Calm did not mean safety.
Inside the shell, the void felt cleaner, brighter, almost organized. Starlight had structure. Mass had weight. Even distance, that cruel trick of the deep dark, began to behave like something that could be measured.
That was the trap.
A lantern did not become harmless because the air around it was still.
Li Xiao Bai drifted inward with deliberate restraint, missing a hand and a leg, his balance held together by habit and will. Concealment clung to him in thin layers, not as armor, but as restraint. No wide sensing. No greedy probing. No reaching for detail just because detail existed.
He had already paid for a single careless moment with an eye.
Now he treated perception like a blade held against his own throat.
The sun grew larger, not in any dramatic rush, but with the slow certainty of a body entering a region where gravity began to speak more clearly. Warmth could not touch him in vacuum, but light could, and light made the emptiness less forgiving. Shadows became sharper. Distortions became easier to notice. Mistakes became easier to price.
The planets revealed themselves one by one, not as hopes, but as points of reflected sunlight that slowly gained identity.
Mercury, a bright fleck too close to the glare.
Venus, steadier and cleaner.
Mars, faint and red more in memory than in sight.
Jupiter, heavy even at a distance, a presence that tugged at his instincts.
Saturn, a ringed ghost, unreal until the geometry confirmed it.
The outer planets were harder to isolate without daring stronger methods. He did not dare. Not yet.
Earth came later.
A pale dot at first, easy to mistake for another wandering spark.
Then his memory aligned with the spacing, and the dot stopped being a dot. It became a coordinate that cut through time, through injuries, through the absurdity of surviving a place that could strip his tools without even acknowledging their death.
Earth.
His first world.
Ordinary. Fragile. Honest about how little it could protect you.
The old familiarity did not soften him. It sharpened him.
Familiar things made people careless.
Li Xiao Bai had not lasted as long as he had by becoming careless.
He adjusted his drift and watched the empty space around the sun.
Still no titanic silhouettes crossed the light.
Still no distant tremors of colossal collisions.
Still no wandering horrors circling a bright feast.
The absence remained too perfect.
His mind returned to the same conclusion, cold and simple.
Something maintained this.
Not a beast with teeth.
A rule that behaved like a mechanism.
Yet even mechanisms left byproducts.
The first sign appeared like a mistake in starlight.
A thin thread of darkness, drifting at an angle that did not match any natural orbit. It moved against the subtle pull as if the pull did not fully apply to it, like ink sliding across glass.
Li Xiao Bai did not stare.
He let it pass through the edge of his vision and watched its behavior indirectly. Not the thing itself, but the way faint dust near it bent. The way starlight dimmed by a fraction. The way a tiny wake formed in emptiness that should have had no wake at all.
More followed.
Dozens, scattered, small, almost unimpressive.
None of them carried the crushing scale of the distant disasters he had avoided by hiding and fleeing. These were different. Smaller. Hungrier in a petty way. Their movement had intention.
Scavengers.
Parasites.
Things that survived by lingering near the shell, feeding on what the shell discarded, but keeping just far enough away to avoid being processed themselves.
One brushed a drifting fragment of ordinary rock.
The fragment did not crack.
It did not melt.
It simply lost a thin layer, shaved away without debris, as if the surface had been edited out of existence. The thread thickened by a hair, satisfied, then drifted on.
Li Xiao Bai's remaining eye narrowed.
He had no interest in fighting them.
He had even less interest in inviting them closer.
So he shifted course by a degree, minimal enough to avoid feeling like a challenge to the shell's flow.
A few threads followed anyway.
Not all.
Only the ones that sensed something on him.
Foreign structure.
Residue that the shell had not fully stripped.
A moving meal.
Li Xiao Bai did not speed up. Speed invited mistakes, and mistakes invited verdicts. Instead, he prepared a small, crude response, not a killing move, not a show of strength, but a way to shed attention.
He released a handful of useless remains from his aperture, brittle husks and dead scraps that had already been weakened beyond function. He let them drift outward like bait.
The threads veered toward them immediately.
They wrapped the scraps, drank something invisible, and grew slightly thicker as the scraps vanished into nothing.
Li Xiao Bai continued inward, expression unchanged.
Even parasites lived under rules.
Feed, grow, survive.
Their hunger was predictable.
His was not.
Earth grew clearer.
The blue remained faint, but it was there, a shade that did not belong to dead rock or gas giants. A color that meant atmosphere, circulation, weather, oxygen.
Oxygen.
That word had once been meaningless to him, drowned under methods and cultivation. Here it mattered again, not as comfort, but as a condition.
Because his immortal aperture was not just storage.
It was refuge.
It was where air existed when his crippled body needed rest. It was where pressure and stability could be maintained when the outside offered only vacuum and law.
If he lost it, he would not die dramatically.
