Light came first.
Not the thin starlight that had stalked him for months like a rumor, but real light, heavy enough to feel like weight. Warmth bled into the void from a distance that should not have allowed it.
Li Xiao Bai did not relax.
He treated warmth the way he treated kindness. As bait.
Ahead burned a yellow star.
A sun.
Around it, points moved in disciplined loops. Not debris. Not predators. Orbits. Structure. A system that still behaved like a system.
The Solar System.
Recognition arrived instantly, clean and useless. A pattern from an earlier life, stored like a tool in a drawer. He did not reach for nostalgia. Nostalgia did not buy time.
He reached for suspicion.
Because the system was intact.
Too intact.
He had drifted through a void where giants collided without sound, where flashes bloomed like dead suns, where a mistake did not lead to injury but to absence. Hunger ruled everything that shone.
And this sun shone openly.
Yet the space around it was clean.
No silhouettes. No pressure. No slow circling appetites. Nothing waiting at the edge of its light.
In the void, nothing was rarely empty.
It was usually deliberate.
Li Xiao Bai slowed, stopped spending burst movement methods, and let inertia carry him. He narrowed his perception until it was a needle. He had already paid for arrogance with an eye.
Then he felt it.
Not with sight. With the instinct that read battlefields, formations, the invisible weight of arrangement.
Dao marks.
Dense. Layered. Coherent.
Not the random foreign dao marks that scraped at his flesh and Gu like sand. Those were environmental and blind.
This was structured.
Space itself resisted around the Solar System. A thin membrane, absolute in the way rules were absolute. Not a wall you could see, but a region where motion became slightly wrong, where light bent in a way his mind translated as interference rather than physics.
A skin.
A boundary.
And within that skin, everything remained stable. Sun, planets, orbit, matter, continuity.
Which meant it was not erasure in general.
It was selection.
Selection meant Rule Path.
Permission. Denial.
He did not call it safety.
He called it a trap that had not been triggered yet.
He could have tested it the obvious way, with Gu.
He had already learned what obvious cost.
A probe had died without leaving a corpse, as if the shell rejected the very idea of Gu entering its range.
That was enough to forbid one approach permanently.
He stayed still and let the problem simplify itself.
He needed information.
Information Path had kept him alive. It would keep him alive again, or it would die trying. Either outcome was acceptable if it paid for clarity.
But the first rule of this place was also simple.
Looking too hard was a rope.
A rope could be pulled from either end.
So he gathered information the way a cautious thief worked a locked door.
Without touching the lock.
He backed away until the pressure of the shell weakened, then began to circle at that distance, keeping the sun at his side and the boundary at the edge of his perception. He marked the safe band in his mind, the region where his Gu did not thin, where the foreign dao marks did not suddenly sharpen into teeth.
He moved in patient arcs, reading changes the way a formation master read air currents.
Interference rose and fell.
Not random.
Periodic.
The shell had layers. That much became clear. Thin strata of rule, stacked like skin over bone.
A thought tried to form, then he cut it.
He did not need poetry.
He needed seams.
He reached into his aperture.
Not for Gu.
For trash.
A shard of stone, ordinary, with no cultivated aura. He had picked it up months ago from debris and kept it because old habits stored everything that might become useful.
He pinched it between his fingers and flicked it forward.
No essence.
No Gu.
Just inertia.
The shard drifted toward the boundary.
Li Xiao Bai did not widen his senses. He watched with the minimum. He watched like a man who knew sight could cost him.
The shard entered the shell's range.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No flash. No roar. No erasure.
It did not vanish.
That alone was a confirmation.
The shell did not reject matter.
It rejected systems.
The shard continued inward, and only then did something subtle occur.
Its path bent, not like gravity bending it, but like a correction. As if the shell adjusted the shard's relationship to space, forcing it into a permitted trajectory.
Not destruction.
Normalization.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained blank.
His mind sharpened.
So the shell was not a wall.
It was a filter that enforced a preferred grammar.
He tried again.
A second shard, this time wrapped with a faint trace of his immortal essence, not enough to be a move, just enough to leave a signature.
The moment it neared the boundary, the trace thinned.
