The pressure thickened.
It was not wind, not gravity, not heat.
It was a law.
It slid across him like a cold edge, searching for the line between what he was and what this place permitted. As Li Xiao Bai drifted deeper, the system's invisible skin stopped feeling like a boundary and began to feel like a verdict being read in silence.
His immortal aperture shuddered.
Inside, the Gu stirred.
Some trembled like animals sensing fire. Some went rigid, instincts screaming even through seals. It was not chaos. It was recognition. Creatures born under one grammar had felt another grammar reach in and begin to compare.
Then the first removals began.
Rank one went first.
Not one. Not two.
Dozens at once.
They did not burst. They did not rot. They did not even leave a corpse. Their auras flickered, then the flame was simply no longer allowed to exist. The connection threads snapped so cleanly that for a heartbeat Li Xiao Bai's mind tried to reject the result.
He did not.
He felt the subtraction as a hollow space inside his thoughts. No pain. No backlash. Only an unsettling finality, like a page torn out without leaving a ragged edge.
He kept still.
The enclosure was not killing life.
It was killing permission.
Rank one Gu carried thin fragments of rules. Weak dao marks shaped into simple function. The shell touched those fragments, compared them to its own law, and decided with perfect coldness that they did not belong.
So it erased them.
More followed in waves.
A hundred. Then more.
Minor support insects, residue feeders, scent markers, storage helpers. Things he had kept because it was easier to have them than not. They vanished without sound, without struggle, without any dignity that could be witnessed.
Li Xiao Bai did not flinch. He only tracked the pattern.
Rank two began to fail.
Some unraveled into faint gray dust that could not remain dust for long. Others lost their shape entirely, dissolving into lightless motes before they too were denied. A few resisted for a breath longer, their auras flaring in a reflex that had no audience, then folding inward as if pressed flat by an unseen palm.
He tightened nothing. He forced nothing.
His immortal essence remained sealed. His breathing stayed minimized. His body stayed as close to dead matter as a living will could manage.
If he fought the judgment, he would only make himself louder.
The deaths climbed.
Rank three held for a moment, then fell.
A cluster of information path Gu bound together in a small internal arrangement disappeared simultaneously. Their loss did not cascade. It severed, clean and absolute, like someone removing the foundation from a structure and letting the rest collapse on its own.
A hollow pressure formed inside his aperture.
Not grief.
Practical emptiness.
He pushed forward another inch.
The law tightened.
Rank four began to crack.
One died abruptly, and he felt it as a sharp twist behind his ribs, a pull that became absence. Its dao marks warped, fractured, then separated with the distant sensation of thin glass giving way. Another fought longer, flared once, then went dull. Its function was erased so completely that the space it occupied in his thoughts went blank for a moment, as if his mind had never learned it.
The enclosure was not eroding him the way the outer void did.
This was targeted.
This was accounting.
Then the fifth rank began to struggle.
Rank five Gu were not insects in any ordinary sense. They were power refined into living structure, dao marks layered and interwoven until a single function could change the outcome of a battle.
Here, they looked like fish thrown into fire.
The judgment did not crush them with force.
It peeled logic apart.
One weakened rapidly, aura shuddering as the rules inside it were stripped layer by layer. Another spasmed, dao marks bleeding out like veins leaking light. A third tried to stabilize itself, folding inward, suppressing its presence like prey pretending to be dead.
It did not matter.
The law did not need to see.
It only needed to compare.
And comparison here was absolute.
One rank five vanished.
A breath later, another followed.
Li Xiao Bai felt each loss as something deeper than the rank one waves. The small Gu were tools. Rank five were pillars inside the ecology of his aperture. When one disappeared, it did not merely remove an option. It loosened the framework tied to that option.
A weaker mind would have panicked.
Li Xiao Bai stayed cold.
Loss was not tragedy.
Loss was accounting.
He shifted his momentum sideways, barely.
Not fast. Not careless.
He followed the faint stutter where the pressure had a tiny irregularity, a rhythm that arrived a fraction late, then recovered. The difference was subtle enough to be dismissed by anyone who still believed in luck. Here, subtle differences were the only doors.
