"Alright, this is the last and final thing I will teach you today. After which, you will spend the rest of the day practicing the techniques I have taught you... or whatever you want but if you want to get better I suggest you practice the techniques.
Now, you both have seen that in order to maintain shadow you need an immense amount of concentration, and this can be fatal in a combat situation. So what I will show you next should decrease the amount of concentration required for you to form objects.
Although this technique may make your shadow shaping less versitile, it will allow you to prepare more before hand. This is a method I personally developed, based on association. This is a bit of a simplistic view, if you experience a sensation or perform an action at the same time you call up your shadow, you can begin to associate the feeling with your shadows form. For example, by calling up a shadow blade at the same time I caused my little finger to tense up-" Mortimers energies poured out of him forming the template of a shortsword and filling it with shadow almost instantly and staying there "-I can form a pre-determined object almost instantly... after hours of association, my shadow automatically associates the tense pinky with this form, and so long as my pinkie finger remains tense, my shadow will remain in this form.
In fact the same thing can be done with anything. You could prick one of your fingers and associate the pricking with a shadow chair. Then so long as you felt the pain in your finger the chair would remain. Or maybe even a particular flavor of gum could cause you to make a shield of shadow. Then you'd have a shield until the flavor ran out...unless you also trained yourself to associate it with the taste of flavorless gum...hmmmm.
The point is to provide you with a stimulant you can easily reproduce, which you can spend a bit of your concentration on rather than an entire weapon at once... alternatively using this method will make you more familiar with a given template and may allow you to call it up and focus on it more quickly and easily. In time you could eventually get rid of the physical cues and concentrate on the object without stimulating yourself. But for beginners this is a viable method for quick creation and little concentration.
Make sense?"
