Jen woke feeling rested. Too rested. With a sinking suspicion that Chronos’ Heart had activated while she slept, Jen opened up her status screen.
Jen Byrnes
Bringer of the Apocalypse Physical Status: Rested Mental Status: Calm Endurance: 9(2) Constitution: 8(2) Strength: 6(1) Health: 90/90(+6.5 / Hour) Reaction: 8(4) Resilience: 19(5) Dexterity: 10(3) Stamina: 96/96(+4.8 / Minute) Willpower: 16(4) Composure: 25(3) Intelligence: 21(5) Mana: 174/174(+12.1 / Hour)
She knew she slept at least fourteen hours for her mana to go all the way back to full, and a bit of mental math showed that her Mana Pool had increased by an additional point, meaning that she was asleep for even longer for her Self Improvement Skill to go to work. Still, it hadn’t cost her anything to try and deactivate her skill, and Jen promised to try again when she was ready for bed. Her stomach growled at her and Jen remembered her goal of unlocking new Paths and amended her strategy. She would stay up as long as possible, going to sleep only when she couldn’t stay awake any longer or after she earned a path. Resolution confirmed, Jen opened up her Skill list before deciding on what she wanted to focus on over the course of the long day.
Skill Screen Name Level Description Resistance Poison Resistance 13 Reduces the effects of various poisons and toxins Pain Resistance 13 Reduces the sensory impact of pain Disintegration Resistance 1 Reduces the impact of disintegration effects Winter Layer 1
A portion of consumed nutrients is stored in a new layer of fat. When activated, enter a state of hibernation that consumes this fat and boosts regeneration.
Enhancement Listen 17 Improve your sense of hearing by focusing Echolocation 14 Determine details of your surroundings using sound waves Determination 11 Ignore pain, hunger, and other distractions in pursuit of a goal Chronos' Heart 13 Your perception of time is tied to your heartbeat Low Light Vision 7 Improves your low light vision Patience 5 Stabilize your mental state while waiting for an opportunity Taste Testing 3 Improves your sense of taste Self Improvement 2 Excess regeneration improves resource pool size Infrared Vision 5 Alters your vision to detect infrared light Improvement Skills Singing 6 Improves your singing ability Ribbon Dancing 4 Improves your ribbon dancing ability Navigation 6 Improves your navigation ability Yoga 5 Improves your Yoga technique Identify 3 Allows you to identify objects Dancing 2 Improves your dancing ability Farming 1 Improves your farming ability Swimming 1 Improves your swimming ability Crafting 2 Improves your crafting ability Climbing 3 Improves your climbing ability Combat Whip Mastery 1 Increases your combat capability with a whip Fist Fighting Mastery 1 Increases your combat capability with your fists Mana Based Mana Control 6 Increases your ability to control mana both internally and externally Mana Manipulation 17 Your mana moves underneath your will Meditation 19
Align your body, mind, and soul. Relieves mental stress and improves mana regeneration by 12%
Devouring Void 5
By focusing while extremely low on mana, you can absorb mana from your surroundings
Spells Plant Growth 2
3 Mana. Accelerate the rate at which a plant develops, forcing weeks of growth to occur within moments.
Mana Bolt 3
20 Mana. Fires a magical bolt of pure force at a target, dealing damage upon impact
Stone Shaping 8
10 Mana / 1 Min. Coat your hands with Earth Magic, allowing you to reshape and mold solid stone.
Stone Skin 2
15 Mana. Cover yourself with a thin layer of rock armor that prevents damage
Earth Spike 3
30 Mana. Target a location to cause a sharp spike to rapidly form out of the ground
She was tempted to head over to the nearest wall and start on digging her way out, even if it would be a rather slow process, but Jen eventually decided against that course of action. While it would be good for her state of mind to start making progress on escaping, she was feeling mentally stable at the moment and had other areas she wanted to invest her magic and time into. Digging her way out was important, but it would take a large amount of effort and time before Jen managed to achieve anything worthy of unlocking a new path. As such it was better to delay her digging, and invest a little more time in working with her other resources so that she could snag some easy rewards before turning her attention to escaping. Even if she assumed it would take a month of digging to escape, an estimation that was probably on the optimistic side, then it was worth spending at least a day to earn a path that would increase her mental stats. Her physical stats might be less impactful, but Jen figured she would be hauling enough rock around that increasing her capability would pay off in the long run.