If he moved too fast, the remaining Gu would be processed.
If he moved too slow, the shell would finish stripping him clean.
He moved with the precision of a blade sliding through the narrow space between ribs.
The verdict followed.
Rank one continued to die in large, indifferent waves, as if the law were trimming weeds. Rank two snapped in clusters. Rank three flickered, then went quiet. Rank four bled dao marks under strain. Rank five shuddered like mountains under an unseen quake.
Inside his aperture, secondary structures collapsed. Balances broke in small places, then spread. A system built over centuries began to hollow out from the inside, not through violence, but through refusal.
Still he did not stop.
Turning back would not restore what was being judged.
It would only stretch the judgment out longer.
The shell surged once, furious and exact.
His aperture clenched like a fist closing around a heart. Every Gu still alive trembled on the edge of denial. Two rank five ruptured almost together.
Not with explosion.
With disappearance.
For an instant, broken fragments flashed across his consciousness, not memories he had stored, but the final shape of their collapsing rules. A cold sense of structure being pulled apart, then nothing.
Li Xiao Bai exhaled once, slow and controlled.
That one hurt.
Not emotionally.
Practically.
Options were life. Life was leverage.
He pushed one more inch.
The pressure peaked.
For a heartbeat, the judgment touched him directly, not his tools, not his insects, but the outline of his existence, as if deciding whether to strip more, or erase the intruder instead.
He did not resist.
He did not plead.
He did not tighten his will outward.
He became smaller.
He folded his presence inward until he was barely more than drift and stubbornness, a thing with mass but no invitation.
The law paused.
Then it stopped.
Not fading.
Stopping.
Like a blade pulled away because the cut was complete.
The pressure vanished so abruptly that he almost felt weightless, even in emptiness.
He was inside.
He did not relax.
He stabilized himself immediately with the smallest internal check he dared. He adjusted his posture by habit, compensating for missing pieces.
His left arm ended at the forearm. The hand had been gone since the first erasures. His left leg was still missing below the knee. His right eye was a sealed ruin. Pain existed, but it had been ground down into something dull, something he carried without spending thought.
He checked the aperture.
The losses were brutal.
Hundreds of rank one gone.
Dozens of rank two and three erased or broken into nothing.
Several rank four reduced to silence.
More than one rank five removed as if the universe had reached in, pointed, and said, you do not get to bring this here.
The survivors hid deep, suppressing their auras like prey. Even sealed, they felt fragile. Some did not respond properly when he nudged them, like blades dulled by invisible sanding.
High price.
Not fatal.
He forced himself to look outward.
The sun hung ahead.
For the first time in a long time, it felt closer in a way that was not only visual. Mass pulled. Orbits held. The geometry of space had edges again.
The planets glimmered like faint coins along their paths.
He did not need nostalgia.
He needed coordinates.
He tracked the third orbit and the faint blue point moving inside it, and old knowledge rose from somewhere deep, not as comfort, but as a tool that still worked.
Earth.
He did not say the word with longing.
He said it with utility.
Then his mind tightened.
The emptiness near the sun was clean.
Not empty, clean.
The reason was no longer a theory. He had felt it in his aperture. This place did not repel what came close.
It processed it.
If something powerful drifted toward this light, it would not be fought.
It would be digested.
Li Xiao Bai's lips curved by a fraction, not relief, not joy.
Recognition.
He had crossed a boundary that stripped rank five Gu like dust, and he was still moving. That meant only one thing that mattered.
The rules here were not the end.
They were the beginning of a new set of constraints.
Constraints could be learned.
Learned constraints could be used.
He adjusted his drift, compensating for imbalance with practiced micro-movements, and aimed himself toward the blue point in the third orbit.
Behind him, the shell did not roar or chase.
It remained silent, as if nothing had happened.
That silence was the true warning.
Because it did not feel like mercy.
It felt like a ledger being updated.
And somewhere within the system's law, something had just recorded his entry.