With her mana pool drained for the moment, Jen made her way over to her stored mushrooms. Not only would she feel better after putting some food in her stomach, but doing so would continue to train her resistance skills. She was only a few skill points away from being able to unlock the next skill in her Novice Spellcaster path, and she was eager to see what sort of sues she could find for another spell.

At the same time, she had found a new area to worry about. None of her magic spells had levelled up yet. While she had only cast them a few times each, that was still several hours of regeneration per spell skill. Her other skills had been gained after exerting herself for minutes, and while Jen had only spent seconds casting her various spells, she had hoped for some sort of compensation due to the fact that her spells relied on a finite resource.

Beyond that, she was worried that there might be another cause behind her lack of advancement. Jen knew there was a correlation between how much she pushed herself and how quickly her skills grew. Her Echolocation and Listen skills had stagnated when she had fallen into a routine, and grown impressively when she had put herself in a situation that challenged her. Her other skills supported this basic theory. Her meditation levelled most quickly when she was pushed to maintain it in adverse conditions, and her poison resistance grew proportionally to the strength of the poison she faced.

With all those skills, Jen felt she had a good understanding of what the skills did and how to bring them to the next level. The system given skills were more difficult. Some, like Mana Control, she had been able to learn about through trial and error. Others, like Patience and Determination, were present, their effects visible in retrospect, but even when they levelled Jen was unsure how to focus on improving them. They were passive skills, and Jen was so far content to simply let them grow as she went about her life.

The spells given by the System were different. They weren’t passive and always growing. They weren’t mysterious things like Mana Control that would simply take time to understand. With her skills, Jen had already seen the underlying structure of the spells, and she knew how incomprehensible they were. Trying to improve them was beyond her capabilities.

Jen idly wondered if she would ever have a high enough intelligence stat to allow her to manipulate and alter the System spells. Being able to break a given spell down into its base components, and then build it up again, tailored to work exactly how she wanted it to was a wonderful dream, but one that was unlikely to come true. For all the increases she had already earned, she still felt the same mentally. The point at which she would be able to intuit the alien structure of the system was uselessly far away. Better to focus on the present instead of hinging her hopes on an idle dream.

Jen knew that it was extremely unlikely that everyone left alive would have earned Mana Manipulation or an equivalent skill. That meant that there really had to be a way to level up spells just by using them, even if it hadn’t happened to her yet. Her current regeneration rate was small compared to the costs of spells, but it would grow, and as it did so would the rate that she could practice and level up spells. Focusing her efforts on a single spell like Stone Shaping would also help.

What would help more would be finding a secondary method of restoring her magic. The antimagic mushrooms were proof that external objects could influence her mana reserves. While they had a detrimental effect, it was possible there were plants out there that would help restore mana, or perhaps could be brewed into rudimentary mana potions.

Thinking of the mushrooms, Jen’s thoughts turned to a question that had been bouncing around her head since she had first come across them.

What did the antimagic mushrooms use as an energy source?

She knew they couldn’t be drawing on heat or light energy, as there was none, and her experiments with growing the mushrooms with her extruded mana had told her that the mushrooms could utilize mana to fuel growth. If she was to make the reasonable assumption that the mushrooms always used mana to grow, it lead to more questions.

Where did the mushrooms draw their mana from, and was it something that Jen could replicate?

Jen took a moment to pull up a ball of mana in her hand. Learning and practicing with the System spells had given her a better understanding of what magic was capable of. She knew now what sort of power was contained in a few MP, the amount of work that the system could leverage from a miniscule amount of energy. That knowledge told her that something wasn’t adding up.

The world might have changed, but Jen believed that the underlying principles of reality were the same, that a universe without a logical structure would immediately collapse. Math was one such principle, one plus one would always equal two. Another, more immediately relevant principle was that of conservation of energy. It was with that law in mind that Jen looked at her ball of glowing mana. The energy from tehd im light, from the small amount of warmth given off, and even the sonic energy from the low hum didn’t add up to anywhere near the amount of energy she now suspected magic to contain.

Suddenly, things seemed to just click. The mushrooms were drawing their necessary energy from an unseen force. Her raw expelled mana seemed to dissipate into nothingness without converting form to a different type of energy. Putting the two ideas together, led to the conclusion that there was a layer of ambient mana, invisible and intangible, but accessible with the right tools, and of a thick enough density to support the local plant life without any signs of competition for resources.