There were a couple of areas of knowledge that Jen was planning on exploring at some point today. The fluorite crystals were able to interact with magic in some way, and Jen was curious to see what the results of using her spells on them would be, both in their normal and charged states. But before that, she wanted to learn more about Rocky, the Myconid that she had created. She felt a little guilty about that. For all that she was responsible for its existence, she had more or less ignored it, only giving it enough mana to stay alive. Part of that was due to her previous negative experiences with the mushrooms. It was hard to trust something with reaching roots when she still had vivid memories of those roots burrowing through her skin, doing their best to suck her dry of mana. Rocky hadn’t been that aggressive towards her, but he had been curious, and Jen hadn't wanted to tempt fate when Rocky was so much larger than the mushroom had been. A larger body meant more resources to fuel the rapid expansion needed to take over her body, after all.
Jen also didn’t know exactly how she was supposed to interact with Rocky. Biology had never been her strong suit, and her memories of gardening were more concerned with the blazing sun and sweltering temperatures than any information actually related to growing and working with plants. And mushrooms were different enough from other plants that she was even less confident. She knew enough to feed them if they looked wilted, but that was about it. Despite her lack of knowledge, Jen knew that she wouldn’t get anywhere without first trying.
Her main objective was to spend as much time as she could observing Rocky to try and understand him better. Infrared Vision would help immensely with this endeavor. Rocky was easily visible, and it didn’t involve creating a ball of unshaped mana in her hand, mana that would attract her Myconid and put Jen at risk. Her goals were simple, get a better understanding for just how he differed from a normal mushroom, and a better understanding of just how intelligent her pet was. Autonomous reaction was capable of a lot even before magic became involved, and Jen vaguely knew that trees could pass a surprising amount of information around using pheromones and connected roots, even if they didn’t actually have a brain to process that information for them. As such Jen needed to eventually come up with some system of tests that could be used to give her an accurate idea of what her pet was capable of. Was it simply a mushroom with the ability to store mana? Was it still mostly a plant that now possessed some mobility and additional functionality? Did it have intelligence, and if so, how smart was it? Was it like an insect that was capable of basic operation only, or was it smart enough that she could train it?
The last was in some ways the ideal situation for Jen. Besides the companionship and interaction that it would provide her, it would also be an incredible force multiplier for Jen. While many of her problems stemmed from the fact that she had a limited amount of mana to work with, others were hindered by the fact that she was only one person. A vision of multiple Myconids briefly entered Jen’s mind, all of them taking care of some sort of menial task while Jen steadily carved a path towards the surface, her other needs taken care of by her trained servants. It was a nice dream but there were many details that needed to be figured out between now and that possible future. The first detail was gathering more information, a task for which Jen turned to one of her older skills.
Identify wasn’t a skill that Jen had needed to use much. Her surroundings were pretty much rock, rock, and more rock, with the occasional pebble thrown in for good measure. Now though it would hopefully come in useful again, providing Jen with additional information about her Myconid. As it was on the way, Jen idly used Identify on the row of mushrooms she had assembled earlier for testing the limits of Identify, only to be forced to re-evaluate her plans in a moment
At the time, she had given every mushroom a unique name meant to challenge the limits of the identification system, hoping to be able to manipulate the system into allowing her to use object names to act like notes. Jen had successfully managed to assign some very unique names to the different mushrooms and had gone on her way, satisfied that the capability was available to her if and when she would need it.
