Earth changed from a curve into a presence.
The halo brightened. Gravity began to speak with clearer authority, not as comfort, but as instruction. The planet ahead was not a promise. It was the next battlefield, and it had rules.
The sight should have done something to him.
It did not.
No awe. No longing. No relief.
Blue and white were only data. Stronger gravity meant less time to correct mistakes. Less time meant survival.
Inside the shell, power invited judgment. Judgment invited loss. So he stayed small. He drifted like debris with a heartbeat, letting orbit and pull do most of the work. When he adjusted, it was in short, restrained bursts, too minor to look like intention.
The name remained sealed in the depths of his mind.
He did not touch it. He did not test it. He carried it like contraband and refused to give it a second of attention.
As Earth's outer reach drew near, the difference returned.
Not the brutal erasing force of the shell.
This was thinner, closer, wrapped around the sky like a clear film. It did not announce itself. It compared.
His immortal aperture answered with a tremor behind his ribs. What remained inside was cramped and wounded, held together by ugly compromises. It still contained air.
That mattered more than pride.
He chose a descent line that avoided witnesses.
Not toward bright coasts. Not toward cities. Not toward grids of human light.
He aimed for distance and darkness.
He let gravity take him.
Then he pushed.
One controlled burst, no elegance, no complexity, only enough to steepen the fall and shorten the time the world had to grind its laws against him.
Black thinned into deep blue.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the world bit.
Friction arrived like a blade dragged across him. Heat followed, quick and exact. His concealment warped instantly, thinning as if the air rejected the logic it carried. His aura flared for a heartbeat, exposed in a way that felt obscene.
Li Xiao Bai did not hesitate.
Immortal essence surged through his remaining channels and formed a crude defensive layer around his core. No refined formation. No clever structure. Pure endurance shaped into a shell.
It held briefly.
Then judgment pressed down.
Not with raw force, but with comparison.
It tested the rule inside his barrier and decided the rule did not belong.
Cracks spread. Heat slipped deeper. Pressure followed. The sky became a grinding mouth.
He fed more essence into the barrier.
The flow was slow, as if every drop had to argue for the right to exist. He forced it anyway. He had no other currency.
His immortal aperture convulsed.
Space folded at the edges. The pocket of air inside thinned slightly, just enough to matter, just enough to make a stupid death feel possible.
He pushed deeper.
The reentry glow thickened around him. The barrier broke and reformed in smaller, tighter pieces. Pain arrived sharp and immediate, and he treated it like weather, real and unavoidable and not worth emotion.
Then his remaining eye began to fail.
Heat crawled into the wet core of sight and turned it into a needle of fire. The lid seared. Vision narrowed. The world shredded into white knives.
His last eye was on the edge of burning out.
He forced it open anyway.
He needed one clean line.
His body was already incomplete before this descent.
He had lost a hand in the chaos.
He had lost an eye and a leg in the void.
Now Earth took what remained.
The atmosphere did not merely burn him. It tore him down to function and then below function. Skin split and charred. Flesh peeled back in strips. Blood cooked hot, then cooled ugly and dark under the assault of wind and heat. His one remaining arm blackened, tendons tightening like wire under a torch. His one remaining leg began to fail as muscle turned brittle and numb.
He stopped being a man.
He became a falling problem.
And as the fire wrapped him, the pull behind his ribs intensified.
Not pain.
Extraction.
Earth was eating the foreign pattern inside him. It was stripping what did not belong. It tested the dao marks engraved into what was left of him and began to correct them out of existence.
His immortal aperture shuddered again, as if the world had found the seam and started tugging.
Li Xiao Bai's mind narrowed into a single decision.
He needed a vessel.
Now.
A mortal body would be smaller under judgment. A mortal body might carry less foreign weight. A mortal body could buy him minutes.
Minutes were breath.
The ground rose fast.
Cloud layers blurred. Wind hammered him. The glow wrapped him like burning glass.
His last barrier shattered.
Heat struck directly.
Cloth blackened and vanished. The air itself felt like it had teeth.
His remaining eye screamed with light, then dimmed, then threatened to go dark forever.
He refused to let it.
He needed the target.
He extended perception downward, narrow and disciplined.
Not searching for power.
Searching for life.
A heartbeat. Warm blood. A living mind close enough to seize.
He found one.
A boy.
Not in a city.
Near a cracked road and a collapsed structure, with a few weak lights trembling far away. The boy moved alone, shoulders hunched against the night air, carrying something slung over one arm.
He did not look up.
He did not see the sky falling.
Li Xiao Bai adjusted angle.
He did not slow.
A clean landing would cost time.
Time was breath.
He struck the earth like a meteor.
Soil exploded upward. Rock shattered. A crater tore open beneath the impact. The shock ran through what remained of his ruined frame and turned it into something barely held together by momentum.
For a heartbeat, he lay in torn ground while heat hissed off him into cold air.
Then the pull behind his ribs surged again.
His aperture was being taken.
His remaining body was failing.
And the world was still correcting him.
He dragged himself out of the crater with brutal economy, leaving a dark smear behind him. His one arm dug into soil and hauled. His one leg scraped and kicked without grace. The rest of him was burned ruin that refused to stop.
The boy heard it.
He turned.
His face went blank first, then twisted as understanding arrived too late. His mouth opened to scream, but the sound caught in his throat when he saw the thing crawling out of the ground.
Li Xiao Bai reached him before the scream could be born.
He pressed the ruined palm to the boy's forehead.
No elegance.
No mercy.
A blunt invasion, thin and precise, carried by centuries of practiced cruelty, pierced into the boy's mind. Fear flared bright and shallow like a match in wind.
Li Xiao Bai crushed it.
The boy's eyes widened for a single second.
Then the light inside them flickered.
The soul collapsed.
Li Xiao Bai entered.
The world lurched.
Sensation rebuilt around a smaller frame. Breath returned in a clean, human rhythm. Pain changed shape, turning from burning ruin into hunger, cold, and old bruises.
He inhaled.
Air filled lungs.
Dirty air. Cold air. Alive air.
It tasted like survival.
Behind him, his old body remained in the crater for only a moment, an empty shell of burned flesh and foreign writing.
Without a soul to anchor it, it could not argue.
Judgment touched it and began to erase it.
Not violently.
Cleanly.
Edges thinned. Charred mass shed meaning. What remained of its dao marks was peeled away in silence, and the corpse faded as if it had never been allowed to exist.
Li Xiao Bai did not stare.
Staring was attention.
Attention was a handle.
He turned away in the boy's body and moved into darker terrain, away from roads and open sightlines, toward cover and time.
The chain still pressed on his soul, weaker than before but not gone.
And the sealed name remained quiet in the depths of his thoughts, present like a locked object he refused to touch.
Earth had not saved him.
It had only changed the battlefield.