The drift was not travel.
Travel implied intention, a road, a destination that felt real. This was something else. This was being carried by an indifferent ocean, where direction was a suggestion and distance was a slow, meaningless punishment.
Li Xiao Bai moved through the void with measured bursts of immortal essence, correcting his course whenever the solar system shifted in his view. The stars did not change. They only watched. Their light looked clean from afar, but the longer he stared, the more he felt that the darkness between them was not empty.
It was waiting.
The chain around his soul remained.
Sometimes it tightened, sometimes it loosened, but it never left. It was like a hand resting on the back of his neck, neither pushing nor releasing, reminding him that his life was borrowed.
He did not waste time cursing it.
Curses were for the powerless.
He focused on survival.
Every movement cost essence. Every mistake cost more. He could not afford panic, could not afford exhaustion, and could not afford to assume that the void was safe simply because it was silent.
In the Gu world, silence was never safety. Silence meant the blade had not been drawn yet.
Li Xiao Bai continued forward.
Hours became days. Days became a blur of repeated adjustments and careful calculation. He slept in short fragments, waking on instinct before his mind could sink too deep. Even sleep felt dangerous here. In the Gu world, the unseen was always more lethal than the visible.
He kept scanning.
Not with eyes alone. Eyes were crude. They could be deceived by distance and darkness.
Information Path was different.
He released small, disposable Gu into the void, letting them drift ahead like scattered ink. They were weak, mortal things, but their function was simple. They carried fragments of his perception outward, turning the emptiness into a map, piece by piece.
No hostile response.
No disturbance.
Nothing.
That was the worst kind of result.
It suggested that either the void truly held nothing, or that whatever existed out there did not need to react.
Li Xiao Bai narrowed his eyes.
His instincts remained calm, but his vigilance sharpened. He fed more essence into the monitoring move, widening its range.
The Gu trembled. The further they drifted, the more pressure they suffered, as if the space itself resisted being observed.
The chain around his soul tightened faintly.
Li Xiao Bai ignored it and continued.
Then the map broke.
Not slowly. Not with warning. It tore apart in a single instant, like a sheet of paper ripped by an invisible hand.
Several of the scouting Gu vanished outright.
Not destroyed.
Erased.
Li Xiao Bai stopped moving.
His body hovered in the darkness. The fragment of Heavenly Court behind him was far now, only a jagged shadow in his memory. Ahead, the solar system was still there, small and distant.
Between them, something had moved.
Li Xiao Bai did not turn his head immediately. He did not react like prey.
He listened to the information left behind.
The void had changed.
There was pressure where there should have been none. A distortion in the cold, like a deep current shifting beneath still water. His senses brushed against it and recoiled, not from fear, but from the simple recognition of scale.
This was not a beast.
This was a disaster shaped like a living thing.
Li Xiao Bai finally looked.
At first he saw nothing. Only darkness.
Then the darkness blinked.
Two enormous shapes opened like eyes in the void, each one larger than a mountain range, each one carrying a faint, alien gleam. They were not bright. They did not shine. They absorbed light and returned only a sickly suggestion of reflection, as if reality itself refused to fully reveal them.
The creature was too far to see clearly, and yet his mind insisted on describing it.
A silhouette like a continent tearing free from the sea floor.
A body that did not obey any familiar shape, too long, too wide, too wrong. Layers of armor or flesh drifted around it in slow, lazy rotations, as if gravity could not decide what parts belonged where.
It moved without sound.
But movement was not the right word.
The void bent around it. Space folded. Distance lost meaning.
Li Xiao Bai had faced many terrifying beings in his life. Ancient desolate beasts. Variant humans with bloodlines that could crack the sky. Immortal experts whose killing intent could freeze thought.
This was different.
This was not power displayed.
This was existence itself being heavy.
Li Xiao Bai's expression remained steady.
He did not scream. He did not flee blindly.
But he understood something immediately.
He was not hidden.
Ghostly concealment meant nothing if the creature did not need to see. If it sensed souls, or dao marks, or simply noticed the disturbance of an intruder entering its territory.
The chain around his soul tightened again.
Li Xiao Bai felt a cold suspicion.
Was this another test?
Or was this simply the price of drifting through space, a price nobody in the Gu world had ever needed to pay?
The creature shifted.
One of its massive limbs, or tendrils, or whatever that structure was, moved slightly.