Looking at the mushrooms now, Jen realized the flaw in her plan. It didn’t matter if she could give the mushrooms weird names, it mattered if the System would remember them for her. Clearly it couldn’t.
El Señor
Anti-magic Mushroom
A Chinese name
Anti-magic Mushroom
Lalalalalalalala
Anti-magic Mushroom
A really long number
Anti-magic Mushroom
One
Anti-magic Mushroom
One
Anti-magic Mushroom
One
Anti-magic Mushroom
Jen’s Pond
Anti-magic Mushroom
Sighing, Jen pulled up the description for Identify.
Identify: Allows you to identify objects
While the Skill technically provided information on whatever object she targeted, it failed to mention that it pulled on her own knowledge to do so. Granted, it seemed to be extremely effective at doing so. Jen could only partially recall her geology information, but Identify had managed to identify the crystals she had found as fluorite, and without any of the hesitancy that it had attributed to her name experiments. Jen chalked the difference up to the fact that she had more or less immediately forgotten about the mushrooms after she was finished with her testing. The skill would still be helpful, it would just have a different use case than she had immediately intended for it. While Jen tried to come up with a new plan for working with Rocky, she decided to use Plant Growth on the mushrooms. She had yet to see them bud or spore or whatever method they used to reproduce, and she was curious as to what would happen if she continually poured in mana. She had a large amount to work with, almost ten times the maximum she had previously used to fuel a single mushroom’s growth, and she was determined for something interesting to happen.
It was cathartic, to vent her frustrations through magic, her anger, irritation, and regrets slowly fading as she fed them and her mana into the mushroom. After four casts the mushroom seemed to stabilize in size, and Jen stepped back after she cast Plant Growth for the fifth time, warned off by a subtle resistance to her spell and a slowly growing vibration. From a safe distance away, she watched as the mushroom cap began to swell and change color under infrared vision, before softly exploding into a cloud of spores which quickly vanished from Jen’s sight.
Jen took a minute and a casting of stone Shaping to mark out a boundary around the area where the spores had likely fallen, not wanting to travel over the area and destroy her growing mushrooms. Having solid confirmation that her supply wasn’t limited helped improve her mood some, and Jen made her way towards Rocky to start learning more about her creation.
The first thing she realized before she even arrived was that her previous information was flawed. She had been treating the name Myconid as if it was System backed, with whatever portents that would convey, but it was far more likely that Identify had named it a Myconid based on her own knowledge, specifically her Dungeons and Dragons knowledge. It wasn't like she knew of any other convenient names for a mushroom related species, but it meant that she couldn’t rely on any of the assumptions she had made up until now. All she knew was that it was an unknown specimen related to a mushroom, and different enough that Identify, pulling on her remembered and half-forgotten knowledge, had deemed it something different from a simple anti-magic mushroom.
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Upon reaching the point where she had left Rocky, the first thing Jen did was to sit down. Even without Identify, she wanted to know as much as she could before approaching into grabbing range, even if the Myconid was drooping a bit due to the length of time since its last feeding. Pulling a mushroom out of currently unused food supply, Jen began to compare the two, occasionally making a small ball of magic light to look for differences using her normal vision.
Both species had similar caps, with the sole difference of the magical fluorite crystal embedded in the Myconid’s. Jen noted that Rocky’s cap was larger than the anti-magic mushroom from earlier when it decided to spore, suggesting that some factor allowed it to have an increased maximum size. She also noted that the crystal seemed to be integrated smoothly with the mushroom flesh around it. While it was an embedded object, there wasn’t a gap or a ridge surrounding the location that joined the two.
Jen moved her observations further down the fungi. The regular antimagic mushrooms had a root system, but it was an anemic thing. There was no wind in the cave that needed to be anchored against, and the stone foundation didn't offer any incentive to burrow deep. Instead, the mushrooms simply anchored themselves on the surface, content to absorb whatever condensation occurred while subsisting mostly on what they could gather from the air and from magic itself.
