An hour and most of her mana later, Jen was finished, her creation mostly a success. Feeding it large quantities of her magic had been sufficient to spark the growth she wanted, but Jen had been exceedingly careful regarding any probing roots. It didn’t matter to her if the outcome would be different, she was not willing to have her body used as a food source for the mushroom.

Thankfully, it seemed like that was not an absolute requirement. While Jen had a suspicion that feeding the mushroom externally had ended up costing her more mana than it would have if she had let it enter her body to feed, She was still more than willing to pay that price. The sheer unpleasantness of being penetrated was enough to turn her away from the endeavor, not to mention the high risk of painful death that any mistakes might bring. Her mana would regenerate, given enough time.

With her new creation of an equal size to her original beacon, Jen took advantage of the fading glow it emitted. Her first priority was to relocate Rocky. As interesting as she found the little Lesser Myconid, she did not want him or his probing roots anywhere around where she slept, as being strangled in her sleep was not something she was eager to experience, accidental or otherwise. She firmly refused to let her mind consider any other reasons a tentacled being should be kept away from her vulnerable form.

Shaking her head to clear those thoughts, Jen looked around, taking advantage of her Low Light Vision skill to get a better understanding of her surroundings and to get a feel for where a good location to pen her pet would be. After a bit of thought, Jen decided to create a pen a little ways around the edge of the pond using the rocks she had collected.

Gingerly, taking care to not break any of the surprisingly fragile roots, Jen picked Rocky up to carry him to his new home. Between the smooth floor and the proximity to a light source, she made good time, and soon Rocky was happily situated a good distance away from what she had begun to consider her base. While the distance should prove difficult for him to cross with his current lack of coordination, it was still close enough to Jen’s developing base for any light she made to illuminate it, letting her check up on her new pet easily.

Unsure how capable at climbing a myconid was, Jen opted for a different strategy to keep her new pet in roughly the same position. Taking care not to crush any roots, she slowly piled up the small rocks she had gathered on her expedition. After prodding Rocky to grab onto the first few, she had simply pinned those grasping roots down with more stones, piling up towards the stem in a manner that left it mostly immobilized. While it still had several roots free to wave about and explore, Jen was confident that Rocky lacked the strength necessary to shift itself out of the rocks that surrounded it.

Giving it a little pat on its head and feeding it the last few points of her mana, Jen made her way back to her beacon and camp. Once there, she decided to take advantage of the light to pull up her status screen. A part of her had wanted to wait until she had finished with her training regimen, but the fact of the matter was that Jen both had access to a light source at the moment, and had expended much more of her mana than she had expected. It was a far better idea to check her progress at the moment, and then take as much time as possible to regenerate her magic before she checked again.

Jen did note that her while the first system announcement had appeared without any say on her part, after that it seemed like all notifications were content to wait until she had the status screen already visible. Jen grimaced as she thought of how her initial interactions with Rocky would have gone if her vision had been obstructed by any accumulated notifications. Now though, that issue had been dealt with and Jen could afford to open up her menu and get a sense of any changes that had occurred.

Jen Byrnes

Bringer of the Apocalypse Physical Status: Tired, Sore Mental Status: Normal Endurance: 4 Constitution: 4 Strength: 3 Health: 43/52 (+4.4 / Hour) Reaction: 6 Resilience: 11 Dexterity: 5 Stamina: 50/50 (+3.6 / Minute) Willpower: 12 Composure: 15 Intelligence: 17 Mana: 4/128 (+8.9 / Hour)

As she had suspected, her magical reserves were almost empty. Her Mana Manipulation skill was able to give her a rough estimate of how much energy she had to manipulate, even if it wasn’t as precise as the System information, and Jen took note of that fact. Being able to roughly track her mana would give her a better sense of how costly various efforts actually were, while checking her status screen would only give her a net change over a time period.

One thing that did surprise Jen, even if only slightly, was that her health was less than full. It was one thing to know that trying to digest anti magic mushrooms without any magic was more painful. It was another to see that the system deemed it to do actual damage to her body, and enough damage that even two hours and twelve minutes later her health was less than full. Fortunately her physical status seemed normal, even if it did recognize that she was more than a bit tired after all that activity.

Dismissing her Status Screen, Jen turned her attention to the other notifications that awaited her.

Listen is now Lvl 12.

Poison Resistance is now Lvl 11.

Meditation is now Lvl 9.

Determination is now Lvl 8.

Pain Resistance is now Lvl 8.

Mana Manipulation is now Lvl 7.

Chronos’ Heart is now Lvl 6.

Mana Control is now Lvl 4.

Low Light Vision is now Lvl 4.

Added up it came to a total of 20 additional skill points to spend. Complementing that was the next announcement.

