Her problem, Jen realized, was that she didn’t know what the System was capable of. For all that approaching it with a scientific mindset had paid off for her, it did so by constructing a framework and working within that framework. Hypothesis and assumptions were assumed to be workable until proven otherwise. Atomic theory was a perfect example of the scientific method at work; each new theory providing new scientific insights based on the truths they observed. Even though later models would find inaccuracies, they did not erase the gains in knowledge provided by their predecessors. Modern chemists have little interest in quantum orbital mechanics after all; earlier theories created the necessary foundation for their work to progress.

In the same way, Jen now felt that her earlier understanding of the System was incomplete, even if it did accurately model the knowledge she had access to. System Skills were literal, even when that required them to use metaphorical language. Before practicing with Devouring Void, Jen would have been confident in the idea that all skills were capable of being replicated by a person with enough natural skill and understanding of this new reality. Her Skills, while operating beyond her capability, all hinted at that comprehension. From the mana structures buried in her spells to the subtle instincts provided by her mastery Skills it all seemed to be concepts within her eventual grasp.

Devouring Void was similar, in that the whirling effect it used to keep her chest node free of mana was understandable, even if her Mana Manipulation skill wasn’t yet up to the task of recreating it. It was the rest of the skill that had Jen hesitant about her understanding of the System. Mindful of her aching body and still refilling Health Pool, Jen levered herself off her bed and shuffled her way outside, making her way to a spot far away from her slowly growing home. Jen activated the skill once more, gritting her teeth as her body protested, her awareness of its ravaged state making it more difficult to proceed, but Jen had earned her Determination skill. Once active she spread her focus out, trying her best to use her slowly growing ability to sense mana to figure out what the skill was doing. She focused on the edges, she spread her awareness out over the entire area, and she finally focused on the point where foreign mana was entering her mana system.

Devouring Void came to an end, but Jen wasn’t comfortable activating it to try again. Instead, she thought over what she had been able to determine. She already knew she was able to determine the area the skill affected, but now she knew she wasn’t actually sensing anything from the skill, but was instead simply feeling that the affected area felt different. There didn’t seem to be any mana structures either hidden inside the area or spread over it, and the mana entering her system seemed to be arriving there from nowhere. It entered the node from the side that was nearest the theoretical center of the skill, but Jen couldn’t track it back beyond that point. There was nothing that indicated mana was moving at all. In short, Devouring Void was impossible. It didn’t use mana, and arguably couldn’t use mana since it was only able to be activated when she didn’t have any mana to use. Yet it still managed to interact with ambient mana, only it did so in a way that Jen was unable to observe. She could barely tell that the mana was going missing, only at the edge of the skill was she able to spot the difference easily, yet it arrived at her mana pool in a way that suggested it was gathered to the center of the skill before being passed on to her.

While powerful, Mana clearly wasn’t the underlying mechanism that powered the System. Not every skill relied on Mana to function after all, and Devouring Void seemed to confirm that some other force existed that superseded mana in capability. Jen had no idea just how far away a true understanding of this new reality was, but she could at least work on revising her understanding to better prepare her for the future.

Jen was still frustrated. It was one thing to realize that her current understanding and resultant framework of reality was wrong. It was another to correct her understanding, to simply come up with a new set of rules that matched her existing understanding while also accounting for phenomena that were antithetical to her existing understanding. There was a reason that most advances in scientific theory were generational; it was immensely difficult to approach a problem from an unbiased perspective once you’ve gotten attached to a specific theory.

Thankfully, there was one factor that gave Jen hope. Devouring Void was an outlier, but it was an identifiable outlier. The very fact that the System had given it a different name suggested that it would continue to do so for odd Skills. Jen knew she would have to be more thorough in testing new Skills in the future, but that was for later. At the moment, Jen was more concerned with reconstructing her theory. It took a while, but she eventually had her ideas organized into a working model of the System.

The way the System names Skills determines what they are capable of. Regular Skills are given literal, straightforward names. These skills are potentially replicable with enough effort and time. Outlier Skills are given metaphorical names that convey their abstract capabilities. The limits of those capabilities are unknown. Outlier Skills have not yet been awarded by the System.

Jen grimaced as she mentally revised the last few sentences. She felt it was significant that both Outlier Skills were ones she had made herself, but it was still early days of having the System around. It might be that you just needed to complete more advanced paths to earn Outlier Skills, especially if they drew on a more fundamental force of System reality. What really hurt Jen’s confidence in her conclusions was that she was basing them on her experiences with only one of her Outlier Skills. It was time to figure out what Chronos’ Heart was capable of.

The first thing Jen did was examine the name in detail. She had assumed Chronos’ Heart to be poetical at the time, a result of her first intentional attempt to create a Skill. Devouring Void had shown the flaws in the assumption. Instead it was far better to treat the name of the skill as literally as she could. Jen had the heart of Chronos, the primordial Greek deity of time. As part of a god, Chronos’ Heart would contain a portion of his power; power that was now available to Jen.