The myconid's roots were far more robust. They still seemed to be made of the same material as the stem, not having the rough texture of wood roots or the smooth slimy texture of plant roots that Jen was familiar with, but they seemed to function well enough. For roots they possess a surprising amount of mobility, and Jen likened them more to tentacles, graspers that the myconid could use to interact with the world around it. They could even be used to pull the myconid around, affording it a level of mobility that was unusual in a plant.
Despite having this capability, it seemed as if the myconid retained most of the behaviours of the mushroom it had evolved from. It was extremely passive, its roots or tendrils quivering only slightly in response to subtle variations in the mana around it.
Jen sighed. It really made her current task far more difficult. How exactly was she supposed to be able to tell what was instinct and what was intelligence? She paused. That particular question might be impossible for her to answer, but she might not need to. A better question to focus her efforts on would be ‘Does the Myconid have behavioral capacity that I can take advantage of?’. For the sake of her conscience, she could always proceed under the assumption that she was working with a sentient being, but the truth of the matter was that it didn’t matter if Rocky followed her intentions due to thinking it was the right thing to do or if he simply did it because a chemical reaction told him to. That left Jen with the far simpler, but still difficult, task of figuring out what her pet was capable of.
Reframing the problem like that gave Jen an idea of how to move forwards. Jen wanted to know Rocky’s functionality. She didn’t know how he functioned, and could think of him in some ways as a black-boxed machine. And the best way to learn more about black-boxed machines or functions was to vary their inputs and determine how that changes their outputs. Jen’s interactions with Rocky were inputs of a sort, and his actions in response would be the output. All she had to do was find an interaction or input that produced an output that she could use and she would be in business!
Of course, Jen quickly realized that she had a problem. Rocky didn’t have eyes, or ears, or any other organs that would provide him with most of the senses she used to communicate and interact with the world around her. Did plants feel pain? Even if they did, she wasn’t willing to pursue that route of testing as she was still operating under her initial assumption that Rocky was alive in some way. That left the one sense that she did know Rocky possessed. His mana sense. At the moment she was far enough away for him to remain passive, but she knew that if she was to get closer his roots would begin to move towards any mana that she was expelling, the better to absorb it. That sense of mana was one she could work with, varying where she expelled mana and how she did so, and seeing how that changed Rocky’s reactions.
In a stroke of convenience, working with mana in different forms was on Jen’s list of things to do for the day, and she quickly made her way back to the pond only to return with an armful of fluorite crystals to experiment with. A quick check of waving an arm around with a bit of mana extruded showed that Rocky was interested in her mana, and after letting a root chase her hand back and forth a bit she let it absorb the mana, pulling her hand away just before it finished and was tempted to dive deeper.
Jen then took hold of one of the crystals she had brought along, slowly repeating the process she had stumbled upon to transform it into a Mana Crystal. Her higher levels in Mana Manipulation and Mana Control sped up the process and after a minute and twenty mana, Jen had a new Mana Crystal to play with. Identify had implied that it could be used to power spells and other magical effects, but Jen was questioning that now. Was that something she had made up? Did the system occasionally help out after all? Or did she have enough information, subconscious or otherwise to come to that conclusion and the System merely confirmed it after doing the work of putting it together for her? All questions that Jen wanted an answer to, but would have to wait at least a little longer. She waved the crystal in front of Rocky, confirming that he was interested in getting hold of it, before tossing it towards his stem. It was quickly snatched up and in moments it was surrounded by a cocoon of roots. Were they really roots if they weren’t embedded in the ground? Jen wondered before being distracted by the tendrils dropping the crystal and ignoring it. Jen walked over and picked it up, letting Identify go to work.
