As she recovered from her ordeal, Jen came up with another objective she wanted to accomplish before she set out to gather more mushrooms to experiment with. She had managed to ignore it until now, but her recent meal had brought back to mind the common need of all animals. Jen needed to pee quite badly, and her urge to defecate wasn’t far behind.
Two thoughts kept Jen in control of her bowels. The first was the need to keep her drinking supply clean. The second was a desire to avoid having to crawl or walk in a spot that she dirtied. With no way to see in the dark, a good position would have to be chosen, out of the way to avoid any accidents. Jen almost considered using the moss covered ground to relieve herself in, relying on the absorbent properties of the plant to clean up the resulting mess, but eventually rejected that proposal. For one, she was unsure how quickly it would be able to decompose her fecal matter. Secondly, even if it was a relatively quick process, Jen wasn’t sure that she would be comfortable sleeping anywhere near her bathroom, even if it had been cleaned up afterwards.
With a bit more thought, Jen came up with an idea that would kill two birds with one stone. She already had to travel back to the cracked portion of the cavern to gather more mushrooms. It wouldn’t take much effort to find an empty crack in the ground and use it as a bathroom. Depositing her waste in the crack would keep it out of the way of both her walking and her water, and it could possibly serve as a source of fertilizer for more mushrooms. Satisfied with this plan, Jen set off to find her rope and use that to lead herself back to the mushroom holes.
It took a long time before Jen was able to actually set off. Her overconfidence and eagerness to leave had led to her missing the location where the had dropped off her raggedy rope. By the time Jen was sure she had passed it, she was far enough away that she had no other choice but to slowly and meticulously search, weaving in and out around the grotto as she chastised herself for her mistake. After she had finally found her rope and used it as a directional header, Jen’s thoughts on the incident changed a little.
The constant sound of dripping had let her become complacent. She had become reliant on the outside noise and had neglected to use her own sense of direction and positioning. It may have been human and fallible, but using it was the only way to improve her ability to navigate in the dark.
This lesson was driven home when Jen arrived at the mushroom cracks. Her course had deviated during her travel and the crack where Jen had first discovered the mushrooms was nowhere to be found. She did take advantage of a relatively shallow crack to conduct her business. Once finished, she finally managed to put her harvested moss to use; utilizing it as a poor substitute for toilet paper to clean herself up.
She had continued to check the various fissures for any sign of the mushrooms, slowly working her ways counterclockwise with regards to the pool. The seventeenth fissure finally paid off, as Jen once more found the source of the mushrooms. Out of curiosity, she ran her arms lightly up and down the length, trying to get an estimate for the number of mushrooms present without tearing them from their fragile hold on the walls and floor. Jen was relieved to find that while the areas that she had harvested previously were noticeably more sparse, there remained a significant number of mushrooms present. She almost decided to try and colonize the the other chasms, but gave up the idea after admitting her complete lack of knowledge about a mushroom’s lifecycle. It was possible that her efforts would be successful, but it was far more likely that she would just be throwing away mushrooms that were necessary to her continuing survival.
With a full load of the poisonous fungi, Jen returned to her base, nervous about the testing but determined to see it through. Her main hope was that eating the mushrooms slowly would help her build up a tolerance to the poison, making her food source much more palatable. While she was less optimistic about finding success, she was still extremely curious about the mysterious paths the poison had taken as it burned through her body.
Jen started by arranging the mushrooms she gathered within easy arm's reach of her position. She then stretched out on the ground, before starting to focus on and regulate her breathing. As her breaths slowed, she turned her attention inwards, searching for the same state of tranquility that had let her make it through her previous poisoning. Finally she reached out her hand and grabbed a single mushroom, taking one last breath before chewing down.
Even knowing of the pain that would soon be hitting her, Jen did her best to enjoy the rich flavors of the mushroom. Finally it was consumed and Jen braced herself for the oncoming pain. She then realized that in her haste she had missed something. While the previous poison had hit immediately after she had finished eating, she had eaten multiple mushrooms over a relatively long duration. After eating a single piece of the poisonous material, there would likely be a long delay before any effects began to show. The realization that she would have to wait an unknown amount of time bracing for a pain that could arrive any moment almost caused Jen to lose her desire to see these experiments through. She buckled down. She needed to be able to eat these mushrooms, and if that meant putting up with the pain without preparation, then so be it.
Jen settled in to wait, her senses on a hair trigger to avoid the shock that had caused so much pain last time. Tensing a little from the pain, she managed to note just how quickly it arrived, seemly starting just as she had finished swallowing down the mushroom.
