It took a few minutes for Jen to reaccustom herself to the dark. It surprised her just how uncomfortable she was. She had managed a whole day without any problems, but now she knew she had a source of light available with just a little effort. It was so tempting just to stay on one place, to put all her energy into bringing back that light, but Jen managed to work herself away from that idea.

For one, it would take far too long before she would have the mana to be able to cast at all. Her previous attempt had taken twenty-eight of her thirty-one mana. With her current recovery rate of 1.6 Mana per Hour, it would take almost eighteen hours before she was back to full.

Jen had doubted this initially, but after a careful examination of her energy channels, mana channels now, she reluctantly agreed with the System’s conclusion. Her efforts to coalesce and then expel her mana had had a significant cost, and Jen could feel a vague weariness that wasn’t like any fatigue she had felt before.

Besides the long wait, the other reason Jen was determined not to rely on her light was its general uselessness. It was helpful for seeing things directly adjacent to her, to be sure. But the rate at which the light faded off was far too sharp to be helpful while exploring. The problem was that her eyes would adjust to the most convenient light level, which would be her mana powered light. But since reflections off anything at a distance wouldn’t even have a small percentage of the same light intensity, she wouldn’t be able to distinguish them at all.

By using sound to navigate, not only would she be able to more easily spot any other light sources she might come across, but thanks to her Listen and Echolocation skills she would be able to find interesting structures much easier.

Skills. Jen was more than a little upset about them, and it took her a moment or two of introspection to figure out why. She had managed to navigate the cave in the complete dark, find a source of food and water, and figure out how mana worked, all on her own. She had been able to have some pride in her accomplishment, and finding out that there was some system assist involved that made it easier to learn and use skills hurt. She knew she probably would have died right away without their help, but she had enjoyed the idea that she was the equal of one of the heroes from her fiction, a modern day Indiana Jones with only her wits to get her out of whatever sticky situation she found herself in. She even kinda had a whip!

But that was the point of the new system, wasn’t it? A plot system added specifically because the storylines were too boring. A lack of interesting narrative. Seven billion individuals, who all end up doing the same things due to lack of options. No new land to explore, nothing left to discover, no real means for an individual to accomplish anything significant.

That had all changed. The new skills and magical system allowed for a drastic increase in individual power, while the partitioning of humanity between twenty-seven worlds shattered the current governing system at the same time as it gave humanity space to grow again. With all of the effort put into conquering the earth undone, the survivors of this apocalypse would have no choice but to start all over again, creating new stories and legends in the process.

It made sense, and brought the entirety of changes together into a frightening picture. To realize that your life, your world even, was nothing more than entertainment for higher beings with the ability to rewrite the laws of reality on a whim. Jen shuddered. As unnerved as she was, there really wasn’t anything she could do about it. Any ability to fight back against the system would need a far greater understanding of her new limits and capabilities.

Taking that goal and focusing on the present, Jen decided to start experimenting with the skill system. The skills she had achieved had all been accidental, the mere act of trying to accomplish various tasks enough to create and advance them. That raised questions of its own. What sort of things could become skills? What threshold of effort was necessary to create a skill? How much could skills overlap in function? There was so much to learn, and only one way to do so. Experimentation.

Without the ability to see any notifications, Jen decided to focus on the effects of learning skills. Her mind filled with ideas of tests to run, but one idea stuck out to her more than any other. She currently had no way to track the passage of time. There was no sunrise or sunset, no lunar cycle, no stopwatch or water clock to tell just how quickly time was passing by. Jen had noted how her resource regeneration was linked to the amount of time that passed, as opposed to taking any action such as sleeping or eating. With generating light to check her status screen being such a costly expenditure, Jen wanted to be able to accurately judge how much time had passed so she could know when she had the mana necessary to attempt it again.

Without much in the way of resources, Jen’s options for telling time were limited. There was a steady dripping of water into the pool, but while that would give her a relative sense of time, all measurements would be in the number of drips, with no way to convert to minutes or hours.

There was another constant rhythm that Jen had access to, one that she already knew the frequency of. Her heartbeat, as of her last physical, had been 70 beats per minute. While normally it would have taken all of her focus and attention to both sense her heartbeat and then convert that to elapsed time, Jen was hopeful that a skill to do so could be created, making a difficult task much easier, just like it had with learning Echolocation.

