Months passed without a sunrise.
Inside the shell, time did not announce itself with mornings or nights. It accumulated in small decisions and smaller costs. A degree of drift corrected here. A breath of essence spent there. A single mistake avoided by choosing the slower line instead of the shorter one.
The space felt cleaner than the deep dark, but it was not kind. It was maintained.
Li Xiao Bai moved as if he belonged to that maintenance, quiet enough to be overlooked, precise enough to avoid being processed.
He did not travel in straight lines. Straight lines were declarations. They were arrogance written in motion. Instead, he rode broad curves and shallow arcs, letting mass and orbit do the work whenever possible. When he needed to adjust, he did it in restrained bursts, never more than necessary, never long enough for the surrounding law to notice a pattern and decide it disliked it.
He learned the shell's habits by living beside them.
Some regions were calm, where light distortion was mild and the pressure felt like a distant hand that never fully closed. In those lanes, he could drift for weeks with almost no effort, letting inertia carry him while he remained sealed and silent.
Other regions were hungry.
He would feel it as a subtle tightening at the seam of his immortal aperture, like teeth testing the edge of a lock. Not an attack, not a sudden surge, but a steady insistence. When that happened, he did not argue with it. He gave up what had already begun to turn unstable, shaving off small portions before the pull could take more than he was willing to pay.
It was not surrender.
It was control.
He could not replenish what he spent. Not properly. Not here. Essence and time did not flow the way they used to. Every resource was a finite stack, and every day was a calculation of how to spend less tomorrow by spending correctly today.
That discipline shaped everything.
He kept his perception narrow. No wide sensing. No greedy probing. The last time he reached too far into the dark, the dark had reached back. He treated curiosity the way he treated poison: useful only in measured doses, fatal if swallowed.
Even so, the shell did not let him forget that it was alive in its own way.
Sometimes the light around him bent in a slow, deliberate curve, as if space had inhaled. Tiny fragments of ordinary rock would drift too close to an invisible current and then slide away along it, guided without impact, as if the system was tidying its own edges.
The currents formed patterns.
Not random spirals.
Loops.
Bands.
Flows that repeated with a rhythm too consistent to be natural accident.
Li Xiao Bai watched those flows from a safe distance and learned where they tended to thicken. He learned where they stuttered, where a pulse arrived a fraction late, where the correction was smoother than it should have been.
Not a hole.
Not a weakness.
A preference.
Preferences could be exploited.
That was his craft.
A formation did not need to fail completely. It only needed to behave predictably.
Once, he drifted through a region where faint glitter hung like dust in sunlight. For a moment it looked harmless, almost beautiful, like the remnants of a shattered comet. Then he noticed the glitter was moving against the flow, collecting itself into thin lines.
The scavenger threads.
They were not large and they did not carry the oppressive weight of the deep void horrors. They survived by being small, by being patient, by feeding on what the shell discarded.
He saw one skim across a pebble.
The pebble did not crack. It did not melt. It simply lost a thin surface layer, shaved away with no debris. The thread thickened by a hair and drifted on, satisfied.
Li Xiao Bai did not fight them. Fighting created noise, and noise created consequences. He dealt with them the way he dealt with minor parasites in a battlefield: deny them profit.
When a few began to trail him, drawn to residue the shell had not fully stripped away, he released dead scraps from his aperture, brittle husks and weakened remains that no longer held value. The threads veered toward the bait immediately and fed.
He did not watch the feeding longer than necessary.
He continued on.
Weeks later, he passed through a band where the currents were unusually clean. No debris. No threads. Not even the faint glitter of floating dust. The emptiness there felt swept, as if something moved through it regularly.
He did not ask what did the sweeping.
He only marked the band and avoided it.
In places like this, the answer to "why" could kill you.
His approach toward Earth was slow, but it was not idle.
Distance in space lied, and light lied with it. A point could grow brighter without becoming closer. A pale dot could look reachable while still being months away in actual travel. He refused to let familiarity make him careless.
So he used what the shell allowed.
Not Gu constructs sent outward.
Not information nets that could be severed.
He used geometry and repetition.
He compared the positions of the brighter bodies over long spans and watched how their relationships changed. He treated their motion as a clock and a ruler at the same time, anchoring himself to patterns that could not be faked without rewriting the entire system.
The sun was a constant burn in one direction, steady enough to use as reference, dangerous enough to respect.
As the months passed, Earth stopped being a rumor and became an orbit.
At first it was nothing more than a faint point that could have been another wandering reflection. Then it gained color, a shade that did not belong to dead stone or gas giants. Blue, thin and stubborn, wrapped in pale bands that shifted slowly, like a living skin.
That color meant atmosphere.
It meant pressure.
It meant air that did not need to be manufactured and guarded like a treasure.
Li Xiao Bai did not feel relief. Relief loosened discipline. He let the sight sharpen him instead.
A stable environment was not a gift. It was a problem with rules, and he needed to learn those rules before they learned him.
