It took just under ten minutes before Jen ran out of verbal abuse to throw at the System. She had already had a low level irritation at the lack of information provided, but had managed to put it aside and focus on using her energy productively to learn on her own.

Her current screen didn’t give her that option. For all that Jen was able to delay making a decision, she couldn’t think of anything she could actually do with that extra time. The few ideas she had were pipe dreams; gaining a skill that would provide more system information, or delaying until she escaped and could see what other people had chosen. No, Jen knew she would have to make the choice with only the information she had at the moment.

To stall for time, she began to list the information she did know, hoping to be able to at least generate some reasonable assumptions.

To begin with, all the paths until now had had consistent patterns of rewards. The pattern may vary depending on the path and its length, but it was always present. Novice Spellcaster had given her an active spell skill at level 10. If that pattern held, then that meant she would gain another spell at levels 20, 30, and 40. The choice screen partially confirmed this, coming up at level 20, right before she would potentially learn the first of her three elemental spells.

What else did she know? A quick check showed Plant Growth hadn’t mentioned an elemental school or alignment, proving that there were spells not affiliated with any specific school. It was even possible that the choice was merely thematic, without any underlying game mechanic that would benefit certain kinds of spells. While Jen had Mana Manipulation, as an example of a support skill, she had no evidence that elemental Manipulation skills existed, or passive equivalents to boost the strength of her spells. That didn’t rule them out, but it did serve as a reminder to take care to not build up any scenario more than necessary.

Jen tried to focus on aggregating her data, only to realize she had already covered what she could. She could expect three spells, which might or might not have supporting skills, and might or might not affect what magic the system would be offering her in the future.

She could make basic guesses as to what sorts of magic the schools might entail, but Jen knew from her various forms of entertainment that there were countless ways to interpret even the four basic elements. Would air magic include lightning, or would that find itself part of the school of fire a la Avatar? Would monsters in this new world have elemental resistances like Pokemon?Or was it using a system completely unrelated to any Jen had ever heard of, and her suppositions misleading her?

Jen had already decided to avoid both the light and dark schools of magic, given the even larger range of variance she associated with them. But narrowing it down further was proving difficult, as Jen could come up with elemental spells for any of the schools that would prove beneficial. The problem was that there was no guarantee that the system would give her the spells she imagined.

A part of Jen wished that the system hadn’t offered her the choice at all, but had simply assigned her a school that it pulled it’s spells from. Whether it based it off of simple RNG, or whether it used some abstract elemental affinity system to determine what best suited her, Jen didn’t care. The week she had spent in the cave had given her an immense confidence in her skills and in her ingenuity. She believed that whatever the system gave her, she’d manage to find some use for. But when the choice was given to her, she knew that if the spells obtained weren’t immediately and obviously useful, she’d feel a strong sense of self recrimination over choosing wrongly.

Jen tried using the bubblegum method of choosing, using the rhyme and the length of each elemental school to arrive at a semi random choice, but she could never muster the courage to follow through, instead returning to agonizing over the decision.

The advice to sleep on a tough decision came to mind, but Jen vetoed that thought as soon as it appeared. She had not been awake nearly long enough to think of sleeping yet, and she did not want to risk spending another day and a bit unconscious.

In the end, what decided Jen was not the possible spells that could be offered to her, but what she could do with them. She already knew that Mana Manipulation gave her the sensitivity to detect the spells being formed before they were actually cast. As such, even the useless spells were valuable for giving her information on how the System interacted with the surrounding world using magic. Jen knew that she wasn’t at the level yet to make inventing her new spells easy or even possible, but the principle of the matter provided another criteria to break the stalemate of choice Jen was facing.

With her new perspective, Jen’s choice became clear. Jen was surrounded by stone that she wanted to get through eventually to make her way to the surface. While any destructive magic could eventually break its way through, Jen hoped that earth magic would provide more efficient solutions of simply moving the rock out of the way.

She had briefly considered trying to use water or air magic to facilitate a trip down the river, but eventually rejected the concept as there were too many unknowns. It was unclear if the river would lead to the surface, uncertain if the passage was large enough for her the entire way, and Jen wouldn't know if she had sufficient mana to fuel whatever spell she used to breathe until she either escaped or ran out of air. Jen might want to leave this cave, but she wasn’t desperate enough to pursue such a risky method of accomplishing that.

Before she could second guess herself anymore, Jen quickly pressed the button labeled Earth. The screen immediately vanished, before being replaced with one that was both more familiar and more welcomed.

Congratulations! You have learned the skill Stone Shaping Lvl 1.

Without enough skill points to reach the next milestone on the path and wanting to get a better idea what both of her new spells actually did, Jen switched focus to her skills screen, pulling up the descriptions in turn.

Mana Bolt: 20 Mana. Fire a magical bolt of pure force at a target, dealing damage upon impact. Range of 100 meters. Damage, range, and projectile speed all increase with skill level.

Stone Shaping: 10 Mana/Min. Coat your hands with Earth Magic, allowing the caster to reshape and mold solid stone. Surface area covered increases with skill level. Cost decreases with Willpower.

Armed with a better idea of what her new skill was capable of, Jen activated it, curious about the interaction with the ball of raw mana she was currently using for light. It took a few seconds for the mana to be organized within her body, but soon a thin film was spreading across her hands, coming to a stop just past her wrists. Her ball of light seemed untouched, although Jen doubted she would be able to manage the concentration necessary to refill it while the other spell was being maintained.

Jen paused there, unsure how exactly she was supposed to cancel the spell. Activating it by voice was simple enough, but the few commands Jen tried didn’t cancel the spell right away. A quick check of her status screen showed that the mana cost had been deducted at the start,and Jen figured that the spell would simply last a minute before needing to be recast, even if that didn’t explain why it wasn’t simply given a duration for a set cost. Not wanting to waste the spell, Jen reached down into the stone, marvelling at how easily her free hand pushed the solid rock out of the way. If she were to judge by feel and sight alone, she would have thought she was playing with some grey colored clay.

There was still a certain amount of resistance, especially when she tried to dig deeper into the stone and more rock had to be displaced, but for the most part she found it both surprisingly easy and intuitive. Jen picked up a small handful of limestone, squishing it in her hand a few times before turning her left hand over.

Using the back of her hand as a flat surface, Jen rolled the stone into a cone, trying to make the tip as pointed as possible as she mentally counted out the last few seconds of the minute duration. As she had hoped, the spell came to an abrupt end, the film covering her hands dissipating into nothingness as the limestone regained its natural feel. Jen tapped the shaped piece of stone on the ground, making sure it wasn’t unexpectedly fragile, before testing the point with her thumb. While it wasn’t needle sharp, Jen still managed to puncture her skin without too much force.

Sticking her thumb in her mouth to suck away the few drops of blood, Jen slowly began to smile. She took her thumb out of her mouth and slowly raised her hand in triumph, her new prize still tightly clutched inside.

“This has potential.”