Mana Crystal, common
She was a little confused at first as to why Rocky had left it alone before realizing that much like her, he might not have been able to get the mana out of the crystal. Incorporating it into his body might either be hazardous or simply not part of his instinctual knowledge, but Jen was still happy to confirm that Rocky wanted mana, and was smart enough to drop an object if he couldn’t get that mana. Or he was dumb enough to drop an object after holding onto it long enough to normally absorb mana from it. Results were inconclusive.
Either way, Jen was left with a full Mana Crystal and more than a few spells she wanted to use with it. Stone Shaping was first on her list, given its interaction with rocks. Jen had thought of a few possible outcomes, but she was still surprised when the Mana Crystal first vibrated and then shattered. Her hand flinched back at the object suddenly deconstructing, but she was thankfully unharmed. All that was left of the crystal was a small pile of dust, and a glowing field of energy that surrounded her hand. Jen idly waved her hand about, but the field followed it smoothly and didn’t seem to have any other effects that Jen could immediately observe. That left testing out the spell art of the experiment. Stone shaping seemed to be working more or less as expected. Jen couldn’t say for certain, but it felt like the ground underneath her was more malleable than usual, the spell making it softer than it usually would. Jen could confirm that the spell lasted longer, staying active almost a minute and half by her calculation.
It was only a single point of data so far, but Jen suspected that she had discovered the mechanism that led to the description ‘Can be used to power spells’. Casting Stone Shaping hadn’t taken any of her mana, instead breaking the mana crystal and using the mana stored inside to fuel itself. The conversion had some inefficiencies somewhere along the line, given Jen had spent twenty mana to create the crystal, but it had only fueled fifteen mana worth of spells, but it was still useful information to know. Mana crystals could be used as a method to artificially inflate her mana pool, allowing her to cast more spells in a short duration. It was a waste of her precious mana, but the possibility existed of coming across natural mana crystals at some point. A better use might be the ability to supercharge spells. It would take more testing with spells that didn’t have a duration, but Jen was pretty sure that all the mana stored in the crystal would be applied to the spell in one way or another. Presumably if the crystal holds less mana she would cover the difference and cast a normal spell, but she wasn’t sure how the excess mana would express itself. Having an emergency spell with an extremely strong effect was a very useful last resort, and Jen could definitely see herself making and carrying a mana crystal around just in case.
The Stone Shaping spell had proven useful in another method as well. Jen had dug into the ground around her, but the handfuls of dirt she tossed aside were quickly grabbed by Rocky and pulled to his base. Jen had no idea how much mana was actually placed inside the stone she worked with, but she felt it must be relatively miniscule. Perhaps Rocky had some other reason to grab those rocks, but it was still behaviour Jen could possibly work with. If she was planning on moving large quantities of rocks then having pets eager to move those rocks for her was certainly an upside.
Jen created four more Mana Crystals, wincing a little at the rapid expenditure of her mana pool. Casting her spells in the order she earned them, Jen did her best to pay attention to the process, wanting to learn as much as she could.
Jen still didn’t have much of a sense for mana outside her body, but her internal sense still let her know that her mana began moving to start the spell just before the crystal vibrated and shattered. The vibrations led her to believe there was some sort of resonance occurring that destabilized the crystal and let the mana out, but it wasn’t something she was able to idly replicate. The results of overcharging the spells was much more informative.
Plant growth failed outright to cast. Jen watched as the mana in her hand was forced into shape by the spell, only for those shapes to immediately swell. In less than a second they were unrecognizable and Jen could feel the spell snap. Fortunately, the backlash seemed directed outward, and Jen only felt a stinging in her hand. The mushroom she was holding was completely pulverized, and it took Jen a bit to work up the courage to proceed to testing her next spell. The thought that convinced her was that the failure was due to the large difference in available mana and the casting cost of the spell.
Mana bolt proceeded in a far smoother manner. With its higher cost, Jen had decided to use the fullest crystal she had made. Jen still couldn’t make out the purpose of the various shapes that her mana formed, but she could tell that they worked together, and that this time even though the spell swelled with the excess mana, it didn’t lose its overall shape and successfully cast. The spell seemed generally improved, from flight speed to size to impact damage, and Jen winced a bit at the last one. She hadn’t aimed at Rocky, but one of his tendrils had reached out further than she expected, and she only saw a glimpse of it by the light of her spell before it was blasted to pieces.