It took a little thought, but Jen came up with a system to help simplify the counting process. Pulling on her choral experience, she began to count aloud, numbering each heartbeat into seven-beat measures. “ONE two three four five six seven TWO two three four five six seven…” Ten measures of seven beats was one minute, which Jen would add to her tally of elapsed time and restart the count.

Time passed by as Jen counted. First one minute, then five, then ten. When she noted that fifteen minutes had passed by, she became curious just how many heartbeats she had counted. Fifteen times seventy was one thousand and fifty. Jen was pleased she had managed to count over a thousand without problems when she realized that she had managed to do that calculation and continue her current train of thought all while still keeping an accurate count of her heartbeat. She had been hoping for such an outcome, but it still amazed her at just how much of an improvement to her capabilities that skill gave her, and how quickly she earned it.

Jen started and stopped her counting a few times, noting that while it made counting her heartbeats much easier, it still took some degree of concentration to maintain. Too much focus on another task, either physical or mental, would cause her to lose count. Taking a minute to focus on slowing down her breathing and her heart rate, Jen confirmed that she was actually counting her heartbeats, not just using it to determine the initial rate of counting. It was still far more accurate than trusting her vague feelings of how long things had taken.

Jen kept counting for another half hour, trying to spot any moment when her skill level might increase, but eventually gave it up as a bad job. She had only managed to spot the initial gain of the skill after the fact, and she guessed that the first level of a skill would have the largest proportional change in ability. The difference between zero and one was infinitely larger than the difference between one and two.

Jen wanted to test her new skill further, but was unable to come up with any experiments she could complete with the resources available. Vowing to come back later, Jen turned her focus to another area of skills that had interested her.

The quick reading of her skill notifications had revealed that she had learned the Listen skill and the Echolocation skill, both of which dealt with hearing. Furthermore she had picked up the Yoga skill from doing her daily stretches, but Yoga was just a codified set of body stretches and poses. If she were to learn Tai-Chi, would that increase her yoga level as her body strength and flexibility increased, or would she gain a new skill? Would there be a single skill for martial arts, or would each school be worthy of a skill? While testing those specific questions would have to wait, Jen was eager to try and learn two overlapping skills.

Jen’s first thought was to try and gain skills for the various branches of mathematics, but rejected it after a bit more thought. If her usage of the rope to navigate earlier hadn’t been enough to gain a Mathematics or Geometry skill, she wasn’t sure that such skills existed. Thinking of that rope brought another idea to her mind.

With the system changing reality into something approaching a game or story, Jen decided to treat it as one. If this was a game, then between the new terrain, the altered animals, and the nature of humanity, it was perhaps inevitable that combat would occur. And if fighting were to happen, then weapons, and the skills to use them would be required. Many weapons also had additional utility outside of combat. Axes could cut down trees, and spearfishing was an alternative use for a spear. Precision knifework was essential in the kitchen, and there was always the possibility of a fighting skill existing for a weapon like a scythe. With both mundane and combative uses present, Jen surmised that multiple skills existed that would use said weapons.

While she didn’t have access to an axe or a spear, or knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting styles, Jen did have a tattered rope made from her shirt that, with a very flexible frame of mind, could be viewed as a whip. She also had the memories of her semester long Dances from around the World, including the week spent on the basics of ribbon dancing. It had satisfied a core requirement at the time, but now it had value of its own.

Jen started to maneuver her rope, trying her best both mentally and physically to treat it as a whip. If it turned out that skills too close together were impossible to learn, she would greatly prefer having a martial proficiency over an artistic one.

It didn’t take long for her to realize that practicing with a whip in the dark was not the brightest idea she had ever had. If she had to describe whip fighting in one word, she would chose momentum. Unlike a solid sword or spear, the whip’s fluidity meant that each motion had to lead into the next one. A strike with a whip wasn’t an instant decision, but rather the culmination of the past several seconds where the whip was coaxed into an arc and accelerated until it reached the target with lethal speed. Without a target to practice on though, Jen found that her strikes would rebound, inertia carrying the tip forwards until it would more often than not impact her in some surprising location. She had left the stones in place weighing the ends down to add some heft to her swings but had paid for that decision with several large bruises all over her upper torso and arms. Two factors kept her from removing the rocks. The first was for motivation. Every hit was an incentive to pay more attention to the rope, to think not just about the moment but to start considering what next.

