Exploring the cave with Eliza was fun, finding all the splinters and building up a map of the labyrinth was just the kind of adventure that Zoe was excited for. And Eliza didn’t help, not much at least. But Zoe knew better than to think it would be the same without Eliza.

She provided a comfort, even if she stood back away from the action. Creatures wouldn’t be drawn to the noise and ambush Zoe from behind — Eliza was just physically in the way. They’d hit her first, and Zoe would hear the commotion. It made Zoe comfortable exploring further, knowing that somebody was there behind her.

But to go alone, through the maze of tunnels without anybody behind her to keep an eye out for something Zoe couldn’t handle? That made her heart race with not only excitement but a healthy dose of fear. A Frozen Shard — or something else that she hadn’t discovered, could float its way through the tunnel with nary a sound and Zoe would be none the wiser.

Before she went, Zoe wanted to at least understand her Earth Manipulation better, she wanted to get some better enchantments for her cave. It was time to get some chores done, but she was excited for those too. Problems to solve and trials to overcome, without the danger of a frigid cave looming over her. It was an adventure all on its own, and she looked forward to it.

Zoe summoned one of the Icy Splinters and started flooding it with her mana. She watched the wisps get whisked away into the splinter, felt her mana rush into it like a bottomless pool she was filling with a garden hose.

There was something different about it to what she was used to, and she switched to flooding her mana into the mattress she sat on. The mana flowed into it, but it wasn’t the same. If the icy splinter was a bottomless pool then her mattress felt like a mess of wire. Full of interference and blockages.

It wasn’t distracting, it didn’t get in her way. And if she didn’t have the comparison on hand she doubted that she would have noticed how stark the difference was. The icy splinter was empty, void of complications. It sucked up all the mana she could throw at it and dumped it into the empty space contained within. While her mattress was saturated almost instantly.

There was just so much stuff in the way. Fibers? Was the icy splinter hollow? Zoe summoned another one and split it in half to take a look, but the splinter was solid throughout. And yet it felt so empty to her mana, like the ball that Ren had her fill a while back she realized.

Was that the difference between some random object and something that was specifically designed to be enchanted? Was the icy splinter designed to be enchanted though? Could she replicate the effect with her Frost skill with practice?

Zoe summoned a small ball of frost next to her and tried to make it hollow then poked around in it with her mana. The sphere of ice was hollow and brittle, but the air inside wasn’t a part of the Frost. She’d just made an empty ball, but she needed to make a full ball that was empty inside.

Which made no sense to her. How did the icy splinter feel so empty and large? Was it some kind of spatial effect? Some extra dimension of reality that Zoe could only just see the surface of? She wasn’t sure.

Another ball of frost appeared next to Zoe, and she examined it. There was nothing special about it, she just wanted to see a baseline. The structure within was a dense web of mana and every spot was saturated with excess mana that flooded into it while she created it.

If she removed the web of mana within, would that make it better at holding mana? What was the purpose of that web of mana though? Did it help maintain the structure of the objects and without it they would be brittle and break?

But how would you make something sturdy that also held lots of mana then? Hematite was strong and took much more mana than the regular rock that was around her, what was the difference with that?

Zoe stood up and walked outside to the pile of rock. She flooded her mana into a chunk of hematite and watched what happened. The hematite felt like a tangled mess of string with her mana settling into all of the empty spaces.

She did the same to some of the regular rock she’d harvested and the tangled mess felt noticeably denser, and her mana filled in all the cracks much sooner.

But what did that mean for her manipulation skills, anyway? With more of her mana in the hematite, would it be easier to manipulate? Or was the structure more difficult to manipulate for some reason she couldn’t see?

Zoe compared the two chunks of rock, how fast they moved and how much control she had over their shapes. If she really looked at it, maybe the hematite was better. A little faster, a little closer to looking like a star. But she wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not, the difference if there was one was so minor.

But was that because the increased mana didn’t do anything, or was it because hematite was just a heavier rock to manipulate? If she found some lightweight, sturdy rock without much structure inside then would that have a noticeable difference?

She shrugged. That wasn’t something she could test now anyway. Maybe aluminum would be a good option if she could find it? But the process of making it required a lot of electricity and infrastructure, would it even exist in this world?

Zoe scratched her head. Every time she learned something new it seemed like there was another hundred questions she wouldn’t be able to answer. There were many more productive things to spend her time on now, she reminded herself.

Like what the difference between her Earth Manipulation and Frost skills were. What was the piece that she was missing to be able to create her own rocks rather than having to pull it from the ground around her?

There was a noticeable difference between natural materials being manipulated, and materials you created yourself. She’d learned of it many years ago when she first tried to upgrade her Manipulation skills.

Natural materials were full of stuff that wasn’t her mana — the mana structures inside them, she believed now after experimenting with the icy shards. Random garbage that wasn’t hers to manipulate. Her mana flooded into the spaces and forced the rocks or wind to move as she wished. But it wasn’t truly moving the rock, it was moving mana within the rock and the rock was dragged along.

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Whereas when she created Frost, it was true manipulation. The frost itself was hers, the structure within belonged to her. When she commanded it to move, every fiber of its existence moved as she willed. There was no impedance, no structures getting in her way, no push back. The ice was hers to control.

When she took over ice with her Frost, it took more mana than when she took over rock, at least relative to the amount of space within. Her mana seeped into the structures within and pushed nature out. She wrestled absolute control of it, not just a portion of it.

