The next few hours passed by quickly. Jen continued to play around with her rope, twirling and snapping it, as she continued to consider her scant knowledge on skills.

Already the increase in ability that skills granted had saved her life at least once, possibly multiple times depending on just how much poison resistance had helped with the pain and damage caused by the mushrooms. Her ability to gain her heartbeat clock skill as well as her whip and ribbon-dancing experiments had given her hope that skills could be worked towards, that a concerted effort could be made to gain a desired skill.

Her need to stay focused on the present and her ability to meditate had helped Jen to stay sane while trapped in the utter dark, but with every passing moment she could still feel her deep desire to see the sun growing. With the knowledge that she wouldn’t immediately starve, Jen began to turn her focus towards escape.

Jen quickly organized her thoughts into three main avenues of potential escape. Her original plan had been to simply explore the cavern, hoping to find a way to the surface through sheer luck. Jen personally thought this was unlikely, a drawn out suicide by any other name. She had no light, was reliant on loose rocks to mark her progress while exploring, and had nothing to carry either food or water with her were she to leave her current location. Added to that was the system announcement of world terraforming. This was not a natural cave system formed by years of geological movement, but one created in an instant, and then stocked with a source of food and water. Given her title and role and bringing about the change, being stuck in this stone prison was certainly possible. Jen had already noticed that the system announcements and notifications seemed to pull from Earth’s knowledge to make references and sarcastic jokes; not the actions of an impartial being.

With the odds of finding a way out low or even zero, that left Jen with the option of making her own way out. She could try and dig her way out with a physical effort, or she could try and find a solution to her problems with magic.

To try and tunnel through the mountain with nothing but her bare hands seemed a herculean task to Jen. Furthermore, she had absolutely no idea how she was currently oriented with regards to the surface, so any direction she tried to dig might be instead taking her further into the mountain. Digging upwards would counteract that problem some, but the ETRI facility had been nowhere near the peak of the mountain it was tunneled into, and Jen had visions of tunneling for ages, only to break ground at the summit, where she would summarily freeze to death from cold and exposure.

Trying to find a way to use magic was both appealing and discouraging at the same time. Magic was currently an unknown factor, potentially capable of just about anything. But whether Jen would have the time, skill, and luck to manage to find a way to make her magic work for her escape was unknown.

Her best and only accomplishment so far with magic had been to extrude a large portion of her mana from her palm. A task that had taken a large amount of time to accomplish, and had been accompanied by an almost debilitating pain. All to create what had generously been a low intensity light bulb that lasted for five minutes. Even that description was misleading, as light bulbs were specifically created to convert electricity to light. She had simply wanted to stop the pain her earlier actions had caused, and hadn’t any idea what sort of effects might have resulted from expelling her magic.

Luckily, her magic had simply decayed into other forms of energy; light, heat, and sound among them. It had been beneficial, but had left her at a dead end for advancing her magic further. She had learned quite a bit from that incident, but not enough to go around vanishing stone or teleporting to the surface.

The only resource Jen had to further any of her plans was the System. The rights skills might let her find a way out if one existed. Other skills might increase her mining ability to the point where tunneling through the solid stone was a viable option. And just like she had already managed to learn Mana Manipulation, it was possible that there was a spellcrafting skill available, one that would increase her understanding of the underlying logic of magic to the point where she could begin to do something intentionally useful. Skills were also valuable for the skill points they gave, and the unknown benefits that investing them in the paths would return.

All that would have to wait until she had the mana to try and make a light again. She felt a little frustrated at the system. The screens had been clearly visible the entire time there was even a sliver of light; perfectly readable, not too dim or too bright, and yet they vanished completely the moment her magic had ended. It wasn’t like they were actual constructs either, she had been able to pass her hand through them with only a strange tingling, and they had responded to her mental desires.

Jen’s stomach growling shook her from her thoughts, and she grimaced a little. All that exercise had worked up an appetite. Her only food source at the moment was the mushrooms she had found. Mushrooms that had an unknown, detrimental effect on her ability to use magic. Whether they drained her magic, or induced crippling pain, or even just applied some sort of paralysis, Jen wasn’t sure, but she was hesitant to eat any when she was dependent on being able to repeat her previous success and manipulate her mana to produce light.

Even if she would wait to eat until after she had experimented with the screens for a second time, Jen decided it would still be a good use of her time to head back to that section of the cave. Finding food had been her initial goal with exploring around her watering hole, but now Jen was eager to finish the job of scouting out the area. She wasn’t in danger of starving, and could afford to take some time to check the rest of the cracks for other plants growing in them, before moving on and checking the rest of the region.

Jen flushed a little when she realized that she had repurposed her rope to practice with and no longer had a directional marker to follow. Making a mental note to gather any loose rocks she might come across, Jen picked a direction and started walking, making sure to keep the dripping of water to her back, and stopping while it was still in range of her hearing.

Jen soon found herself near her path that she had built out from the pillar, and quickly cannibalized the linear markers, taking an armload of rocks back to the side of the pool before heading out in the opposite direction to try and find the mushroom holes.

Upon reaching the cracks, Jen soon realized she had no good way to tell what sections had already been examined and which cracks were as of yet unexplored and potentially filled with useful plants. Having left her supply of loose rocks behind and without anything else to use, Jen decided to utilize some mushrooms, even if it would cut into her food supply a little.

After carefully picking a handful of mushrooms and making every effort to make sure that their fragile root systems were still attached, Jen began to plant the mushrooms as she ran her hands up and down each crack. Even if they would die instead of spawning more mushrooms, Jen decided that the knowledge of what was there was worth the loss.

The cracks themselves seemed to almost fight her cataloguing efforts. There was no one uniform direction that they ran in, and more than once Jen came across a lone mushroom in a crack that she had thought she was exploring for the first time.

After that happened fifteen times in a row, she gave up. She had explored what cracks she could, ignoring those that were further away from the pool than she was comfortable exploring for the moment. She had managed to find a second source of mushrooms and had gathered a few, keeping them separate from her previously gathered mushrooms. There was a possiblitiy they were a different variety, and Jen wanted to examine them closely with her magic light before she tried them at all. While she was slightly aggravated that there were places she hadn’t explored, she knew that her Listen skill would improve as she used it, and she would be able to come back and explore more at a later point.

Jen made her way back, where she drank her fill of water to quiet her stomach down before making her way back to her moss bed. While she still had a fair amount of mental energy left, her body was weary from the exercise she had put it through, and she was more than willing to oblige it with some sleep.