He kept drifting inward, careful not to cut too deep through the shell's preferred flows. He stayed in lanes where correction felt clean, where the pressure did not press against him like a question.
Then the Moon entered his map.
Pale and close to Earth's path, exactly where memory said it should be. A lifeless rock, a quiet companion that reflected borrowed light and carried nothing but dust and old scars.
From a distance it looked ordinary.
Craters.
Ridges.
A curved horizon that held no promise.
Li Xiao Bai did not approach it with sentiment. Sentiment was a tool that made people die. He watched it the way he watched everything here: as terrain.
And then he noticed the stain.
A region of haze clinging to the lunar surface, too coherent to be glare, too stable to be drifting dust. It did not spread. It did not disperse. It sat there like a mark that had been placed.
Mist did not belong on the Moon.
Not in vacuum.
Not without machinery.
Not without a domain.
Li Xiao Bai did not rush to confirm the obvious explanation. Obvious explanations were often bait. He changed angle first, widening his line so he could view the haze without giving it a direct approach to him.
The haze remained in the same place.
Unmoved by perspective.
Unmoved by time.
He watched in short glances, never long enough to turn looking into commitment.
Once, the haze pulsed faintly.
Not like weather.
Like a breath.
Li Xiao Bai slowed until inertia became almost indistinguishable from stillness. He sealed his essence tighter. He let concealment sit lightly on him, not as protection, but as restraint, as if apologizing to the shell for existing at all.
He looked again.
Something stood within the haze.
At first it could have been a trick of crater shadow and distance, the mind trying to create a shape where none existed. Then the shape resolved with an order that shadows did not have.
An upright figure.
A human outline.
Not crawling.
Not drifting.
Standing on the lunar surface as if standing was normal there.
Li Xiao Bai held still and changed angle a second time, careful and wide. The haze did not shift. The figure did not vanish.
He took in details in a single controlled glance.
Two arms. Two legs. A torso. A helmet catching sunlight and returning it as a cold reflection.
A spacesuit.
That detail hit harder than the impossibility of mist.
A suit implied a person, or a story that wanted to look like a person. It implied intention. It implied technology. It implied that something here understood what humans were and how humans survived in vacuum.
Li Xiao Bai cut his gaze away and let his mind settle without rushing to conclusions.
A figure on the Moon could be an illusion.
A corpse held upright by a method.
A puppet.
A trap.
Or a gatekeeper.
He did not have enough information to name it, and naming too early was a weakness. Names pulled attention. They made the mind stick to one interpretation. In this system, sticking to the wrong interpretation could be fatal.
So he treated it as what it was, without adding story.
A presence.
A deliberate one.
He held position high above the haze, keeping distance, keeping silence, keeping the smallest possible signature. He did not send anything toward it. He did not probe it. He did not test it with a method that would announce his interest.
He waited.
The lunar haze did not spread.
The figure did not wave.
It simply stood there inside the mist, motionless, patient, as if waiting for someone to be in the sky above it.
Li Xiao Bai kept his eyes on Earth for only a moment, just long enough to remind himself of the objective.
Stability first.
Answers second.
But the Moon had placed a problem between him and that objective, and problems did not disappear because you refused to acknowledge them.
He drifted a fraction higher, shifting his approach line away from the haze while keeping it in peripheral view. He did it slowly, so slowly that even a predator that read motion would find little to justify attention.
The figure remained.
And in that stillness, the thought arrived with cold clarity.
This system was quiet because something enforced quiet.
And whatever stood in that haze did not look like a victim of that enforcement.
It looked like part of it.
Li Xiao Bai did not move closer.
He did not retreat either.
He held position and let the distance speak for him, keeping every thread of essence sealed, keeping every impulse of curiosity cut short at the root. In this place, attention was not free. Attention was a handle, and he refused to offer one.
Earth remained ahead, blue and calm, a destination that promised structure. The Moon was only terrain, only an obstacle, only a variable he could not ignore.
He adjusted his approach by a fraction, widening the line. Slow enough to look like drift. Small enough to avoid provoking the shell's currents. His concealment stayed thin and disciplined, not built to win, only to avoid being worth noticing.
The figure below did not react.
Then, very slowly, it moved.
Not a wave. Not a signal. A simple shift in posture, as if it had been waiting for the exact angle of his shadow to fall across its visor. A glint caught the sunlight and returned it upward, a cold mirror that seemed to find him without looking.
Li Xiao Bai's body remained still.
His mind did not.
A faint pressure brushed the edge of his thoughts, gentle in the way a blade could be gentle when it tested skin before cutting. It carried no malice, no warmth, no urgency.
Only certainty.
He understood in the same instant he refused to admit it aloud.
This was not a corpse. Not a relic. Not weather playing tricks with light.
Something down there had been aware of him before he allowed himself to be aware of it.
Li Xiao Bai kept his gaze steady and his presence small, and waited for the first real move to be made.