By successfully creating a new species of fungal life, the Fungal Arts path is now open to you.

A quick check showed the Fungal Arts path on her path screen, sitting at 0/18. Having already reviewed her only other option, the Underdark Dweller, and found it lacking, Jen didn’t waste any time in spending the plot points necessary to complete the Fungal Arts path.

The path gave out rewards every other point put in. 2 points to Intelligence, then Resilience, followed by Composure and finished off with 2 free points to spend as she wished. Jen mostly skipped the pithy statements that accompanied each reward, reading enough only to be sure that gaining a plant like resilience wasn’t actually literal. Finishing the path also gave something Jen had been hoping for since she had learned magic was real.

Plant Growth: 3 Mana. Accelerate the rate at which a plant develops, forcing weeks of growth to occur within moments. Cost increases with age of targeted plant and decreases with skill level. Power increases with Willpower.

While a part of Jen was wishing for more numbers, she understood that it really wasn’t applicable in a situation like this. Reality simply contained too many variables that any spell could potentially interact with for a simple mathematical equation to reasonable model. Far better for it to give her a rough idea and let her figure out the details on her own, instead of being misled by some abstract numbers that didn’t carry over.

That part of her mind was quickly silenced though by her general jubilation. She had a spell! She could cast real magic now, not just make a weird light thingy. And while her reserves had been almost empty, the increase to her Intelligence and Composure stats had given her more mana to play with.

Wanting to test her new spell, Jen made her way over to her small supply of mushrooms she had harvested for food. While she was unsure if they were still alive enough to qualify as a target for her spell, she did recall that they had still managed to absorb her unrefined magic to continue their growth. Wanting to give it a try, especially since it would only cost three mana, Jen picked one of the smallest shrooms out of the pile. A part of her wondered how the spell would quantify age for objects that hadn’t existed for more than a few days. Would it go by their physiological age or their actual time of existence. Picking a small mushroom played on the safe side of that argument.

Placing it down flat on the ground, in a position it could have conceivably grown on its own, Jen sat and tried to figure out how to actually cast her spell. The only other somewhat active skill she possessed was Identify, but that triggered off of spending enough time studying an object in some fashion. Given that her menu seemed to run off of verbal commands, Jen decided to give it a try. “Plant Growth!” She announced, before dropping back into silence as she observed the magic begin to swirl around inside her body.

The system’s assistance was awe inspiring. Jen’s current visualization of her magic was that of a liquid, one that she could surge and swell and otherwise move around her body. What she saw now shattered that illusion. If Jen’s actions were comparable to creating a large wave that crashed towards its destination, then the magic formed by the system was an ice sculpture, detailed down to the molecular level, precise and structured in a way that Jen had never managed to accomplish.

It explained how the system could generate months of growth with only a few mana. The amount of structure built into the spell allowed for every iota of power to be directed towards that singular purpose. It put her earlier efforts to shame. It had taken her almost forty mana, pushed outwards with no true shape, to match the growth that was happening in front of her.

The mushroom, once smaller than her thumb, had grown tremendously, doubling and tripling in size in moments. It reminded Jen of a stop motion timelapse, where aggregate photos of a plant were combined to give the illusion of rapid growth. Only what was happening in front of her, to the mushroom she was touching was no illusion. The growth slowed as the mushroom continued to grow, each additional inch of size taking longer and longer. Jen pulled up her status screen to make sure that she wasn't accidentally casting the spell multiple times and was relieved to see her mana staying static, the initial spell cost having already been removed. Shortly after that, the spell ground to a halt, the System built structures in her mana channels all having either been forced into the mushroom or been broken down back to the simple mana they had formed from.

Looking at the enlarged mushroom, Jen laughed a little. Even after finding the mushrooms, food had been a concern. She hadn’t known if the mushrooms would grow back quickly enough to supply her needs, but with the ability to transform a single mushroom into a filling meal, that worry faded.

She knew that it would take months to fully understand just how the system had formed that spell, if not years. Even more time would be needed to take that knowledge and come up with a spell of her own. Give how the increases to her intelligence had already given her a noticeable increase to her clarity and speed of thought, it was possible to bring that down, but Jen wasn’t holding her breath. In a way, she was perversely pleased to see the difficulty of the task that lay ahead of her. Her old reality had been too simple in a way, the rules of reality easily figured out with no places or loopholes that allowed dreams to prosper. This new system was complicated to the point of being incomprehensible, but that just meant that the realm of what was possible was currently infinite.

She wasn’t able to leverage the system to create an easy way for her to escape. But in a world of infinite possibilities, she just had to keep looking to find one that would work, that would finally give her her freedom.