That’s why her Earth Manipulation skill was so much weaker than her Frost was at a similar level. There was this constant internal battle between her mana and nature trying to maintain itself with Earth Manipulation. That didn’t happen with Frost, she was its master and it belonged to her.

But even knowing this, she wasn’t sure what the next step was. She could try to flood some rock with her mana so much that she pushed nature out and saturated even the framework that held it together. But that wasn’t what would give her Earth. That was still not creating rock from her mana.

She needed to flood reality itself with her mana and force it to create rock, but how would that happen? Zoe had watched her Frost knit together from the fabric of reality more times than she could count, but it was out of her wheelhouse to understand what was happening. A messy web of power that resulted in ice was all she could garner from it.

Understanding that process was the next step, the key to everything she could ever want. Earth, Wind, Fire, maybe even Space and Time at some point. A maelstrom of elemental skills at her fingertips if she could just figure it out. She knew that. It was just so much work, so much effort, so much studying. Months, maybe even years of watching ice form over and over as she pieced it together bit by bit.

And then who knows how long to translate that process to some other element. How much of that mess of mana was for creation and how much of it was just for the ice part of her skill?

Would her Earth Manipulation even help her with the process? Creation and manipulation were different things on a very fundamental level from what Zoe had seen. Relying on it to help with the creation seemed like a pitfall that Zoe didn’t want to fall into.

In fact, she had a theory about the skills. Earth was not an upgrade to Earth Manipulation but rather a combination of Earth Creation and Earth Manipulation. If Zoe had done things differently, she imagined she could have gotten Earth Creation and then upgraded it to Earth by unlocking Earth Manipulation.

And if she was right, then using Earth Manipulation to try and unlock Earth Creation was backwards. She didn’t need to intensify her manipulation, she didn’t need to upgrade it. She needed to pull it back to its roots, to its purest form.

The days turned to weeks, and the weeks turned to months as Zoe summoned ball of ice after ball of ice and watched the process unfold. Each day she’d pick a piece of the process and try to work through it, see what was happening. At first, it was impossible to see anything in the mess of mana.

But after a few weeks she began to see patterns in the mana, bits that moved together as one, warping and flickering in and out of existence as the ice was formed. It was such a quick process to create Frost that trying to watch it in such detail was more than just a little frustrating.

Day by day, bit by bit, she worked through it and after months of studying her skill she felt confident enough to try it without her Frost skill’s assistance.

Zoe sat on a rough bench she’d made at the top of the hill with her eyes closed. She felt the mana rushing around her and within her as she reached within her soul and disabled her Frost skill.

She took some deep breaths and let the mana flow around her, felt the subtle pressure of reality baring down on her, and the essence of her self push back against it. And then she pulled mana from deep within her and pushed it out next to her. She followed along the chaotic patterns she’d spent so many hours watching.

Wisps of light twisted and flickered as she pushed the mana into the form she remembered. A moment later, a ball of ice materialized next to her and fell to the ground.

“YES!” Zoe jumped off the bench and shouted. She felt like she was going to burst from the immense pride that welled up within her.

Without the skill, without the system’s help, with only her own power, she’d created ice. It was a useless ball that clattered to the ground without being able to manipulate it without the system’s help. But it was her useless ice!

Zoe bounced around on the hill with excitement for a while, and then flipped the switch to her Frost skill back on again. Doing it without the system’s help was fun and exciting, once. Doing it every time that way would be tedious and even dangerous. The focus required to manipulate all of her mana into the patterns she needed was impossible while she was fending off a Frozen Shard or while a mindless zombie rushed her down.

But it felt good knowing she could, that if she sat down for a while and really tried, she could succeed at even something that seemed so daunting before.

She made her way back down to the home cave and smiled at the makeshift fans she’d made — even after a few months, they still hadn’t seemed to lose any of the mana. The icy splinters made them last forever it seemed, as long as she didn’t destroy them on accident. She’d taken some time one day to secure them in place in the tunnels. Stone wrapped around bits of them and formed a mesh to keep the air flowing but her fist or whatever else she prodded the tunnels with from damaging them.

Zoe sat on her bed and summoned one of her meals — another venison wrap with some of the slimy sweet sauce from the strange fruits she’d found. Wraps were the perfect meal for her she’d decided. Easy to eat while she was walking, sitting, or even squished into a tiny tunnel and scraping out detritus that made it past her caps.

No cutlery was needed to eat them and there was no garbage to store away in her bracelet when she was done. A nice comfortable self contained meal that she could enjoy.

Her next step would be to figure out what she needed to change with the process to make it create Earth instead of Frost, but that could wait for tomorrow. She wished she had at least one other skill to reference, a Fire skill or something that she could pick apart in the same way to spot the difference.

Which parts were similar? Which parts would be different? What did those differences do? But that was a fruitless line of thought since getting another of those skills would require her to either find an elemental or figure it out without having another skill anyway.

Zoe laughed as she thought about another elemental weak enough for her to kill wandering into her cave. It would be nice, but even if she did run into an elemental Zoe doubted she’d be strong enough to take one on without the help of an entire city. And even then, what kind of elemental was going to show up near a frosty cavern? Fire?

Some baby fire elemental determined to rid the world of this terrible cold? Zoe sprawled out on her bed and chuckled. She was on her own, but she’d already proved to herself that she was good enough. It might take some time, but at the end of the day, that was the one thing she had in abundance.