He would die quietly, stupidly, choking in silence.
Li Xiao Bai kept moving with that truth anchored behind his thoughts.
Then something inside him shifted.
Not a thought.
Not danger outside.
A tremor from within his immortal aperture.
At first it was subtle, a faint imbalance, like a reservoir settling. Then it sharpened, and the aperture clenched as if something inside had been grabbed and pulled.
Li Xiao Bai froze mid drift.
He did not move. He did not activate any wide method. He turned inward with the smallest examination he could manage, careful as a surgeon working beside an open flame.
What he saw was wrong.
Most of his aperture's internal environment was gone.
Not shattered into rubble.
Not burned into ash.
Gone.
Whole stretches of land, resource points, stored materials, prepared pockets of air and water, removed as if scooped out cleanly, leaving a smooth absence that did not belong to his world.
His heart did not race.
His mind did not panic.
The first reaction was calculation.
How much.
How fast.
How long until the rest followed.
Then the second reaction arrived, colder and clearer.
This was not ordinary damage.
This was digestion.
The shell's law had not stopped at judging the Gu inside him. It had found the seam where his aperture touched external rules and pushed through. The pressure outside had become a hand on the throat of his internal world.
The remaining portion shuddered like a living animal sensing a knife.
A slow pull began.
Subtle, steady.
The rest was starting to be taken.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze hardened.
He had only two immortal Gu left that could still function reliably under these conditions. Two. After everything that had already been stripped.
One was his last true pillar for gathering and sorting information without exposing himself.
The other was a stability type Gu used to reinforce structures and boundaries.
He could not waste either.
Yet if he did nothing, he would lose the aperture entirely.
If he lost it, he would lose air.
If he lost air, his body would fail.
Unacceptable.
Li Xiao Bai focused and traced the pull inside his aperture. The loss was not random. The missing region formed a clean bite taken from one side, a direction that pointed back toward a single point of contact.
A breach.
Not a physical hole.
A conceptual channel, a line of legal authority where the shell's rules could reach in and compare.
Compare, then delete.
He understood the mechanism in one cold breath.
His aperture carried his cultivation's grammar.
The shell carried its own.
It compared the two.
Found mismatch.
Corrected by removal.
Li Xiao Bai made a choice.
He would amputate.
Not flesh.
World.
He summoned the stability Immortal Gu.
It appeared in his palm smaller than it should have been, aura trembling, suppressing itself as if fear had become instinct. Alive, but strained, like a tool held beneath a constant weight.
Immortal essence flowed.
Not freely.
Not wastefully.
Carefully, like pouring water into a cracked cup.
He shaped the simplest version of the Gu's function.
Partition.
Isolate.
Deny access.
His aperture shook. The foreign pull did not argue. It continued, patient and steady, as if time itself belonged to it.
Li Xiao Bai pushed back anyway.
A line formed inside the aperture, not visible in any mundane sense, but real in the way rules were real. A boundary drawn across the remaining land, crude and violent, separating what still held stable air from what had begun to taste wrong.
He did not hesitate.
He cut the contaminated portion away from the rest.
The separated segment paled immediately. Foreign pressure crawled across it like mold across bread. The air there thinned, and even through the partition it felt wrong, as if the space had been claimed.
If he kept it, the law would use it as a handle.
If he kept it, the rest would follow.
Li Xiao Bai severed it completely.
The contaminated segment vanished at once, taken by the pull outside as if it had been waiting for permission.
For a breath, the pull weakened.
Li Xiao Bai did not relax.
He cut again, smaller this time, shaving away another sliver that showed the faintest sign of foreign pressure. More essence burned. The Immortal Gu trembled, its aura thinning with each use, as if payment was demanded in vitality as well as essence.
He ignored the cost.
Cost could be repaid.
Death could not.
Another sliver vanished.
The pull weakened again.
The breach remained, but it no longer chewed freely. It was forced to take only what he offered.
That bought time.
Time was the rarest resource.
Li Xiao Bai steadied his breathing and looked outward again.
Earth remained ahead, the blue point growing steadier, more distinct.
A promise and a trap at the same time.
If he reached it, he could rebuild. He could adapt his foundation to this law instead of letting this law dismantle him. He could find stability before the aperture was eaten down to nothing.
If he failed, he would die before ever touching atmosphere, not to a beast, not to a scheme, but to a simple lack of breath.
Inside him, the remaining portion of his aperture still trembled under the slow pressure of foreign law.
The pull did not stop.
It only slowed.
Li Xiao Bai drifted forward again, moving toward Earth while his remaining world shrank behind his ribs, cut piece by piece into survival.
He did not know how long the partition would hold.
He did not know how many cuts he could afford.
He only knew what this had become.
Not a journey.
A race against the loss of breath itself.