Rushing over, Jen was very glad to see that Rocky didn’t have much of a reaction to taking damage. Causing him pain, even by accident wasn’t something she wanted to do. She was even more impressed to see that the root had already grown back and was even larger than before, taking advantage of what mana remained from her spell to quickly recover. It did give her some concern over the possibility of fighting off Rocky with magic if she ever needed to do so, but she wasn’t about to go worrying over that possibility without more evidence in its favor.
Earth Spike came out almost exactly like normal. There was a little swelling in the spell as it was being cast, but Jen couldn’t tell the difference in the final product. Maybe it formed faster than usual? Either way she shrugged and moved onto her last spell, curious as to what would happen when a mana crystal didn’t supply enough mana to fully cast a spell. She briefly considered seeing what Rocky thought of her armor, before deciding against it. If he did take a liking to it, she would probably find herself completely contained by his root tendrils, and she didn't see that experience going well for her.
Earth Spike did end up pulling from her mana pool to complete the spell, but even then it was obvious that something was different. Either there was a delay in gathering more mana, or the spell only took the minimum necessary to cast, but the pillar formed was only about half the volume that the spell normally moved. Rocky quickly grabbed onto the pillar of stone, and unable to pull it closer to himself, instead dragged his whole body over to the pillar, leaving his old nest of rocks behind and firmly entrenching himself around his new home. Jen simply smiled at her pet’s antics, and was quietly glad to have a hands-free method of relocating her pet.
With a better understanding of what the mana crystals were capable of, Jen turned her full attention back to interacting with Rocky. The next minute quickly turned into a game of fetch, with Jen Stone Shaping different sized rockets to get a better understanding of how much weight Rocky could move, as well as how much interest he actually had in grabbing rocks. Jen noted that the crystal in his cap was slowly becoming cloudier as time went on, Rocky apparently absorbing enough mana to slowly feed himself.
Eventually Rocky reached a point where he seemed satiated and no longer eagerly grabbed at the rocks Jen was Stone Shaping. With nowhere to store the extra mana he would simply reach out a root tendril to explore the new object for a moment before letting it drop back down to the ground. Jen continued trying to grab it’s attention until her current casting of Stone Shaping ran out, before finally standing up and stretching.
Waving goodbye to her pet, she made her way back to her house. Rocky wasn’t quite as dumb as his namesake, but he clearly seemed to be operating mostly on instinct, instinct that drove him to absorb mana any way it could. Jen felt a little guilty when she realized that while there was enough ambient mana in the air to support the regular anti-magic mushrooms, the Myconid she had created was reliant on other sources of energy to fuel itself, Rocky was a creature that was utterly dependent on Jen in order to survive. It was her responsibility to care for him. A small part of her argued that the situation really wasn’t any different from keeping houseplants that needed their owner to water them, but Jen knew it was a false equivalency. Houseplants at least had a natural environment they could grow and thrive in, even if they happened to be transplanted elsewhere. As far as she knew, there was no place on earth that would support her creation.
Shaking her head, Jen put it out of her mind for the moment. There wasn't much she could do about it for now, other than regularly feed Rocky, but she made a promise to keep an eye out for any combination of abilities or new skills she might acquire that would give a longer term solution.
Having arrived back at her home, Jen wondered what else she wanted to do. Eating and sleeping were both out of the question, given Jen’s desire to earn paths in both categories, but her stomach’s growling made the prospect of meditating at the moment unappealing. She still had a good half of her mana pool available thanks to taking breaks in between forming mana crystals and working with Rocky. Looking around, Jen had an idea and made her way to the far side of her house from the pool. At the moment, the ground was simply a rough space, but Jen had a plan to change that.