Jen sighed. There was a certain irony in having a Skill that gave her power over time itself, when that skill was her only way of keeping track of time that was passing. Only, that wasn’t exactly true. Jen knew of two times when she had been surprised by the passing of time. One of which was marked permanently in her Path Screen. Jen pulled it up to confirm her suspicion.

By sleeping for more than 30 hours in one session, the Hibernation Path is now open to you.

It wasn’t an impossible amount of time to have slept by itself, especially when Jen wasn’t sure just how long she had been up before then. Add on the general mental stress she had been under, and Jen hadn’t questioned it before now. Two factors changed her mind. The first was the assumption that Chronos’ Heart was capable of manipulating time. The second was the fact that she had slept far longer than she should have the next night, even though she had been using Chronos’ heart to track the passage of time and make sure she wasn’t staying up for days at a time. More than that, she didn’t feel like she had slept that long. She had pulled her share of all-nighters studying for exams or hanging out with friends, and before this her record had been 18 hours of sleep. But she had woken up from that feeling restored in a way that her recent rest hadn’t accomplished. Which would make sense if her personal time frame was different than that of reality.

That still left testing her new skill, but Jen wasn’t in the same position that she had been when she created Chronos’ Heart, trapped in the dark with nothing to see. Infrared Vision allowed her to constantly observe her status screen, and she could easily track the passage of time by watching her Mana Pool refill. Its rate was still relatively slow though, and Jen didn’t need to know how much time was passing on an absolute scale, just a relative one. For that, she had a much more convenient tool at her disposal.

Her pool of drinking water was fed by a steady drip from above. Every couple of seconds a new drop would fall with an audible plip. When Jen had first arrived she had treated the sound as useless since she hadn’t had any idea as to how much time had passed between droplets falling. The sound had proven useful for navigating back to the pond but had otherwise been treated as background noise. Now, Jen was ready to put it to use.

Her first project was simply getting a good understanding of how fast the water was dripping compared to her heartbeat. Since Chronos’ Heart was already providing a steady count, she decided to manually count the number of droplets that fell over a period of one hundred beats.

After reaching a result of thirty-seven water drops, Jen repeated the test, then did so once more. Both times her result came out to thirty-seven, and Jen was more than a little suspicious about the lack of variance. Chronos’ Heart was still active, after all.

Wanting a more accurate answer, Jen kept track of the falling water until there was a moment where her heartbeat seemed to mirror the impact of the droplet, and then she began to count. If her heartbeat was truly a consistent frequency than it and the falling water would have the same beat period; the period of time it would take for them to align once more. If her heartbeat wasn’t exactly steady, then it was more likely for it to accidentally align with falling water sooner or later than the beat period would suggest. It was a more esoteric piece of information than the average frequency Jen had calculated previously, but she had hopes it would pay off. Until now Jen had only been considering the interaction between her heartbeat and her skill in one direction, but now she was wondering if it actually worked both ways, with Chronos’ Heart regulating her heartbeat and her heartbeat regulating her perception of time through her skill.

Three attempts confirmed that her heartbeat seemed to be absolutely steady while Chronos’ Heart was busy counting, and Jen went to work to test the limit of this capability, glad to have a direction to advance in. Pushups were the easiest method available to raise Jen’s heartbeat, and after doing 20 in rapid succession Jen collapsed, panting, on the stone floor. It only took a few seconds to realize that her heartbeat had remained roughly the same. The fourth drip came just after the eleventh heartbeat that Jen counted, and she willingly released her Skill. It was fascinating to watch as her heart belatedly sped up, doing its best to carry oxygen to her starving cells.

As Jen physically recovered, she mentally prodded her Chronos’ Heart skill. Using it to regulate her heartbeat was easy, she had more than enough practice with mentally counting, and she could feel the Skill impose itself on her body. It was far easier to tell at the moment, since her elevated heart rate was an unusual state and since deep slow breaths refused to have any effect on how quickly it beat. Trying to figure out the opposite effect; of having her heartbeat slow or speed up time was more difficult. Jen’s only clue to its function was that she was capable of activating it unconsciously in her sleep. Fortunately, that and some luck were enough.

The trick was that activating the effect almost required it to be an unconscious action. Trying to pay too much attention to her heart rate would simply lead to Jen controlling it. Instead, she had to relax and let her heart rate return to normal. Jen could feel her heart slowly returning to its regular beat but she ignored it, focusing on the world around her. It was subtle, almost impossible to notice at first, but the steady metronome of falling water seemed to slow down as she relaxed, and attempts to wave her arms around seemed slightly sluggish.

Jen didn’t have the time or tools to confirm the effect before things slowly returned to normal. Keeping her heart rate elevated was difficult, and distracting besides. A second round of pushups tired her out before she could tell if it was having an effect, and while she was sure that the dripping and slowed down relative to her own perception of time, she wasn’t able to determine a dilation factor before the effect vanished.

Trying the other direction seemed far more feasible. While Jen wasn’t quite ready to sleep, the slow steady breathing tied to Meditation promised to help slow down her heartbeat, and the clarity of mind provided by the Skill would leave her plenty of awareness to track the sound of water.

