The short break did not last long. Ashen didn't waste time diving back into the Dreamscape.
The moment he reopened his eyes, the usual white void didn't greet him. Instead, massive training halls spread across his view.
In each of these halls, soldiers waited stoically like puppets awaiting an activation sequence.
Each hall was different from the other; one had soldiers with spears, one had swords, some had long-range weapons, and even bare-handed soldiers had their own hall.
But what was most disturbing was that each soldier was skinless. Only pink and red muscles were shown, aside from their eyes and hair.
Ashen spent a lot of effort skinning them to study how their muscles moved when they fought using his hyper vision.
Of course, he didn't actually skin their real versions to be able to summon the skinless puppets in his dream.
As to how he was able to conjure what was underneath their skin, even though Lucid Dreamweaving conjured only the things that the host knew, it had to do with a discovery that Ashen had made about dreaming recently.
In dreams, the human mind can surprisingly synthesize things it's never seen directly by recombining what it knows. For example, people can dream of being stabbed without ever having been stabbed; the brain simply uses associative imagination.
It could be less accurate, but he made it up by studying the real versions and correcting the inconsistencies.
That was also one of the reasons he attempted to rope in some soldiers for sparring, and surprisingly, the bored men jumped right at the opportunity. The spars became one of the rare things that amused them during the idle time between skirmishes.
Ashen didn't spare the surrounding halls a glance and headed to the smallest one at the center.
One of the few things he learned to do the hard way was letting the dreamscape persist even as he woke up. Conjuring everything from scratch every time wasted a lot of time and concentration, after all.
This new trick, coupled with the method of associative imagination, made his skill gain a minor level, making it reach Basic from Basic-.
Entering the hall, he was met with another skinless soldier, unsurprisingly, but the special thing about this one was that it had the same golden eyes as him, as well as the same black hair.
And if you put skin back on it, it would exactly resemble him.
Yes, it was his own body.
And this puppet was conjured with a hundred percent accuracy, unlike the others.
At first, he considered dissecting himself to make the puppet a flawless replica of the original. But then a thought stopped him.
It was his body. His own…
Shouldn't he already know every part of it? Not consciously, perhaps, but didn't his brain handle everything anyway?
It was the brain that made the heart beat, that kept the organs working and the muscles moving.
If he were injured, it was still the brain that set the body's repair in motion by sending pain, triggering hormones, and redirecting blood flow.
Every sensation, every function, every breath… all of it flowed through the brain.
It was true that most of it happened on the subconscious level.
But dreams... weren't they born from that same unconscious realm?
If the brain could orchestrate every heartbeat and every cell, then surely, it already carried the body's complete blueprint. The conscious mind simply never needed to look at it.
When Ashen reached that conclusion, Lucid Dreamweaving came to life almost on its own.
He didn't need to see his real organs or muscles. His brain had already drawn a representation of them based on everything it constantly monitored, and all he had to do was dream of that map that was the blueprint of his body.
But summoning an identical version of himself was only the first and fundamental step. What came next was the harder part.
He already had the framework to work with, and the next step was to upgrade it.
The other halls' initial purpose was made for that. By putting every group of people based on their specialization, he could study them, see how their muscles twitched, and what made them better in their domain.
And then, he would graft it onto his identical puppet.
He first targeted those who hit the hardest. How they fired a punch, what technique they employed, and which muscle groups they used.
He applied them to the puppet's movements bit by bit until finally, aside from the difference in muscle mass, everything else was stolen.
If he had picked the Greed pathway, he would have surely gotten enough feedback to take the next step right then.
Unfortunately, he hadn't, and even worse, "the goods" that he stole actually made things worse most of the time.
In reality, everyone moved in their own unique way that wouldn't necessarily work the same for others. Such a thing was normal since mass and height were rarely the same for two different people, among other things.
But Ashen had time, persistence, and a space where he could simulate and adjust as much as he wanted.
And that eventually made the impossible possible.
From jumping, running, movement techniques, weapon handling, and bare-handed fighting to even niche skills such as Respiratory Timing, Hemostatic Focus, and Silent Footfall, as their original owners called them.
Respiratory timing, he took from a marksman. It was a man who could hold his breath for entire minutes without trembling.
Ashen noticed how the man's pulse would steady just before he pulled the trigger, as if his lungs themselves had learned restraint.
After observing the pattern, the puppet's breathing matched it perfectly. After that, it no longer gasped under strain. It learned when to breathe, and when not to.
Hemostatic focus came from a medic.
During drills, she would press a palm over a soldier's wound, close her eyes, and somehow slow the bleeding.
Ashen studied the tightening of fingers, the exact pressure over the artery, and the breath synchronized with the heartbeat.
It wasn't magic, just mastery of the body's own hydraulics.
When he grafted that control into the puppet, its wounds no longer spilled wildly in simulation. It learned to clamp itself shut.
Silent footfall was more challenging.
It belonged to a scout whose steps made no sound, even on gravel. Ashen had assumed it was simple muscle control until he saw the truth.
The man didn't walk lighter; he walked softer, distributing weight through his entire frame like water flowing through reeds.
The muscles in his calves and back flexed in perfect counterbalance, canceling noise before it was born. Replicating that balance took countless simulations. The puppet stumbled endlessly until, finally, it moved like a shadow.
Each fragment he stole brought the puppet closer to perfection.
By the end of it, Ashen was sure that it was the best fighter in the entire army, if rated on technique alone.
With the puppet crafted to be as flawless as possible, next came the last and simplest step: Learn from it.
Ashen thought it would be easy. Just make himself move the same as it repeatedly. It was a dream after all, so it was certainly possible.
If he kept mimicking it for long enough, wouldn't he gain the muscle memory required to move the same way?
But facts proved otherwise when he woke up the next morning with zero progress.
The human body was simply not made to move the way the puppet did, no matter how obsessively he repeated the drills.
This made this step become from a simple one to the hardest by far among the three steps.
Ashen felt that he was facing a gigantic wall that would take ages to break, if he ever could.
But when despair finally started eroding his will, he remembered how this feeling was similar to that time when he had just lost his 'Brilliant' trait.
Back then, he tried to do everything at once, when he clearly could not anymore. And when the truth was laid upon him, he almost gave up and kept procrastinating.
But that was a lesson already learned. And procrastination wasn't even in his dictionary now.
So instead of despairing, he simply let go of his greed.
Summoning an earlier version of the Ashen-puppet, one that had only learned a single extra technique—a running technique—he started with it.
And as if by magic, a single day was enough to gain enough muscle memory to use it in real life.
From then on, Ashen knew what to do. Start small before steadily accumulating techniques until finally, he and the puppet would be the same.