Her first step was to cast Earth Spike, aiming for as wide and as short a spike as possible. It felt good to push the limits of the skill, and Jen followed up with a second casting immediately next to her first spike. Only an abstract artist would call her new structure a chair, and even they would admit it to being a particularly unpleasant piece of furniture, but Jen was just getting started. Stone Shaping allowed her to pull handfuls of stone away from the spikes, rapidly reducing the stumpier one into a flat seat, and turning the remaining stone into a functional backrest. Every handful of stone she pulled away was slapped onto the sides, slowly building up a pair of rough armrests. Two minutes and two castings later, Jen took a break to test her chair for the first time.
It was rough. really rough. Jen’s handfuls of stone had been pulled away haphazardly, leaving edges and divots that poked at her awareness, and the actual shape needed a good amount of work to reach the shape Jen had envisioned. Her end goal was a chair for meditation, a stone recliner that would match the contours of her body and support her from neck to ankles. What she had was two angled lumps of stone with a too deep crack in between them that pinched at her butt when she tried to sit down.
Before she got back to working on her project, Jen made a detour to grab a bowl of water. While Infrared vision had the lovely benefit of not costing Jen any mana to keep active, it had the large drawback of not providing very much information about the physical details of objects. The stone she was working with was all the same temperature, and while Jen could vaguely make out details thanks to her depth perception and practice, it was a similar process to trying to make out the filament in a lightbulb; slow and visually draining. While Jen could feel the various protrusions she had made, seeing them while she was working would slow down her progress to a crawl, a serious problem given the limited duration of Stone Shaping. Going at it using only her sense of touch to guide her working wasn’t an option either. It wasn’t enough to simply smooth out any rough edges. Jen needed to first excavate and build up her chair to the right shape, otherwise she would simply have two smooth lumps that still wouldn’t work as a chair.
The water was the simple solution Jen needed. Not only did it show up as a different color to her Infrared vision, appearing almost black, but its temperature was slightly colder than the rest of the cave. These two factors meant that when Jen poured her bowl of water over the stone she was working on, not only did a thin layer of moisture cling to the stone, but various areas cooled slower or faster than others. Any outcroppings had relatively more surface area for the water to evaporate from and were cooled more, dimming in color compared to their surroundings. Armed with this additional information Jen went to work with a will.
Once Stone Shaping ran out, Jen took a bit to test her new chair, mentally noting the areas she wanted to focus on, before grabbing another bowl of water to wet her project again. It took three castings before Jen felt satisfied with the current shape and moved on to the next stage of her project. Having almost no mana left to work with also played into her decision.
The moss had already proven to make for a nice cushioning layer on her bed, and Jen repeated that process. Using the last of her mana, she quickly grew a small piece of moss into a covering that enveloped her whole chair and spilled onto the ground around it. Happy for the moment, Jen sank down into her new recliner, enjoying the contact it provided as she began to Meditate. Her stomach was a constant irritation, but one she managed to ignore. In some ways she was grateful for the additional challenge as it would help her level Meditation. Some other irritations were more of a struggle to ignore.
Jen managed just under an hour of meditation before she finally snapped. Her chair still had some flaws; one area in particular was enough of a bump to become a constant aggravation every time Jen breathed in. The hour of meditation she had managed to complete had given her enough mana for another casting of Stone Shaping, and Jen’s fingers tore through the moss in order to level out the offending area. Done for the moment, Jen wondered what to do with the remaining duration of her spell before her eyes turned towards the floor. She appreciated the way that the moss seemed to spread out from her chair, but she could do more to enhance the area, turning it from a random chair in the middle of the cave to a dedicated meditation area. Some quick swipes with her hands smoothed out the roughest patches, and then Jen got to work with her fingers, using them to rake thin lines in the stone that circled her mossy chair and spread out like gentle ripples. It was whimsical work, which is why the new skill notification was a complete surprise.