Before Jen could get too absorbed with her experiments, her stomach rumbled. She had intentionally not been eating, wanting to preserve her mana for other purposes, but her hunger had reached the point of distraction. While part of Jen wanted to ignore it to focus on the surprise her last experiment had become, a greater part overruled that.

The fact of the matter was that while her experiments with the magic crystal were interesting, she lacked the informational base necessary to derive anything truly valuable from them. The mushroom’s interaction with the crystal was interesting, but Jen knew that she couldn’t even begin to explain why things had happened as they had.

Any theories that Jen might come up with were likely to built of little more than wishful thinking, and dangerous because of it. Treating the world as if it functioned the way that she hoped it did could easily lead to a deadly surprise when her misinformed theories misled her.

Heading off to gather mushrooms and fill her stomach was a much more practical use of her time. Beyond that, Jen realized that with Chronos’ Heart, she could easily keep track of the time and thus have a rough estimate of her current mana without checking. Her meal could become an experiment in its own sense, as she could now calculate just how much mana was actually consumed by the poisonous mushrooms. Furthermore, if repeated in the future, she might be able to gain a better understanding of the efficacy of her Poison Resistance skill.

One issue that Jen had noticed regarding her skills is that very few of them offered concrete statistics on their effects. She was provided with a brief description, but only Meditation had actually quantified its functionality.

While Meditation seemed to operate on a linear principle, each level increasing the efficiency by 1%, she was curious if that would hold true for all her skills. Poison Resistance would provide a useful counterpart, given that it served as a reduction based skill. Done properly, she could learn if that was a percentage reduction, a linear reduction, or whether it functioned on a more complex model. No matter what the case turned out to be, having a better idea of how the system functioned could only benefit her.

While Jen didn’t have a physical marker pointing her in the direction of the mushroom caverns, she was able to roughly navigate given that she knew it was on the same side of the pool of water as she had started on. She was pleasantly surprised to find her initial heading to be only slightly off, and attributed it to her Navigation ability. Even in the dark, she seemed to be able to keep a rough sense of direction so long as she didn’t arbitrarily spin or otherwise confuse herself. Even with that sense of orientation, Jen decided to continue using her rope to maintain a straight heading. Relative directional sense wouldn’t prevent her from curving her path due to uneven steps.

Having reached the mushrooms without incident, Jen harvested enough for two large meals, taking care to extract a few with as much of their root systems intact as possible. If her old experiment could no longer serve as a light source, she would just need to make a new one, and then maybe some spares or to place at other positions of interest.

By this point, Jen had travelled the route back to her pool often enough to be confident that there were no obstacles to trip over. Paying close attention to the sound of the pool to estimate distance, she slowed down only once she began to worry about falling in.

Evidently while her directional ability was quite reliable, her sense of distance needed some work. It took a few minutes of slowly edging forward before Jen could feel the ground under her feet change texture, having reached the mossy area again.

Grateful to be back at her ‘home’, Jen piled the mushrooms up before collapsing nearby. No matter how necessary or how useful it might be, consuming the mushrooms was still painful. Getting into a comfortable position made the process easier, if only a little.

From previous experience, Jen ate slowly, taking a pause after each bite to keep the pain low. After a moment, she began to use mana control, curious to see how it would fare when faced with an obstacle to moving her mana around.

It took an immense amount of focus to accomplish, the pain constantly distracting her from her task, but eventually she managed to succeed. She began to feed more mana into her stomach area, glad to see that it did seem to reduce both the pain and the duration of the poison, even if it did come at the cost of burning through additional mana.

After eating a few more mushrooms to restore the empty sensation, Jen braced herself. She had a suspicion that trying to eat mushrooms without any mana to react with would be dangerous, and was potentially the sort of action that could kill her if she underestimated the poison. Trying to remove mana from the poisoned area was not the smartest idea, but it was still necessary to get a better understanding of what could happen.

Jen wouldn’t claim that she had gotten used to the pain the mushrooms brought, but between her rising Pain Resistance, Poison Resistance, and just a general expectation of what would happen, it became much more tolerable. All that in no way prepared Jen for the agony that tore through her.

Even a moment was enough to break her concentration, letting mana flow back into the region and bringing the pain back down to a more reasonable level. Gritting her teeth, Jen prepared to repeat the process.

Not only would it provide invaluable information for an emergency situation, but she knew that this was good training for her skills. Both her resistances and her Determination skill would benefit greatly from this challenge, giving her the essential skill points necessary to improve.

For the rest of her meal, Jen challenged herself, continuing to force her mana away, letting the poison ravage her body without anything to stop it. She noticed that the pain soon became physical; without any magic to devour the poison seemed to affect her body. The area seemed to be inflamed to the touch, and trying to move was a challenge.

Eventually she had her fill, both of food and of pain. Taking a moment to catch her breath she turned her attention inwards, working on improving her meditation.

It was a difficult skill to improve, simply because she wasn’t sure how it managed to do what it said it did. The system treated meditation as an ability that improved her mana regeneration. She saw it as a state of mind where she made an effort to be calm and composed, to set aside her worries of the moment.

She gave it some thought. Meditation in a way was about entering the best mental state possible. On the other side of things, increasing her mental stats, her Intelligence and Composure in particular, increased her regeneration as well. So there was some relationship between a heightened mental state and increased regen. Now she just had to somehow incorporate that connection into purposefully increasing her meditation level.

Encouraged by making that connection, she dove into her meditative state. Jen was so engrossed in her meditation that she failed to notice the leathery tentacle that wrapped its way around her ankle.