Jen took the time to finish up working the ground with her current duration of Stone Shaping, before returning to her meditation seat and looking at her new skill and it’s description.

Congratulations! You have learned Zen Gardening Lvl 1.

Zen Gardening: Improve Mana Regeneration in an area through careful cultivation of its metaphysical nature.

As usual, the extremely vague description was only marginally useful. It offered no information on how exactly she was supposed to create a zen garden or what qualifications a zen garden would have. The only useful piece of information was the fact that Zen Gardening would increase her mana regeneration. For that alone, Jen was willing to forgive all her other frustrations with the skill.

Even if the skill itself wouldn't tell her how much of an improvement to mana regeneration it provided, it only took a moment for Jen to call up her status screen. Her mana regeneration stat was important enough that she knew it by heart. Instead of the 12.1 that it normally was, it read 12.46. Jen, seeing that it was visibly higher than it should have been, smiled in relief. The increase was incredibly useful, and the fact that her status screen apparently could display multiple decimal places if needed was interesting and another sign that there was a large amount of flexibility secreted away. It would have been nicer if the boost was larger, but given that the skill was still level one, Jen was pretty happy.

Of more interest was the fact that the bonus provided by the skill wasn't consistent. It seemed to fluctuate over the course of a few seconds, sometimes dropping almost to zero, other times reaching a bonus of almost five percent. It always remained positive though, and while a static bonus might have been easier to work with, Jen hoped to be able to learn more about mana with the help of this feature.

While Jen could feel her own mana, even after she had expelled it from her body, she had yet to develop a Mana Sense skill or anything similar. Zen Garden promised to potentially change that. Until now there was nothing for her to feel at all, with the only other mana around her being the stable ambient mana. While Jen knew intellectually that the ambient mana was there, it was simply too consistent. It’s presence had been accepted as part of the normal state of being, much like the atmosphere that Jen knew was technically pressuring her body. That same mana now seemed to be in motion, pulsing in strength that Jen couldn't yet feel, but could see the effects of in her status screen. She was hopeful that she could eventually learn to sense those changes, earning herself a skill, before using the System’s help to grow that sensing skill into a useful tool.

Before she got too carried away with planning on training skills she hadn’t even earned yet, Jen forced her train of thought back towards Zen Garden. It was an unusual skill, but she could understand why she had gotten it. Much like Ribbon Dancing and Whip Mastery, it all came down to intent and knowledge. While Jen hadn’t been intending to earn a new skill, she had been focused on improving the aesthetics of her area and had been inspired by the sand art often incorporated into zen gardens. Her medium may have been solid stone, but the basic principles were the same.

Jen's college had required her to take a certain amount of general education courses, even though she had already committed to the engineering track. While there were some engineering equivalents available, such as Report Writing 101 for Engineers to meet the English requirement, that wasn't always the case. For her history requirement, Jen had opted to take Architectural History. While most of the course had focused on greco-roman architecture, the teacher did take a couple of weeks to cover Eastern styles, including an informative day on Feng Shui and Zen Buddhism and their influence on building design.

The teacher had been one of the best Jen had ever learned from; passionate about his course, able to articulate the key points in an easy to understand manner, and invested in his students. Jen had loved learning from him, and had been disappointed when she realized she wouldn't be able to fit another class of his into her schedule. While her knowledge about Doric and Ionic columns wasn't helpful now, the bits she could remember about Feng Shui were. Those scraps of knowledge were what her skill had pulled from to create itself, and using that information intentionally could help Jen in a multitude of ways.

For one, Jen had a hunch that the boost provided by Zen Garden was less reliant on the skill level and more on the area she created. A well made garden traditionally implied concepts of increased spirituality and alignment with nature, concepts that she hoped would translate into increased mana regeneration in this new world. More than that, there was often an aspect of meditation involved with zen gardens. They were meant to be places that spoke to the innate truths of the world, and where the observer could meditate and better understand those truths. Jen wasn’t sure exactly what truths her current garden conveyed, but she would be ecstatic if there was a synergy between Zen Garden and Meditation. Two separate boosts to her mana regeneration was nice, but two multiplicative boosts would be amazing.

