The order runes in the Order Lord's pupils rotated at a constant pace—two revolutions per breath, no more, no less.
His aura remained as steady as ever, and the law patterns on his robes flowed at a fixed frequency.
Chu Ming spoke. "The fourth bone is complete."
Five words. A statement.
The Order Lord did not answer, but the instant Chu Ming's words fell, an exceedingly faint ripple appeared in his law fluctuations.
The ripple lasted less than half a breath, taking the form of law lines contracting and rebounding.
At that same instant, every law line flowing around him contracted inward by roughly the width of a hair. After converging upon a certain central point, they all sprang back outward to their original positions.
The interval between contraction and rebound was so brief that without maintaining absolute focus, one would never have noticed it.
During that half-breath, the eye of Chu Ming's divine consciousness captured the structure of that sensation of contraction.
It was not complex.
The central point was a "hypothetical point." It had no substance, no laws, no measurable state of existence.
When all the law lines contracted, they did not arrive at anything. They merely "pointed" in the same direction, and the ends of those directions converged into a single point.
That point did not exist in physical space. It existed in the "consensus" of the law lines.
He understood.
The fifth bone was not some external object. He did not need to go anywhere to retrieve it.
He needed to gather every law pattern within himself toward the same source point. Once the convergence reached its limit, he had to cease maintaining the independent form of any individual pattern, then unfold them anew from their converged state.
This was a "return to zero and reforging."