Thanks to the smaller dosage and her anticipation of the poison, Jen found the pain to be much more tolerable this time, and was already at work trying to listen to her tortured sense of pain to determine what hurt and what didn’t. The pain spread much like it had previously, but only a few more inches were affected before the aching numbness began to fade, much to Jen’s relief. It seemed the dosage of an individual shroom was a manageable amount of poison, especially compared to a full meal’s worth. A second mushroom was eaten, with the exact same effects.
Wanting to test her limits, Jen decided to eat two shrooms, one after the other. She made a mental note that that the poison again seemed to wait until she had finished eating to begin its work. It was possible that the poison was ignored by her stomach enzymes until the entirety of the mushrooms had been digested, but Jen didn’t have the knowledge of biological chemistry to hypothesize an actual mechanism.
Turning her attention away from that line of thought, Jen noted that the poison from the two mushrooms induced a stronger feeling of pain, lasted longer, and expanded further into her body before beginning to fade..
Satisfied that she had a basic understanding of the mechanism and the properties of the poison, Jen began to steadily eat the rest of the mushrooms, pausing only long enough for the poison of one mushroom to kick in before starting to eat the next one. In this manner Jen was able to allow the poison to slowly spread throughout her body, all while at a low enough level of pain that she was able to pay attention and analyze the entire process.
It was extremely educational. There were places where the poison channels seemed to pool, or even double back at times, things Jen was only made aware of due to her ability to track the poisons slow progress as it spread throughout her body. By the time the poison had reached her upper arms and legs, Jen had decided to start experimenting on ways to affect the speed of the poison. She began with modulating her breathing, breathing faster then slower, before trying to hold her breath, all to no effect. Bloodflow was next. Keeping her body still, Jen begam to tense her muscles in her arm, doing her best to increase blood flow to the region. While this didn’t speed up the spread at all, it did seem that the movement of her arm as she flexed moved the location of the channels around a little.
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Curious about this Jen started to move her arms around, first in small movements, then in larger in larger ones before stopping and returning to her prone position. There did seem to be some strange relation between the movements of her arms and the locations of the channels, but it was currently beyond her ken, and the movement seemed to emphasize the pain from the poison, making it harder to calmly ride out.
As Jen tried to recover from her movements, her thoughts wandered a bit. Until now, she had been trying to explore the mystery under the assumption that her old understanding of reality was still valid. While this had worked out for her most of the time, events such as her spontaneous teleportation to this cave showed that it was possible for things to exist that were impossible within her previous framework of reality.
The solution was simple. To drop all preconceived notions and look at the situation with fresh eyes. It didn’t take long for ideas to start flowing in. Force Pathways. Chakra Channels. Qi Flows. Mana Circuits. Soul Markers. Spirit Lines. The myths and fiction of Earth was filled with alternate energy sources that could possibly describe her new anatomical structures, or at least provide a starting point for further self discovery.
That said, simply changing her descriptive terms from ‘mysterious pathways’ to Mystic mumbo-jumbo wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she could use the stories for more than just that. All of those energy systems were meant to be used, and could be manipulated. But how?
Jen thought back to how her arm movement had affected the mystic channels in her arm. Slowly she began to flex and relax her arm muscles, trying to focus not on the arm movements itself, but on how the flows changed. As she worked she continued to pop mushrooms into her mouth maintaining the pain and her ability to visualize the effects of her actions. Eventually she had to give it up as a bad job. She had eaten the last of the mushrooms she had collected, her arm seemed to be cramping up, and she had no progress to show for all her efforts. It might have been possible, but it reminded Jen of when she had tried to learn how to raise only one eyebrow; far too many connected things involved to be learned quickly.
As the pain was finally allowed to fade, Jen turned her thoughts away from the interaction of her muscles and the channels to the larger mystery. Previously she had thought the mushrooms to use some neurotoxin that caused intense pain but no lasting effects. In the light of her new outlook Jen decided to revisit her earlier conclusions. She started by firmly defining the mystery structures as energy channels. It was general enough to encompass many of the fictional concepts proposed, without tying too closely into any single fantasy system leading to false assumptions.
Looking at the situation from that perspective, the mushrooms induced an unnatural state in her energy channels. Whether by removing her energy, introducing a foreign incompatible energy, or stressing the system with too much energy, there was some relationship between the mushrooms and this new energy.
That thought led back to an earlier problem that Jen had been ignoring. There hadn’t been any apparent source of the energy for the mushrooms to utilize for their growth, but if this energy was anything like fantasy magic, it could serve as the main source of the mushrooms’ growth. Jen groaned a bit at the realization that she had literally been eating magic shrooms, before picking up her train of thought again.
