It burned, in a strange way. Jen instinctively tried to curl up to escape from the pain, but her movement only backfired, causing the agony to grow. Her whole stomach was now engulfed by the throbbing ache. Connecting the pain with the mushrooms she had eaten earlier, Jen desperately stuck her hand into her mouth, trying to trigger her gag reflex and throw up the food that was the cause of all this. It was a futile effort. Jen’s hand was already trembling from the pain, unable to move quickly or accurately, and the few moments she did manage to irritate her tonsils, the feeling was buried and ignored in favor of the much stronger sensations from her abdomen.

Jen remembered back in high school, when she had been making some food and a large cutting knife had slipped off the counter. She had gone to grab it, missed, and received a large cut on her arm. The cut had hurt, but what had stuck with Jen was the dull pulsing coming from the rest of her blood vessels as they continued to try and pump all the blood her body needed, making her loss of blood clear with every beat of her heart.

This pain felt similar to that half forgotten memory. Her stomach wasn’t roiling like it usually would with bad food, trying to expel it all costs. Instead it felt like a black hole had taken up residence in her gut; a pulsing feeling of something missing and making its absence known. If normal pain was the feeling of nerves being set on fire, an overload of sensation, then this feeling was the opposite, a cold absence so strong it began to burn again.

Jen’s frame started to quiver. The pain, the fear of dying, the regret at making the wrong decision with the mushrooms, all combined into an amalgam of negative emotions that demanded release. And as Jen clenched her teeth against the pain and struggled to maintain her consciousness, silent tears began to slip down her face.

Then the growing agony reached her core, her most intimate place. Jen stopped trying to resist the pain, stopped trying to fight back and win. All she could do was to float on top of the hurt, to let it simply flow while she focused on just being. With nothing else to do, she tried to meditate, to accept the pain to the point where she could push it from her awareness. Every pulse from her abdomen sent tremors through her body and threatened to destroy the progress she had made. But she was making progress. After a time that was both a moment and an eternity, Jen was again able to process the information her body was telling her, having clawed her way to a state both distant and present.

While she had been occupied, the affected area had continued to move upwards, stretching around her lungs and her heart. Every breath and heartbeat brought her attention to that fact. Her vagina had also been completely engulfed, each of its many nerve endings sending back that confusing hurt. But pain there was something that she was used to, and that experience and her newfound distance began to give her an understanding of her current affliction.

She had vaguely felt it before, but now Jen could understand just how different this pain was from anything she had felt before. It wasn’t the steady pain of cramps, nor the sharp hurt of an overstimulated nerve cluster. It wasn’t the dull ache of a yeast infection, nor the stretched feeling of an overly large insertion. It was a pulsing pain, that seemed to wax and wane in a rhythmic manner. Furthermore it wasn’t a general pain as she had first thought, but one that was limited to strange lines spreading throughout her body. The unique feeling made it difficult to fully grasp what hurt and what didn’t, blurring into a general feeling of hurt if she didn't give the persistent tattoo her full attention.

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But the pulsing ache did not beat with her heart or synchronize with her breathing. Nor did the advancing lines of agony seem to trace her blood vessels as they pushed outwards, but seemed to meander down her arms in legs in patterns known only by themselves. The pain continued to grow as more and more of her body was consumed by the poison. Not willing to let the growing pain defeat her hard earned meditative distance, Jen forced her awareness to narrow, focusing on just her left arm as she tried to completely map the path the poison was taking through her body. Every centimeter of flesh was another data point, slowly confirming to Jen that this pain did not flow through her nerves, or her blood vessels, or even her bones, but through structures that had never been realized before.

But there were structures there. Jen switched focus to her right arm, and the symmetry it showed as it independently moved down her limbs proved that much. And as Jen hid from the pain in her focus it seemed at some moments that an understanding of it all was just outside her grasp, only for the next moment to surprise her again.

As the burning poison reached her hands and feet, Jen tensed a little as the pain seemed to spike for a moment her whole body bar her head now consumed, only to relax as it seemed to finally run its course. Over the next few minutes the pain faded, but Jen stayed in her curled up position, worried about a relapse. Slowly, she started to sob, her trickles of tears turning into a flood.

All that effort into tracking down something to eat, only for it to be poisonous. It might be a survivable poison, but Jen wasn't sure she could bring herself to try eating another one, knowing that that level of pain would be her reward.

But still. Those strange paths it followed, the lack of any known method of spreading, the curiosity that it avoided her head. There was a mystery here, one no doubt equal in size to how she arrived in this dark cave in the first place. As time went on, Jen was becoming more and more convinced that this was all a strange version of reality, not a hallucination as she had once hypothesized. A part of her knew that she would not have been capable of coming up with the experience of that poison on her own.

“Reality doesn’t change if you ignore it. Instead, you must work to understand it and use that understanding to advance.” Jen whispered, finding control of her voice again.

The pain had been a bad surprise, to be sure. But she was alive, and more knowledgeable for the experience. Her stomach was full for the moment, but hunger would come again. Jen would be ready for it. Determined not to give up hope so quickly after that shock, Jen started to plan.

Her first need was to restock her supply of mushrooms. She had a few left after her meal, but moving around to fetch more would help give her something to do while she finished regaining her composure.

After returning, Jen would drink as much water as she was able to, to better dilute whatever poison the mushrooms might contain. And then instead of filling up, she would eat the mushrooms one at a time, the better to control her intake of the poison and let her keep her mind focused as she studied its effects on her body.

And once she had eaten her fill and learned all she could, then it would be time to venture forth once more. Food and drink would keep her alive, but Jen was not ready to spend the rest of her life in the dark. There was plenty of areas in the cave she hadn’t been to yet, and it was quite possible that one of them could contain a way out, back to the surface. She just had to keep moving forwards till she found it.