months. Even sealed and unused, they still weakened, as if the void pressed against them like a tide that never retreated.
He learned to travel with as little movement as possible, drifting when he could, bursting forward only when needed.
He learned to treat every activation like a sacrifice.
And he learned to treat every soundless shadow like a predator.
Because predators existed here.
Not always as beasts.
Sometimes, the predator was a change in space itself.
Sometimes, it was an absence that moved too cleanly to be understood.
He paid for that lesson with an eye.
It happened in a stretch of emptiness that looked no different from any other. He had been careful. Concealment layered over concealment, movement measured, senses stretched thin.
He was scanning with an information path method, not searching for prey, but for distance. A ripple. A trace. A difference in the way starlight fell. Anything that could be turned into safety.
Then he saw it.
For a single heartbeat, the darkness ahead took shape. Not a body, but a pattern: too many points arranged in a geometry that made his mind want to slide away. It was far.
Yet it felt close.
Like something had leaned toward his skull.
Li Xiao Bai froze.
The method kept feeding him detail, and every detail felt wrong. No aura. No clear form. No movement. Only presence, and the sense that presence was not meant to be observed.
He should have cut the method immediately.
He did not.
Not from greed, not from curiosity. For one half-breath, his mind chose its old reflex.
Information first.
That half-breath cost him.
The void tore, not space, but perception. Pressure slammed into his face, and his right eye ruptured as if squeezed by an invisible fist. Pain arrived a fraction late, sharp enough to turn thought into white.
Blood pearls drifted away in slow motion.
He shut the method down instantly and wrapped concealment over himself like a shroud. He did not scream. The void would not carry it anyway.
He simply endured.
When the pain dulled enough for thought to return, he understood the warning more clearly than any lecture.
He had seen something he should not have seen.
And the moment he saw it, it had known.
In this void, sight was not one-way.
It was a line.
If you reached outward with awareness, something could follow the line back.
From that day on, Li Xiao Bai treated perception like a blade that cut both hands. He did not widen his senses unless he had to. He did not stare at anomalies. He did not try to understand what the void refused to explain.
He moved forward with one eye, and he moved as if the universe could look back at any moment.
Then came the second strike, harsher and simpler.
He drifted through a region where starlight felt subtly different. He could not have explained it to anyone else, but he sensed faint structure ahead, like lines that almost formed a familiar pattern. The emptiness had texture now. A difference in the pull of distant masses. A thin shift in how space carried his movement.
His instincts sharpened.
Solar system.
He did not arrive at that conclusion through instinct alone. Before apertures and immortal essence, he had once studied the sky with human eyes. Orbits, resonance, mass distribution, the quiet mathematics behind light and distance. As a clone, he carried that knowledge like marrow.
Distance in the void was a cruel joke. You could see a star and still take years to reach the space where its light was born.
Yet the pattern was there.
It was not proof.
But it was possibility, and possibility could be lethal if it made him careless.
He slowed down, layered concealment, and pushed forward with controlled bursts.
Then something fast crossed his path.
No roar.
No ripple.
No warning.
One moment he was moving, and the next his left leg was gone from the knee down.
Pain arrived an instant later, bright and brutal.
In the vacuum, blood did not spray. It formed trembling red spheres that floated outward, shining like grotesque rubies in starlight. The severed flesh whitened at the edges, not from frost, but from the void's erasure starting to bite into open tissue.
He reacted without thought.
A healing Gu activated, then faltered, its aura thinning as foreign dao marks scraped across it. He forced essence through anyway, not to regrow the limb, but to stabilize the wound and prevent further loss.
His body shuddered. Pain tried to climb into his mind.
He suppressed it.
An information path method rose by reflex.
He stopped it.
One-eyed and bleeding, he remembered the first lesson.
Seeing could invite being seen.
He searched with smaller means, narrower methods, less arrogance. Even so, he found nothing. No shape. No aura. No lingering presence.
It was as if a piece of the void had snapped shut around his leg and stolen it, then vanished before he could name it.
He sealed the wound further and adjusted his movement.
He could not walk in space, but posture still mattered. His body still depended on balance and the tiny corrections that kept his methods stable when he activated Gu. Without his left leg, every correction took more effort.
Not fatal.
A warning written in blood.
The void could take a piece of him in an instant.
And he might never know what had done it.
A weaker mind would have panicked.
Li Xiao Bai did something worse.
He adapted.
He reduced his signature further. He minimized activations. He moved like dead debris, letting inertia carry him when possible. He accepted that the void could strike without reason and planned around that truth.
Then, for the first time in a long time, he allowed himself a thought that felt almost human.
I am close.
Not because pain demanded meaning, but because he needed a reason to accept loss without wasting time on rage.
The structure ahead felt stronger now. The pull of mass grew clearer. Distant starlight carried a faint geometry, as if space itself was beginning to bend toward orbit.