Not gradually.
Decisively.
As if a line had been crossed, and the trace ceased to be allowed.
The stone remained.
The essence imprint did not.
Li Xiao Bai stored that result.
Essence was treated as foreign rule input.
Stone was treated as acceptable matter.
He needed one more test to make the pattern stop being a guess.
He withdrew a tiny piece of immortal material.
Nothing precious, but still immortal. It carried dao marks the way a blade carried an edge. Even inactive, it was cultivated substance.
He released it and let it drift inward.
It lasted longer than the information construct had.
A fraction longer.
Then it went blank.
Not shattered.
Not burned.
Blank.
The piece did not explode into dust. It did not leave residue.
It simply stopped existing as a meaningful object.
As if the shell had denied the concept that made it immortal.
Li Xiao Bai did not blink.
The shell rejected dao marked structures.
Gu were dense structures of dao marks.
Immortal materials carried structured dao marks.
His cultivation was structured dao marks.
His aperture was a world built on structured dao marks.
The answer he had been avoiding arrived anyway.
Crossing might not kill his flesh.
Crossing might kill his framework.
He stayed still long enough to strip emotion from it.
A cripple inside a foreign system was still better than being erased outside it.
But better did not mean acceptable.
He needed more.
He needed criteria.
Selection required conditions. Conditions created edges. Edges created weak points.
He continued circling.
Slow.
Patient.
He mapped the shell's behavior without touching it.
Light distortion increased near certain arcs.
Interference weakened near others.
Not enough to call a hole, but enough to mark a gradient.
Like a rule that was stretched thinner in places.
He tested with more inert shards, always keeping his Gu sealed, always keeping essence flow minimal. He watched which trajectories were corrected more strongly. He watched where the shell's pressure felt sharper, where it felt indifferent.
Then he noticed something that did not fit physics.
The chain around his soul tightened once.
Not in panic.
In alignment.
A small adjustment, like a lock finding the right groove.
Li Xiao Bai paused.
He did not assign meaning immediately. Meaning was a trap if you grabbed it too early.
He repeated the same inert shard test along that arc.
Correction was smoother there.
Not weaker.
Cleaner.
As if the shell recognized that line as proper.
The chain tightened again, a fraction, the same sensation as earlier when he brushed the seam out of Chaos.
Not comfort.
Compatibility.
That was the first moment a certain rumor stopped being just a rumor.
The chain's intent had always tasted like boundary and limit, like edges being enforced without argument. The shell tasted the same.
Not identical.
But related, like handwriting that matched the same hand, written years apart for different reasons.
Limitless.
He did not say the name aloud. Names were expensive. Even here.
But he allowed the shape of it to exist in his mind.
If this was a boundary built from Rule Path, then it was the kind of work that belonged to someone obsessed with limits.
Someone who treated the universe as a problem to solve, not a home to live in.
Someone who would build a cage around a star system and call it research.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze stayed flat.
If Limitless had left something here, then this place was not just shelter.
It was a laboratory.
That did not make it worse.
It made it predictable.
Laboratories had protocols.
Protocols had loopholes.
He stopped circling and held position, letting the sun burn in the distance like an indifferent witness.
Ten planets moved in their loops.
One of them was Earth.
Not home.
A location.
Air. Mass. Resources. Predictable structure.
He did not need warmth.
He needed a foothold.
He looked at the shell again and did not rush.
He now had a map of gradients.
Not a seam, not yet, but a direction.
He had confirmed the shell's preference.
Matter was permitted.
Dao marked frameworks were denied.
And the chain, the one thing that had dragged him out of Chaos, reacted to one band of the shell as if it recognized the rules.
That was enough for the next step.
Option one had paid its profit.
He had gathered information without crossing.
Without sending Gu into the mouth.
Without offering his mind as a rope.
Li Xiao Bai adjusted his drift along the compatible arc and continued, patient as a blade being slowly raised.
If the shell selected, then selection had criteria.
If criteria existed, then a method existed.
And if a method existed, then it could be exploited.
He moved on in silence, missing an eye, missing a hand, carrying a soul held by chain and rule, while the sun burned ahead like bait wrapped in law.