Since the Dream-Weaving Art was best practiced in one's own dreams, the Ninth Princess soon left to return to hers. Li Ling sat cross-legged where he was and began his cultivation.
Just as Li Ling had said, the art's incantations, subtleties, and circulation routes mostly concerned guiding mental power. It was a method focused on directing the mind, and could even be practiced as a meditation technique for stabilizing it.
He used his mental power to knead the divine sense within his dream. It felt like a mass of runny mud that needed a constant infusion of mental power before it could gradually stabilize into a clay sculpture.
Yet even this claylike consistency was far from sufficient. He needed to inject still more mental power to give it a fixed form.
The more mental power he poured into it, the more solid and stable it seemed to become.
Once he had roughly grasped these principles, what remained was constant adjustment and experimentation to master its various physical properties.
Then, according to his own understanding, he added the properties of real-world substances. This was verisimilitude.
Li Ling spent several days creating a granite block about a foot square.
This was his first block.
Fortunately, the first step was always the hardest. Once he had grasped the essentials, creating the second took only a few hours.
Then he spent another hour creating the third.
A quarter of an hour for the fourth...
A little over a hundred breaths for the fifth...
His efficiency kept improving.
Once Li Ling was certain he understood the entire process of creating it, he waved his hand, releasing a mass of white light. Dharma power hovered like a sprite around a great current of divine sense and began transforming it automatically.
Granite blocks emerged in an endless