If the mushrooms were causing pain by interfering with the natural state of her energy channels, than it was possible, even probable, that the reason she was having no progress at learning to control her energy was that her channels had not been in a working state.
Eager to give her tests another try with the effects of the mushrooms now purged from her system, Jen tried to sink as far into her meditative state as possible. As she started to focus, she brought her mental map of her energy channels to the front of her mind. They might not be visible to her sense of pain at the moment, but she knew they were still there.
Ready to begin, Jen timed her actions to her breaths. With every breath in, she tried to pull; to move the energy in the channels towards her chest, trying to collect it in the largest pool structure located just behind her sternum. With every breath out she relaxed; spreading her awareness throughout her body to catch any sign that her efforts were having an effect.
Ten breaths, then twenty, then more as she stopped counting to focus on her actions. There was a sense of failure slowly growing in the back of her mind, but Jen refused to admit defeat. If her dreams of mad science had been what had drawn her into pursuing her degree in physics, then her dreams of learning magic were what she had discarded beforehand as being both impossible and childish.
But there was opportunity to do so right in front of her, no matter how self constructed or illusory it might be. Jen was not going to give up easily. She stopped relaxing when she exhaled, and began to pull inwards with every change in breath. Her mental exercise became a physical one as well, her body tensing and relaxing with every pull
In her mind, she visualized her actions like incoming tide. Each wave receded in turn, but the next wave always travelled a little further, creeping up slowly until the tide was in and the beach submerged. Just a little bit further, just a little bit further, just a little-
Jen was broken from her mantra by a growing pain in her chest. She was elated that her actions had affected the channels, but the long term ramifications of self damage began to worry her as she constructed a better picture of what was happening.
If the pain that the mushrooms had brought was that of a devouring black hole, then this was the flare of the sun at close range. Jen was Icarus, who had flown too high in her arrogance and blindness, and was about to pay the price. Castigating herself for stopping her progress checks, Jen tried to disperse the inferno of energy, only to panic when it refused to break apart. She was able to slowly move it, manipulating it with her growing understanding of the energy system, but breaking it up and returning her body to normal was beyond her.
Feeling like she was running out of time, Jen began to push the excess energy upwards, through the channels leading to her left hand. There were several places along that channel that were close to her skin, and she was hoping that it would be possible to expel the excess energy from them before the current pain developed into more permanent damage. If that proved to be impossible, Jen was far more willing to have her non-dominant hand be damaged than to have any unknown effects occurring so close to her vital organs.
It was a slow process. At times Jen needed to forcibly compress the fiery energy to fit it into smaller channels, taking the entirety of her focus to shift it an agonizing inch. Jen dimly noticed that the pain from this exercise gave her an unexpected clarity into the limits and locations of her channels as they moved through her body. The poison from the mushrooms had been focused on her channels but had been both strange and encompassing, difficult to comprehend. This pain, the pain of excess energy was a white hot pain that illuminated the eddies of her channels with a frightening clarity. Jen would have loved to take the time to study the new details revealed, but her focus needed to stay on pushing forward.
She managed to navigate past her elbow and up her forearm, the pain diminishing slightly. The roiling surplus seemed smaller, having lost some of it’s energy to the channels passed through and as a function of time. Jen could see that even now it was slowly shrinking, but she was not content to wait it out. The pain was still sharp, both a focus and a shackle, and she wanted it gone. The energy reached her hand and began to pool again in the reservoir area located there. Jen refused to let it rest and began to push it forwards again, not up through the delicate channels of her fingers, but outwards, towards her palm. There was no channel, no opening for her to push through, but she persisted, as the pain grew from her unusual handling of the energy. Just when she thought her task impossible, Jen felt a lessening of the pressure in her hand, replaced by a comforting warmth. At the same time she began to hear a low humming, crystal clear in pitch. Her eyes, neglected in favor of her other senses and closed as a meditative aid, perceived something even through her eyelids.
Curious, Jen opened her eyes, blinking a little in the red glare before shutting them and shying away from the liquid light that was currently sitting in her hand. Jen sat up, holding her hand off to the side and looking in the other direction. Slowly she opened her eyes again, blinking away tears from the relief of being able to see again. Her relief was short lived, replaced by confusion as she took in the things currently floating in front of her.
She swallowed a bit as her mind started whirling. “I think,” she said slowly,
“I need to revisit that hallucination hypothesis.”