Jen wondered if she was already drawing on that mana to fuel her regeneration, but quickly dismissed the idea. Her regeneration was tied too closely to the System for that to make sense. It was possible, but the sheer proportional increase that she had experienced made it less likely. Given how much the mushrooms grew when she fed them her mana, her current hourly regeneration rate was as much as a mushroom would absorb over weeks. That difference, measurable in orders of magnitude, made Jen quite confident that she was managing to create her own energy. It also forced her to realistically examine just how much mana she thought she might be able to gain from exploring this route, but Jen ultimately decided to press forwards. So much was riding on her magical skills, that even a small increase in her regeneration and subsequent ability to cast spells that spending a few hours on this goose chase was still worthwhile.

But where to begin? Jen’s attention turned to the acorn sized ball of mana that remained in her hand. For all that it was her mana, her awareness of it was minimal. She could see it’s presence, feel the heat radiating off of it, but trying to sense the actual mana that filled it’s form was much more difficult. Not impossible, thanks to the Mana Control and the feedback provided by that skill, but much more difficult to detect.

Jen began to actively mold the ball of magic, letting its natural resistance to her manipulation come into play. More resistance meant more feedback, and with a clearer understanding of what was occuring Jen began to analyze the decay.

While the System might use discrete amounts to define how much mana Jen had available, she was unable to feel any discrete particles at all. Her magic felt fluid, like she was handling a liquid, one capable of easily conforming and rearranging itself as she twisted it this way and that. And like a liquid, there were no particles of energy that she could see making a break for the mysterious energy surrounding her. Instead, it felt more like evaporation.

Taking the liquid analogy and extrapolating from it, Jen changed her usage of Mana Control. Instead of flexing and twisting, she began to compress. There was an immediate effect as the emitted light becoming brighter accompanied by a reduction in the amount of heat being put off. After a couple seconds of maintaining the compression, Jen confirmed that it seemed to have slowed the dissipation rate to a crawl.

Letting the pressure fade away, Jen watched as the last specks of her mana faded away. For all her efforts, she had been unable to track her mana as it dissipated, and had no other ideas as to how to begin to sense the ambient mana around her. Her mind kept going back to the liquid comparison she had made, which had held up surprisingly well. It wasn’t exactly the same, but much like the fundamental rules governing gravity and magnetism overlapped, Jen felt that there was possibly a similar relationship present that she could take advantage of. It was going out on a limb, but Jen hoped that there was one property of fluids that carried over to mana as well. Osmosis.

There weren’t any obvious signs declaring it to be an impossibility. That mana levels would tend towards an equilibrium, even through permeable barriers worked well on the theoretical level. The mushrooms maintained a low level of interior mana that let them passively absorb the magic around them, while Jen’s extruded mana was at a much higher concentration than its surroundings and would dissipate to restore equilibrium. Said dissipation took time, and while it was occurring, the area contained enough energy for it to spontaneously change forms or decay into light or heat. Holding it in place reduced the rate of decay, while concentrating it further increased the amount of light being given off proportional to the energy density .

If Jen wanted to absorb the ambient mana, she would either need to find some method of applying force to work it into a more concentrated form; difficult without any method of sensing ambient mana, or she would have to reduce her internal mana reserves to the point where the equilibrium would work in her favor, filling up her reserves till the equalled their surroundings.

Jen knew there were variables she was ignoring, that she was avoiding the complexities of her body, or the capability of ambient mana to permeate it, as well as a thousand and one other factors of the mechanics of this new world. She pressed on, as she felt an intuitive rightness to her theory, and because she knew she already had one set of organs capable of precise particle exchange.

Sinking into a meditative state, Jen focused her mantra onto her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Each breath a little deeper than the one before, until her lungs felt filled to the bursting with each inhalation. Satisfied with her rhythm, she turned her attention to the manna channels and pools she had identified throughout her body. While the largest pools were located in her core, metaphysically imposed over her stomach and intestines, there were smaller pools scattered throughout her body, including her lungs. It was hard to map her mental understanding of her organs’ locations with her physical awareness of where her mana channels were, but Jen had a suspicion that the mana channels actually crossed through the empty space in her lungs. An idle thought crossed through her mind on the philosophical question if that qualified as inside or outside of her body, before being pushed away as Jen returned to her task.

Focusing on the region around her chest, Jen began to pull the mana present there away, tuggin it down to fill the pools in her core, or outwards towards her arms and head. It was slow going, as the mana seemed determined to slip through the cracks and fill the void she was creating, but she persisted, all the while keeping her breathing steady. In. Out. In. Out.