Jen quickly realized that the upside of elevating her heart rate was that it was far easier to create a large difference for Chronos’ Heart to work with. Working out at full capacity would more than double her heart rate, while meditating would only reduce it by a fraction. As such, Jen had been meditating for a good ten to fifteen minutes without any obvious sign of success.

She didn’t mind too much though. Practicing Meditation helped her relax and made the physical pain she was in more distant. With Devouring Void no longer a Skill that she was interested in using regularly, Jen was eager to raise Meditation’s level and increase its effectiveness. When Chronos’ Heart didn’t show any immediate signs of working Jen put her full focus onto Meditating. She did her best to make each breath identical in strength and duration, doing her best to have it not be driven by her body’s needs. While Jen was manually directing it at the moment, she was hopeful that her efforts would eventually become ingrained. At that point it would become another tool for Meditation to use to better relax and focus her mind and body.

After finding and holding a slow rhythm that encouraged her body to relax while still providing enough oxygen to remain clear-headed, Jen took a moment to check and see if Chronos’ Heart had had an effect. Much to her surprise, the sound of dripping water was now noticeably faster. It seemed to be steady enough for Jen to study, and she carefully began to focus on it, doing her best to remain inside the meditative state she had entered. She started comparing it to her heartbeat, only to realize that it had stabilized at a slow rate instead of returning completely to normal. Instead, Jen simply started silently speaking, using her mental voice to count out “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”.

She knew there was a relatively large margin of error, but her final calculation of a 60% increase felt roughly right. She had also come upon a different method to calculate the differential and was eager to try it out.

By itself, measuring the rate of drops per heartbeat was useless, as both variables were different from her initial measurements. Jen did so anyways, ending up with a result of 76 drops per 100 heartbeats, more than double her initial calculation. Before anything else could change, Jen took hold of Chronos’ heart, stopping the time dilation effect and instead locking her heartbeat into it’s current rhythm. She could feel Meditation stop working, but did her best to keep herself in the same relaxed state, wanting to reduce the strain on her heart. If she wasn’t careful she might need more oxygen than her constrained heart could provide, causing her to black out and ruining her experiment.

Thankfully, her body seemed to be able to handle the unusual demands she was putting it under, and Jen could turn her attention back to figuring out her skill. The time dilation effect didn’t break immediately, but instead seemed to fade away over the course of thirty or so perceived seconds. Once everything seemed to have settled into its new rhythm, Jen once again measured the rate of droplets.

This time her answer came out as 49 drops per 100 heartbeats. After finally letting her heart resume its normal function It took Jen a bit to work the mental numbers into an answer that seemed right. Somewhat more than 150% was her rough estimate, accounting for variance in the counting process and some rounding in her calculations. It matched up well enough with her other result to believe she was in the right ballpark at least. Jen released her heartbeat counter and gave her body a few more minutes to return to normal, before picking herself up and returning to her bed.

All that was left was to put what she had learned to use. Using Chronos’ Heart to slow herself down seemed to be a downside to the Skill at first glance. Jen was losing time whenever she went to sleep, and potentially during Meditation as well if she didn’t remember to keep Chronos’ Heart running as a clock. However, as Jen considered it further the advantages began to reveal themselves. It might be costing her time to be using Chronos’ Heart, but time wasn’t a resource that Jen was concerned about. She had enough food and water to stay alive, and the perceived passage of time mattered more to Jen’s mental health than how much actual time she had spent trapped in this cave. Slowing herself down or speeding up time essentially allowed her to skip a portion or the boring period of waiting for her mana to regen, which was all to the good. Furthermore, speeding up time was the most reliable method she had of using and training Chronos’ heart. Attempting to slow down time required far too much effort to constantly keep her heartbeat elevated. Jen was sure there was likely some method of increasing the speed at which time dilation effects actuated instead of waiting for it to happen naturally, but it would require practice and experimentation to find and utilize it, resources she had available thanks to being able to slow herself down.

On the other hand, increasing her own time frame promised to be extremely versatile. While the skill stated that it only affected her perception of time, and wouldn’t actually speed her up like Quicksilver or the Flash, the mental boost that provided would come in handy in quite a few situations. Jen hadn’t thought to keep track of it at the time, but she had a suspicion that Chrono’s Heart had activated before to slow down time. Keeping the mental count running during her more painful experiments hadn’t been her top priority, and Jen had an idea that Chronos’ heart had given her more time in those moments than she otherwise would have had, given that her heart would be racing from the pain.

While it meant that Jen was suffering for longer than she otherwise would have, that extra time to think and examine quite possibly could have been the difference between success and failure. Extracting the mushroom roots from her body had been a close thing, and Jen was grateful for all the factors that had tipped the odds in her favor. While it was likely that her painful experiments would benefit from Chronos’ Heart by default, Jen was more excited about using it to help study some of her other skills. The automatic construction of Mana Bolt and her other Spells fascinated Jen, and having more time to study just how those spells were put together would be amazing, as would giving herself more time to try and construct things with Mana Manipulation. There was a long road of skill improvements before she would get anything approaching results, but Jen was eager to see what the future would hold.