Inside the pavilion, the light was dim.
Only a few strands of daylight filtering through the gaps in the window lattice slanted across the room's stillness, illuminating the drifting dust in the air.
Zhang Tie sat cross-legged on a meditation cushion, his eyes slightly closed, his breathing long and nearly imperceptible. A faint golden thread hovered quietly in the air a foot before him, flickering in and out like a living thing as it gently writhed.
It was a strand of the metal law he had previously extracted.
At that moment, ripples began spreading across the surface of the golden thread.
It was not trembling, but loosening and peeling apart from its most minute structure, like an icicle beneath winter eaves quietly melting under an invisible warmth.
At first, the decomposition was slow, like water wearing through stone. Tiny motes of light, smaller than dust, could be seen drifting from the end of the golden thread.
But after several breaths, the process suddenly intensified. The golden thread could no longer maintain its complete linear form. It broke apart from the middle into more than a dozen shorter golden streaks, which then shattered further into hundreds, then thousands, of brilliant yet minuscule golden particles.
Zhang Tie's brow twitched almost imperceptibly. His outstretched palm did not retract, remaining in its guiding posture.
From his fingertips emerged strands of pseudo-law connected to his origin, their color somewhat dark and mottled. Like the roots of a plant, they slowly and steadily extended toward the cloud of golden light that was collapsing.
When the light particles touched the pseudo-law strands, they were neither repelled nor absorbed. Instead, like spilled mercury, they silently "sank" into them.
Each mote of golden light that entered caused a corresponding section of the pseudo-law strand to flash with a momentary,