Armed with a rough idea of what her new spells were capable of, Jen began to plan. She had a large amount of mana available, and wanted to maximize its use in pushing her new skills to their limits. Her initial tests combined with her casual generation of light had left her with 130MP. Jen planned on splitting that roughly in half, spending 60 mana on both testing her Mana Bolt and her Stone Shaping. The remaining ten mana would be held for generating light and for neutralizing the toxic Anti-Magic Mushrooms.

Jen was torn about investing so much of her mana into Mana Bolt practice. It was her most expensive spell, and lacked the utility that both Plant Growth and Stone Shaping offered. On the other hand, the look Jen had had at its construction had shown it to be the simplest of the three spells. As such, she was eager to use it as a starting point to begin to understand just how raw mana was shaped into spells with powerful and varied effects.

Casting Stone Shaping multiple times would be more immediately beneficial. Jen could already think of several items she could form out of stone to make her life easier. Some, like a basic toilet, were nothing more than wishful thinking, but Jen was hopeful she could form at least a rudimentary container to carry water around. She hoped she would be able to make a knife, but given she was working with limestone, a stone not known for breaking into sharp edges like obsidian. While she had already confirmed she could make a single sharp point, making a continuous sharp edge would take much more effort, and likely a better understanding of Stone Shaping functionality only available through practice.

Jen took a minute to slip into Meditation, wanting to take advantage of the mental benefits to maximize her growth. Once she felt composed, she intoned “Mana Bolt”. The first time she had cast the spell she had been unprepared, not ready to comprehend the spell given the speed at which it had formed. The bright lit it had emitted had come as a shock as well, and Jen preemptively closed her eyes in preparation

With Mana Manipulation and the extra sense it gave her, Jen watched as her mana was formed into dozens of complex structures that were then combined before being forced out of her palm and away into the distance. Even through her eyelids she was aware of the flare of light but it barely registered as Jen did her best to commit the System built structures to memory.

She wondered what the underlying structure behind the spell was. Did it function like programming, with the structures serving as a more complex form of binary or hexadecimal? Or was it more like an actual machine, the structures the metaphysical equivalents of gears and levers and heatsinks to convert the energy from one form to another? Either way, Jen once again was brought face to face with the knowledge that the System was an alien construct. There had been nothing intuitive or straightforward, no section of the code or structure that had jumped out to her as a starting point to begin her dissection.

Before casting the spell again, Jen took a small break to switch her focus from the theoretical to the practical. Her examination of the structure hadn’t given her any easy location to pursue further, and instead of wasting her efforts on an endeavor she believed she wasn’t ready for yet, Jen instead elected to set it aside for the moment.

Injecting a few points of mana into one of her two replacement beacon mushrooms gave her a target to aim for, and a small amount of light to better measure the destructive capabilities of her spell, which she had previously simply watched dissipate when it reached its maximum range. Jen took the time to move the mushroom away from her base, not wanting to miss and cause any collateral damage

Jen both physically aimed her arm at the target and mentally focused on hitting it before casting the spell again. Not wanting to flinch and pull of her aim, Jen did her best to anticipate the light. She wondered whether the mana bolt was usually bright enough to blind people, or whether the amount of time she had spent in the dark had simply made her more sensitive to bright light. Any further musing was cut short as the bolt once again left her arm, travelling at a fast clip in the direction her arm was pointed.

Her aim was slightly off, she was displeased to note, but her arm had still been pointed downwards enough for her mana bolt to collide with the ground near her illuminated target. There was a sharp crack as the mana bolt vanished, and Jen thought she saw a spray of small stone shards fly into the air. Walking over to further inspect the area, she made note of the fist sized impact region that was now much rougher than its surroundings.

For her last shot of the day, Jen decided to test what a close range impact against the mushroom flesh would look like. The spell hadn't mentioned any sort of damage falloff related to distance, but the fact that the spell simply ran out when it reached max range made Jen unsure if that was an omission or an unstated fact. Even against a different substance, comparing the destruction would give her a starting point for determining the truth of the matter.