There was one other factor to Zen Garden that interested Jen. While zen gardens had evolved over the ages, becoming their own distinct style of architecture and art, they had historical roots in the Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui. Jen retained almost nothing the teacher had mentioned on the subject, but one valuable factoid had stuck. Feng Shui concerned itself with not just the space being organized by itself, but also it’s global orientation. Gardens in particular were supposed to have water flowing from east to west.

Jen had been lost since she had first found herself in this cave system. Making a base and exploring her surroundings had made her less lost, but in many ways she was operating in her own little word, completely cut off from the surface. It would take work, and there were a few conditionals that may not pan out, but Jen was hopeful that she would be able to set her cardinal directions again. It might have been a small step towards freedom, but it was an important one. While Jen knew that if she was to dig in any direction at an upwards angle she would eventually reach the surface, some directions would make that a much shorter journey. She was operating under the assumption that she was more or less in the same area she had been before the System arrived, with the artificial installation reverted to solid rock, and her and any other humans presence shunted to an open space, either here or on one of the other worlds. That would mean she was still somewhere in the south of Germany, close to the Austrian border, underneath part of the Alps. With the rest of the Alps to the south, knowing which direction north was would hopefully let her escape far sooner.

Even though she didn’t have enough mana to use Stone Shaping to work on her new zen garden, Jen took a few moments to gather some mushrooms and place and water them. The fluctuations made it hard to say for certain, but Jen felt like they improved the area, and let them be while she settled back into her chair.

The moss was soft and comfortable, and the spots that had bothered her last time had been smoothed out. Jen could still feel some areas she wanted to change, but those were minor details like lowering her left leg a smidgen or adding a bit more support for her neck. As such it was surprisingly easy for Jen to activate Meditation.

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The difference in her surroundings was immediately obvious, as Jen felt Meditation give a mental hiccup after just a few seconds. Shocked awake, she blinked, before attempting to activate the skill again. After another seven seconds of meditating, Jen found herself awake and intrigued. It was obvious that there was some sort of interaction between Meditation and Zen Garden. Unfortunately, at the moment it was a negative effect, with the changing effect of Zen Garden preventing Meditation from properly activating. The only upside was that if Zen Garden could affect her, it meant there was likely something happening that she could sense..

Jen spent the next half an hour constantly activating Meditation. Trying to feel what was happening with the two skills before she was forced back to awareness. Unfortunately, the only thing she had to show for her work so far was a slowly growing headache. After taking a break to drink some nice cold water, Jen decided to try a different tactic.

Until now she had been meditating as she always would, but Zen Gardens were meant to provide an external focus for Meditation. Jen took the time to walk around her landscaped area, taking in the scattered mushrooms, and the shallow grooves she had carved into the floor. Getting the start of an idea, she grabbed a stone bowl and made her way to her little pond, making enough trips to fill most of the grooves with water, a dark, softly rippling surface that radiated outwards from her seat.

The channels now looked far more like the ocean they were traditionally representative of, and the fungi had transformed as well, becoming passengers bobbing on the waves. Allowing her mind to run wild, Jen’s chair soon became a mountain rising above the waves, a giant larger than Everest that dominated the ocean. But this wasn’t a harsh monolith of nature, but a tool. It had been carved down into a seat, her seat. The unyielding stone turned soft and comfortable.

The last word seemed to resonate with Jen, more than she had expected it to. Comfortable. She realized, to her surprise that it was because it was a word she was willing to accept for herself. She was comfortable, right now. Things might change as time went on, but for now she was safe, had unknown potential at her fingertips, and had a plan for the future. While she missed most aspects of her life before the system, mainly the food and the safety, she had to admit that at some level she had been unsatisfied. Her dreams were deemed impossible to achieve, while she felt socially isolated and alone, there wasn’t anything that she would have complained to her family about, but Jen knew that deep deep down she felt like something had been missing.

Her life now had a lot of problems. She was trapped in a cave with nothing to eat but mushrooms, and with no idea how her family was doing, everyone she knew about was on the other side of the world, and even once she got out of here she didn’t know how exactly she’d make it back home. But beneath all that was a sense of satisfaction.

Jen made her way back to her meditation chair. Her mountain turned into a seat. The System had thrown everything into chaos, and while Jen might hate the circumstances that had ended up with her here, she had still made the mountain her home. This cave was hers. She had explored and claimed every inch of it, and was slowly transforming it into a home she could live in while she dug her way out.