That small movement erased another patch of space, a clean disappearance like ink wiped from a page.
Li Xiao Bai did not wait for the next one.
He acted.
A cluster of Gu rose from his aperture, swirling around him. Some vanished instantly, consumed to activate a killer move. Others formed a layered defense, thin as paper, but stacked in dozens.
Information Path defenses were not walls. They were misdirection, interference, confusion. They made the enemy see the wrong answer.
He released a killer move designed to hide his presence by distorting the "meaning" of his existence, turning his soul signature into meaningless noise.
For a heartbeat, it worked.
The creature paused.
The void grew still again.
Then the eyes focused, and Li Xiao Bai felt something press against him.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
Like a massive intelligence testing a small object between its fingers, deciding whether it was edible.
His concealment shattered.
The creature did not chase.
It simply moved closer, and space folded.
The distance that should have taken hours to cross became seconds.
Li Xiao Bai's body tensed.
Now he saw more detail.
The surface of the creature was layered with strange patterns that looked like dao marks, but not of any Path he recognized. They were not carved into flesh. They were embedded into existence, floating in slow rings around its body like drifting halos.
Its mouth, if it could be called that, was a vast裂 gap filled with rotating darkness, a spiral that looked like it could swallow worlds.
Li Xiao Bai understood the truth.
This thing did not hunt like beasts.
It consumed like a natural law.
He triggered another move.
A burst of information distortion exploded outward, creating false positions, false trajectories, false "Li Xiao Bai" scattered across the void. Ten, twenty, a hundred duplicates created from pure misdirection.
The creature moved its gaze.
One by one, the duplicates vanished.
Not because they were discovered.
Because the void around them was erased.
Li Xiao Bai felt a chill at the edge of his calm.
Information Path did not matter if the enemy erased the page.
He needed distance. He needed time. He needed a miracle.
He sacrificed three more Gu in rapid sequence, building a layered escape route. His body shot forward, riding the recoil of his own killer move like an arrow.
The creature responded with a slow, casual motion.
The spiral-mouth opened wider.
A pull formed.
Not wind. Not gravity.
A force that dragged at soul and essence alike, as if the creature was inhaling the concept of "approaching" into itself.
Li Xiao Bai's movement faltered. The void around him stretched, turning his forward thrust into a struggle against an invisible tide.
He clenched his teeth.
This was not something he could outfight.
He needed to outpay it.
He reached into his aperture and touched an immortal Gu.
A true immortal Gu, refined with effort and time. A core component of his Information Path methods. Losing it would cripple him for years.
He did not hesitate.
Years meant nothing if he died here.
Li Xiao Bai forced immortal essence into the Gu until it screamed, its aura flaring painfully. Then he crushed it.
Not physically.
He destroyed the refinement structure, detonating its dao marks into raw, uncontrolled information.
The void flashed.
A storm of meaning erupted, like an encyclopedia exploding into dust. Countless fragments of "truth" and "falsehood" burst outward at once, turning the nearby space into a chaotic field of conflicting definitions.
The creature's pull faltered.
For the first time, it reacted sharply, its eyes narrowing, its body shifting as if irritated.
Li Xiao Bai seized the moment.
He burned essence. He burned remaining Gu. He tore open a narrow channel through the storm and threw himself into it, forcing his body to slip through the warped space before the creature could reassert its consumption.
The void cracked around him.
For a fraction of a second, he felt himself on the edge of being erased, his soul scraping against nothingness.
The chain around his soul tightened violently, holding him together like a hook through flesh.
Li Xiao Bai did not look back.
He did not need to.
The pressure faded, slowly, unwillingly.
The creature had stopped following.
Not because it was unable.
Because he was no longer worth the effort.
Li Xiao Bai continued drifting, his breathing steady but deeper now.
His aura was weaker. His essence reserves were reduced. His aperture felt like it had lost a limb. The absence of the immortal Gu was a hollow ache, a missing tooth in his methods.
He did not regret it.
Regret was a luxury.
He turned his head slightly, letting his gaze catch the distant solar system again.
Still there.
Still waiting.
Li Xiao Bai lowered his eyes.
In the Gu world, battles were often decided by schemes, by calculations, by the careful arrangement of circumstances.
Here, in the void, the battlefield did not care about schemes.
It cared about whether you could survive being noticed.
Li Xiao Bai moved on.
And behind him, far in the darkness, the void returned to silence, as if nothing had happened at all.