Even nowhere near it’s max range, the bolt vanished upon contact in an identical manner, leaving behind a much abused mushroom. Jen hadn’t managed to hit it directly, and as a result the entire left half of the mushroom from her perspective had been torn to shreds by the impact. Even so, she felt confident in declaring the damage done to be roughly equivalent once adjusted for the different materials. The softer, lighter mushroom had simply spread the energy further and broken easier than the stone floor.

Taking in the pulped remains, Jen was grateful she hadn’t attempted to experiment on herself. For all that she had a health regeneration stat, she didn’t think that getting hit by one of her bolts would have been a pleasant experience.

Feeling a bit more secure against any monsters that might still be lurking in the unexplored sections of the cavern, Jen turned her attention to her other new spell. Grateful for the light still coming off the mangled mushroom, she spoke the name twice in quick succession, curious if the duration would stack, or if some other effect would occur. Her status screen showed that the cost for two castings of Stone Shaping had been deducted, and Jen was eager to see what the result would be.

Turning her attention to the ground, Jen began to dig into the solid stone, marveling at the ease and absurdity of her actions. Molding stone like it was playdough was surreal. Once she had torn up the ground to the point that there were handfuls of stone in easy reach, Jen began to methodically test the limits of her skill. Jen began by forming two long sticks of stone, one to be possibly be used later as a walking stick, and the other to serve as a method for determining the range she affected.

Building the sticks, Jen’s hands had always been at the location she was molding, the other end firmly planted in the ground to let her build to her desired height. One finished, it was simply a matter of reaching down to the base and pulling it free. It didn’t take long for Jen to realize that the surface area mentioned in the spell description referred to the amount of stone that was affected when she was in contact with it. Attempting to bend her meter long rod with her hands holding the ends simply resulted in it breaking or bending only an inch or two outside her grasp.

After fixing it, Jen tested how outside forces could interact with her influenced area. Probing the region she held in her hand with a bare foot was both awkward and produced no result. The altered stone felt much like any other. Her next test involved making a thin spire of stone, before piling a much heavier weight on top. Jen stopped once she began to crack the supporting stone, before reducing the weight slightly and repairing the supporting column. In doing so, Jen confirmed that the section’s strength didn’t seem to change while she influenced it, something useful to keep in mind if she was ever working on a location under tension in the future.

A more effective method was general force on an object. The previous system had been static, the forces balanced without Jen’s influence. In situations where she was forced to exert a force to maintain an equilibrium, it was much more difficult to keep Stone Shaping from having an effect. One example was trying to lift her stone stick with a single hand at one end. The torsional force would naturally begin to bend the stone just past her hand, the contained system unable to recognize the difference between her bending her handful of stone and the rest of the stone bending away from her hand.

The surface area description of the spells effects proved to be apt in another experiment. Jen was curious as to how far down she could dig, only to find out that it was next to impossible to reach any deeper than her hand. Her current assumption was that she reached a depth at which the surface area affected no longer reached the surface, and the mobile stone acted as a liquid in an enclosed container, incompressible and immovable without a location to transfer it to. While Jen could easily scrape stone off the surface to shape any project she was working on, it would make tunneling with her spell much more difficult, with removed volumes measured in handfuls instead of larger portions.

She’d been grateful to find that the duration could stack if she cast it while it was still active, but after the first she had spread out the active time, taking a pause after each one to plan out actions and make most of her limited seconds. By the time Jen reached the last two castings, she had already finished the basic experiments she had thought of, and instead used the time to try and make some of the things she had thought of. Three lumpy bowls, a misshapen flask, her previously mentioned walking stick, and a stone version of brass knuckles were the reward that Jen had to show for her two minutes of frantic working. Her flask was filled up before being roughly stoppered with a piece of the destroyed mushroom. It wouldn't make a watertight seal like a cork would, but should keep the water from splashing out due to abrupt movements, so long as Jen took care to keep the flask mostly upright. It was heavy, and didn’t hold much water, but Jen still felt much better for making it.

Her gathered mushrooms were placed into her bowls, and Jen took a moment to test out her walking stick, before discarding it in disappointment. Despite her efforts to make it as thin as possible, it was still a solid piece of stone and was uncomfortably heavy. Jen knew that making it any thinner would have just led to it breaking in short order, having experienced that in her tests. Consoling herself with her working products, Jen decided to celebrate her successes by having a meal and using up the remainder of her mana while she looked at her options.