Keeping that thought in mind and her eyes open, Jen began to meditate once more. This time her focus was not on her steady breathing, or on a concept of nothingness that shattered when things changed. The rock was her chair, the mountain was her home. That thought was the truth that Jen had taken away from her garden, and that truth was her focus. Jen’s ability to act while Meditation was active had been slowly growing, but now Jen could only sit still. The waves beneath her seemed to ripple and move, and Jen imagined she could feel them slowly moving across the ocean to crash into the base of the mountain she was sitting on. It took her a moment to realize that she actually was feeling something, only for the point to be driven home by the sensation of a ghostly impact. Jen now had an idea of what exactly had broken her out of her previous attempts, but this time was different. Her Meditation wasn’t an empty void to be interrupted and broken into. It was a simple truth, one that the shock couldn’t break. The world might notice when the waves crash against the rock, but the rock doesn’t care, and Jen had made that rock her home.

Another impact arrived, and Jen lost her train of thought, before she focused her mind back to the simple truth. She had turned the mountain into her home. These interruptions might be new and confusing, but they were something she had made, something she had caused, something that was hers.

Another swell came, but Jen was somehow ready for this one. Instead of crashing against an unknown sense, Jen could feel the surge enter her body, straining and pushing against the limits of her mana pool before fading away. The feeling was both strange enough and tangible enough to make Jen stop her meditation, but checking her status screen showed her mana had only increased by the few points she had expected. Whatever had happened clearly wasn’t a miracle solution.

Once again Jen began to meditate, and this time she felt ready. The first impact came a little earlier than she had been expecting, but Jen managed to ride it out without losing her focus. She managed another two before deciding to try something else. She could technically keep meditation active, but it wasn’t something that came easily. It required her to be constantly concentrating, using all her focus on staging on task because a moment’s distraction would end things. It might work, but Jen didn’t think it was actual meditation. Instead, Jen altered the statement she was holding in her mind. If the mountain was her home and if the rock was the chair, that was all and good. But the rock was the mountain. Jen’s mental image stretched. She could still picture the waves crashing against the mountain, but soon a giant pair of legs entered the picture, splashing down and resting on the rocky bottom without difficulty. Another wave arrived at the mountain, and Jen could feel the impact against her mana pool, but this time it was different. After all, she was against who sat on the mountain. No wave was large enough to bother her. Somehow the thought made a difference, and while Jen knew that the mana was still moving through and around her in much the same way as it had every previous cycle, it lacked something this time. The power perhaps, or maybe the urgency. It was better and Jen could think like this, but she knew it could be better yet. She was still fighting the cycle of waves. They might not be much of an opponent anymore, but it was still adversarial. And it didn’t have to be. Jen wanted to work with the waves, work with her Zen Garden. She wanted more than to just endure, she wanted to grow and create.

Jen knew the next wave of mana was about to hit her, and as it impacted she tapped her foot, both in reality and in her mind. The waves might always exist, but who was to say that the giant wasn’t causing them? That she could grow to the point that what were once arduous struggles were now nothing more than the byproduct of her footsteps? And if she was the cause of the waves she couldn’t be their effect.

Jen kept tapping her foot, a slow, somewhat irregular beat. It varied at first as she learned the tempo and the vagaries of her garden, but soon her foot was steady and her breathing and body fell into rhythm soon after. It only lasted a couple of minutes before a pulse of pain distracted Jen, and it all fell apart, leaving her sitting in her chair. Her headache from earlier had returned, and Jen drank some more water before returning to her bed to wait out the pain.

She wasn’t quite there yet, but Jen had a feeling that she was pushing the limits of her current Meditation skill. She had learned to align herself as the skill description stated, but Zen Garden gave her a peak at what else was possible. She had thought that aligning herself was a simple thing. Either she was aligned and receiving the benefits of meditation, or she wasn’t. Now though she realized that there were multiple alignments possible, liking an infinite number, each different in their own ways. All of them would help Jen regain her mana faster, but only some of them, maybe even only one of them would help Jen align herself with her environment as well, further increasing the benefits. Jen knew it wouldn’t be enough for her to simply sit down and wait while meditation did its thing. Simply knowing that there were other ways to sit, breathe, think, and do every other part of Meditation would have her looking for them, wanting to increase her understanding and improve her skill further.

Fortunately, she had a new skill that would help with that.

Congratulations! You have learned Mana Sense Lvl 1!