The second reason for continuing was an unexpected benefit to the weight. Because of the dark, Jen was unable to track the position of her makeshift whip with her eyes. She had a general idea of where the rope was thanks to her intuition, and when the rope would whistle at high speed she could hear roughly where it was. But as she continued to practice, she began to pay more attention to the tug of the rope itself. The weight of the rock on the end asserted itself enough that she could tell if she was having to pull to add more speed, or if her whip was beginning to get ahead of her. She still got hit on occasion, but knowing she could regenerate any lost health let her press through the pain and continue practicing.

Jen managed to work for an hour by her estimate before she gave herself a break. Her muscles sore from the workout, she flopped down on the ground before rolling herself over to the water’s edge to rehydrate herself. As she rested a huge smile appeared on her face. It had been surprisingly enjoyable, swinging an object around at high velocity, and towards the end Jen had managed to last almost five minutes between getting hit, alternating the whole time between various swings. The only whip crack she had managed was when she had accidentally brought the end of her whip downwards onto the stone ground at high velocity. After that, she had stopped several times to check the integrity of her rope and to tighten some of the knots, but she had been pleased with how well it had held up to the strain overall.

She hadn’t noticed any point that she could point to and say with confidence that she had learned a skill, but she was cautiously optimistic she had. She was also tired of being hit and was ready to move on to ribbon dancing whether she had gained a skill or not. Taking another few minutes to catch her breath, Jen worked to remove the stones tied to the end of her rope.

As she began to perform the basic twirls and sweeps she remembered, Jen started to wonder just why she had hoped to gain two skills instead of just one. Her thoughts went back to her earlier hypothesis that there would be different skills for Woodcutting and for Battleaxes, even though they would primarily use the same actions. What then would the system use to differentiate the two skills? Would it rely only on user intention? The concept felt wrong to her. Merely wanting to learn a skill wasn’t enough. Effort was required before that first level was earned. The concept of gaining Woodcutting by using an axe in battle was painful.

Jen stopped her twirling, and focused on the question, before deciding to look at it from a different angle. What would separate a skilled woodcutter from an unskilled one, or a skilled axe fighter from a novice? Jen understood that she didn’t know enough about either profession to give a full answer, but she did manage to draw her own insight from the comparison.

Both a skilled and an unskilled lumberjack would cut down trees. But the one with more skill would be more efficient. There would be less wasted effort on his swings, better precision with his strikes, a deeper understanding of where to cut on a tree and why, very little of which would carry over into a battle situation, which would require its own knowledge of movements and positioning and places to strike.

If all the skill did was let you move faster or hit stronger, then it wouldn’t be skill at all, but speed or strength. It was the details of an action and the better utilization of the potentials already present that made up a skill. Skills could have an immense amount of overlap so long as the details were unique enough. Listen and Echolocation both dealt with hearing, but Listen seemed to improve the sensitivity of her ears, while Echolocation dealt with using her two ears to tell the relative location of a sound. The two skills had an immense synergy, but one skill alone couldn’t do what the other one did.

Jen restarted her ribbon practice, this time focused not on the similarities to wielding a whip, but the differences. While both had sweeping motions of a thin, flexible rope or string, the intention was different. Whip fighting was about building up the momentum of your weapon and then landing a strike that conferred that to your target in an instant, before pulling back to build for the next strike. Momentum wasn’t conserved, but transferred. Ribbon dancing was about conserving the momentum, each movement flowing into the next so that the ribbon never hung still or touched the ground.

Ribbon dancing was also fluid, the dancer moving her base to better allow the ribbon to flow gracefully. Not only was the ribbon dancing, but the wielder was as well. Jen realized that when she fought with the whip her stance had been solid, a firm base that let her transfer the maximum amount of energy to her whip every moment.

Jen felt her movements smooth as an understanding of her ribbon’s current position seemed to flood her mind. She smiled at the confirmation of her conclusions, pleased at her increased understanding of this new world.