The first thing that Jen did was go to bed. Chronos’ Heart and the slowly increasing count tied to it gave her a general sense of the passing of time, but in many ways that was just a number. There was no day/night cycle to inform her actions, and Jen hadn’t had time yet to create an actual routine to follow, with her actions guided more by necessity or new capabilities. Moreover, Jen’s mental attributes were constantly increasing alongside her Resilience, allowing her to stay awake longer without negative repercussions.

But just because she could go without sleep didn’t mean it was a good idea to. The ‘weary’ mental condition in her Status still weighed on Jen, and she hoped that a good sleep would put her into a better state of mind. Moreover, she was still heavily limited in her ability to test new things by the amount of mana she had available to her. Sleeping was an easy way to pass the time as her reserves returned to full, and thanks to Self Improvement, any excess regeneration would simply help improve her pool size.

Jen was still a little concerned with the fact that she had slept for more than 30 hours the last time she had gone to bed, but there wasn’t much she could do. She didn’t have a good method of creating an alarm clock yet, and would just have to accept whatever happened. She reminded herself that it didn’t really matter how long she slept. She had enough food and drink to keep herself alive indefinitely, and with no clue as to what the condition of the rest of the world was, it wasn’t like she was hurrying to get out to save her family. All that mattered at the moment was her current situation.

Comfortably relaxing on her bed of moss, Jen was tempted to open up her Skill List to read the description for Infrared Vision, or to try it out just once, but resisted the urge. She had fallen into a constant cycle of improving skills and learning new ones to improve in turn, and was more than willing to just close her eyes, deepen her breathing, and drift off to sleep.

Jen was refreshed in the morning, a subtle weight gone from her shoulders. She opened her Status page, noted that her mana pool was both full and slightly larger than it had been before, and got started with her day. A breakfast of mushrooms filled her growling stomach, putting a small dent in her Mana while barely registering on Jen’s sense of pain. A quick drink followed by a trip to her bathroom crevice took care of the rest of her personal needs, and Jen turned her attention to Rocky. The myconid was once more lethargic and drooping, but his condition wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the last time Jen had woken up. Jen wasn’t sure if this was because she hadn’t slept as long, or if it was because Rocky was beginning to adapt to his new size and capabilities, but either way she funneled mana into his cap before making her way back to her moss bed to finally try out her new skill.

Infrared Vision: Alters your vision to detect infrared light.

The description of the skill seemed straightforward enough, and with nothing else to check or prepare, Jen used the skill. “Infrared Vision.”

Immediately, she could feel the mana flowing through her head alter its path, changing direction to pass through her eyes, where it paused and began to pool, building up its density.

At the same time, what she could see began to change. The shrinking ball of mana that illuminated her surroundings began to shimmer, and the world turned into a kaleidoscope of color. All around her colors began to shift their hues, changing from red to orange to golden yellow, before sliding into a cool green, running through all the shades of blue before vanishing. But even as her blue jeans and graphic t-shirt lost their color, new shapes and lights lit up in umber red to continue the cycle. After twenty seconds of this, Jen closed her eyes, the madness of the world reduced to a single shifting color that lasted until the mana in her eyes finally stabilized and continued on its way.

Satisfied that her skill was now working correctly, and that she wasn’t about to lose her breakfast, Jen opened her eyes, only to be stunned by the sight in front of her.

She could see. It wasn’t what she thought the world around her would look like, but it was no longer a black void. Her body was lit up in greens and blues, with her shirt taking on a lighter yellow, and the rest of the world was filled with a variety of reds and oranges. She could make out her moss bed colored a cosy orange, while red stone supported her and trailed off into the distance, fading to black as it passed beyond her range of sight.

She raised her hand in front of her face. It was currently a calming green, with blue veins softly pulsing; glowing and dimming in a counterpart to her heartbeat. Cautiously she pressed her hand to the cool stone next to her seat of moss. Pulling it away after a moment revealed a spot of yellow that was already turning orange, before returning to its usual red.

Jen closed her eyes again, taking in what she had seen. While she associated reds and yellows as warm colors, and greens and blues as cold, reality was somewhat different. Red was the lowest energy wavelength of the visible spectrum and blue was the highest energy. Whatever method let her see Infrared had kept that relationship, even though it now meant that red objects were cold and blue objects were warm or even hot. This ran contrary to her intuitive understanding of what she was looking at and Jen knew she would have to spend a good amount of time practicing with this new sense of hers before using it would become natural.

The swapped color palette of the world almost bordered on synesthesia; where Jen had gotten so used to using her eyes to interpret the sight of the world around her in one way, that she was attempting to do so even when the connections those interpretations relied on were no longer correct. Colors, shadows, light intensity, and more all correspond to new physical features. Jen opened her eyes for a moment. In fact, nothing in her new senses corresponded to physical features at all! Every object was it’s own light source, and just about every object was the same temperature throughout, releasing the same hue of light and making it almost impossible to detect texture or smaller detail through appearance alone.

Reluctantly Jen forced her eyes open, ignoring the gut feeling that something was wrong for her body to be the color that it was. She spotted the pile of mushrooms she had collected, only to be rudely interrupted.

Infrared Vision has gained a level and is now Lvl 2!

Somehow the System message was still the same annoying color it always had been and Jen waved it away, before attempting to change her personal System to only show those messages when she pulled up her System and asked for them.

While she had the screen open, she also looked at her current mana. It seemed that while Infrared Vision required mana to operate, it didn’t consume any in the process, allowing her to use it indefinitely. Given she could feel the mana pooling in her eyes, she guessed that if she was to drain herself to empty again it would cancel the enchantment, but otherwise Jen more or less permanently had her vision back.

As she looked around, Jen tried to figure out what she wanted to do next. She had planned on using up a good amount of her mana on practicing with Infrared Vision. As she took in the patch of moss she slept on Jen knew what she wanted to do next. It was one thing to sleep on just the moss while her world was mostly dark, but now that she could see, Jen felt far more exposed. Fortunately, she had a couple of tools that would allow her to quickly reshape her surroundings.

Earth Spike was the first spell she turned to; four casts creating a skeletal five foot tall pyramid. Earth Shaping followed, Jen working as quickly as possible to move rock from the center of the pyramid to the space between the pillars, slowly transforming the pyramid into a recessed teepee. Her walls were sloppy, with varying thickness and obvious hand prints and marks running their entire length. But they were almost complete, with only a few small gaps left at the top that would need some finesse work to fill in. For now Jen was happy to leave them as they were; they improved the ventilation of her new room and were small enough that she didn’t feel threatened by their presence.

Having burned through most of her mana and stamina while building her hut, Jen lay on her back inside, grumbling at the uneven surface but more interested in observing the walls around her. She had worked both mana and kinetic energy into the rock during her building spree, and the stone was a good enough insulator that the extra energy was still evenly distributing itself. It was fascinating to watch warmer patches of color appear on the surface and spread out, fading in intensity as it moved along. Far sooner than Jen would have liked, the walls were one more a uniform red and her break had come to an end. Knowing that her Devouring Void skill was one that needed training, Jen worked through the rest of her mana cleaning up her new house, smoothing out the floor and piling the excess stone into a raised plinth that would eventually serve as her bed. It took a bit to get the spell to work as she wanted it too, but Plant Growth soon made an appearance, doubling the size of the moss bed, allowing Jen to tear off and fold up the new growth, giving her a comfortable mattress pad and pillow.

Now out of mana, Jen turned her attention to what promised to be the most difficult part of her day. It was time to train up Devouring Void.