He continued forward with a crippled body and a calm mind.
The worst experiences did not end there.
There were days when he sensed giants fighting far away, their clashes sending faint tremors through space. He never went near them. He never looked too long. In this place, attention was a rope.
There were moments when sudden flashes lit the void, silent blooms that expanded like dead suns and vanished. Some were battles. Some were disasters. Some were things he could not name.
Once, he drifted near a region where the void seemed to thicken. Thought felt heavier, as if even intention slowed. He fled that place at once, sacrificing speed to escape, because he suspected that staying longer would not only erode body and Gu, but erode mind.
He did not sleep properly for weeks after.
His immortal aperture remained his only true refuge, yet he did not dare retreat into it fully. If he sealed himself away too long, a predator might drift close and he would not know until it was too late.
He lived on the edge of consciousness.
And in the end, the void offered a trap that did not need a beast.
A wormhole.
He did not recognize it at first. Space could lie. Light did not travel straight when distortion bent it, and the worst traps were the ones that looked almost normal.
There was no swirling tunnel. No dramatic glare. Only a subtle curve, a wound in geometry. Starlight near it bent in a way that made his remaining eye want to slide away.
Then he felt it.
A pull.
Not gravity.
Suction.
A force that grabbed at space itself and tried to drag anything nearby into an exit that might not lead to the same sky.
Li Xiao Bai reversed at once.
A restrained burst of movement.
The suction intensified.
His speed slowed as if invisible hands clutched his bones. The severed end of his leg throbbed, and foreign dao marks along the wound flared, as if the void grew hungrier near this distortion.
He activated concealment.
The wormhole did not care.
He raised a defensive barrier.
The barrier bent and tore, not from impact, but from space being pulled wrong.
Li Xiao Bai understood instantly.
This was not a monster.
This was a passage.
If he slipped, he would not die immediately.
He would be thrown elsewhere.
A different region of the void, perhaps farther from the solar system, perhaps into a place where even his chained soul would not remain stable.
Worse, time might not behave the same.
He might return to nothing.
He might never return at all.
He forced his mind still.
Panic was waste.
He needed distance, but his movement methods were being smothered by strain.
So he anchored himself with the only currency he had.
Gu.
Not the ones he wanted to spend.
The ones he could afford to burn.
One by one, he released Gu into open space and activated them in deliberate sequences. Useless in vacuum, many of them, but activation still created ripples: patterns foreign dao marks could cling to, friction the wormhole had to swallow.
The suction grabbed those Gu at once.
They flashed, strained, then began to whiten and blur as the void ate them.
Yet in those brief seconds, resistance existed.
Not much.
Enough.
Li Xiao Bai used it to twist sideways, changing angle, forcing his body out of the clean line of pull.
The wormhole fought him. His body shuddered. Blood spheres drifted and vanished as they entered the distortion's reach.
He released more Gu.
He calculated the cost as he did it.
Twenty percent.
That number formed with cold clarity.
He could not afford more.
If he spent too much here, he would die later.
If he spent too little now, he would be dragged away and his entire year would become meaningless.
So he cut deeper.
He sacrificed Gu that had served him for years.
Information.
Communication.
Storage.
He activated them in a chain, producing a violent burst of signals that tore against suction like a net thrown over a mouth.
The net did not hold.
But it slowed the pull for a breath.
Li Xiao Bai moved.
Sideways. Forward. Sideways again.
Broken vectors, ugly motion, anything to stop the wormhole from taking him cleanly.
For a moment, the edge brushed him.
A cold pressure, not physical, but positional, as if space tried to rewrite where he belonged.
He forced more essence through the movement method and tore himself free.
Then the pull weakened.
Not because it released him.
Because he escaped its reach.
Li Xiao Bai drifted, body trembling in silence.
He did not celebrate.
Relief invited carelessness.
Instead, he checked his inventory.
The losses were real.
A hollow space inside his aperture where options had once been.
Some Gu were dead.
Some were damaged.
Some remained alive but weakened, their lifespan shaved down by the void's hunger.
Twenty percent.
Gone.
He looked back once, only long enough to fix the lesson.
The wormhole remained there, an invisible wound that could steal a traveler and spit him into an entirely different fate.
He turned away.
Ahead, structure was stronger. The pattern of distant light sharpened. The void still scraped at him, still waited for mistakes, still eroded everything it could reach.
But he could feel it now.
A system.
Orbits.
Mass.
A familiar arrangement of darkness and light.
He was close.
Li Xiao Bai drifted on, one eye gone, one leg gone from the knee down, his left arm still incomplete, and a fifth of his Gu reduced to ash.
The void had tried to throw him away.
He did not allow it.
As long as he remained alive, there was always a chance.
And for someone like him, a chance was enough.