One downside of treating magic as a computational force instead of a fundamental force was that it made Jen painfully aware of just how few tools she had to perform testing with. She had no instrumentation, no peers, no previous body of work to build upon and her ability to interact with mana in a repeatable and observable manner boiled down to just two skills, Zen Gardening and Mana Sense. She hadn’t given these limitations too much thought before now. Many of the physical constants she was familiar with were able to be derived using extremely simple setups. Along those lines of thought, coming up with an eventual approximation for the effects of magic might take some time, but would eventually happen. Every garden she created was another data point that would allow her to slowly pigeonhole the unknown into something understandable. Except now she wasn’t trying to solve a single equation, but instead was working with a black box of a computer that could do any number of things in any number of ways and could even change what it could do. Given how mana seemed to be affected by the abstract natures of the garden she created she wouldn’t be surprised at all if it also varied depending on the lunar cycle, or the time of day, or even abstract random celestial events like shooting stars. She snorted at the idea of shooting star wishes actually working before sighing. Zen Garden was a fantastic tool for research. It’s only real cost was space, which she had plenty of, and it offered her a large variety of inputs that she could vary in her testing. The real limiter was Jen’s ability to observe the output of her tests. Sense Mana was far better than nothing, but at her current level of skill all she could do was tell if it was higher or lower than it was previously. All the complexity in the world reduced to a simple binary choice.

Jen wasn’t about to quit testing just because of the difficulties. Even if the results of testing were limited, every little bit of knowledge she learned was still a step forward, and enough small steps would cover any distance. The tests were also beneficial for steadily increasing her skill levels, improving her capabilities and giving her hopes of unlocking more useful skills eventually. It was a good use of her time, all things considered, but Jen had to admit that science wasn’t going to be the beacon of salvation she was hoping for. She had privately hoped that she would be able to learn enough about mana and magic to simply spell her way to the surface, making her escape with little more than a wave of her hand and the burning of her mana reserves, but Jen admitted that it was unlikely she would reach that level of competency any time soon. Her existing spells were too advanced for her to reverse engineer, and now her attempts to construct new magic from first principles were stymied as well. Reaching this conclusion was the turning point Jen needed to stop and re-evaluate her situation, capabilities, and plans.

While she still harbored some concerns over her long term health due to lacking minerals and vitamins in her diet, Jen figured that her food and water supply were as stable as they were going to get and would last indefinitely. She made a mental note to look into breeding mushroom variants that might be capable of extracting other minerals from the ground, but decided to put that project on the burner for much later. Her mental health was in a pretty good state due to having a house and companionship through her myconid. While she was using Zen Gardening mostly for testing purposes and the mana regen at the moment, she could also see the appeal of making a garden or two to mentally relax in as well. In summary she was in good condition for the short term, but the nature of being trapped underground by herself would continue to introduce new problems as time went on.

Zen Garden and Mana Sense were both useful skills, but neither of them was truly game changing. The extra regen that Zen Garden provided was useful and held the promise of eventually being a potent effect, but for now was both inferior and incompatible with the regeneration increase that Jen received from her Meditation skill. Their true value was as learning aids, giving Jen a better understanding of the rules of this new world. Moreover, Jen wasn’t holding out too much hope of receiving new skills in the near future. She had run out of ideas for useful skills to try and make on her own, and while she figured she could probably come up with a few random ones if she needed extra Plot Points, at the moment she didn’t have any paths she was willing to invest in. Her capabilities were limited to her current Skills, although she could reasonably plan on an increase in skill level.

After considering her skill list Jen knew her best strategy was still tunneling her way out. Any other ideas she came up with weren’t nearly as feasible, from teleportation to simply sending a message to people on the surface to help her. She wasn’t willing to say any of those ideas were impossible, but they all relied on abilities that she didn’t currently possess. Having come to the conclusion that her best course of action was to tunnel out, and having given up hope of changing her abilities up in the near future, Jen decided to get to work.

Information was Jen’s first objective. Before she turned her attention towards digging a tunnel she began to put the results of her experiments with Zen Gardens to use. Zen Gardens effectiveness waxed and waned based on unity of meaning. A scale model would have a relatively clear meaning attached to it, and would hypothetically be most effective when it was rotated to align with it’s real world counterpart. Jen activated Stone Shaping and began to pile up the stone from the ground next to her, forming a rough mound before moving over a foot or so and repeating the process. It didn’t take long before Jen had a four foot long rocky ridge assembled.

She then took the time to detail her creation, sharpening ridges and adding outcroppings and other features to make it look more like the mountains she knew she was under. Her memory wasn’t perfect, but she had come and gone from ETRI enough times that she could summon up an image of entering the facility, with the mountains looking over her to the left and the right. Converting those details into something she could add to her model was slightly more difficult, but Jen was soon satisfied with her work. Her new Sculpting skill was acknowledged, and then ignored as she moved on to the next part of her plan.

Stone Shaping fields on both of her hands extended into the earth for a couple of inches, a distance that had been steadily growing with the skill level. Most interactions she had tested with the affected area seemed to treat it as if it was still regular stone. There were a few exceptions though, namely objects that Jen was consciously holding onto. A thin piece of her rope pulled taut between her two hands extended her usage of the skill and allowed her to cut through the stone like cheese wire. With her hands turned parallel to the ground, Jen pushed forwards and down, knifing her way through the base. When she was finished there was a visible gap where her hands had passed through leaving the replica of the mountain supported by a perfectly smooth four inch thick strip of stone.

Moving her creation proved more difficult than Jen had been expecting. Her model was almost five feet long and a bit over a foot at its widest point. Building it up a handful at a time had concealed just how much weight had accumulated in the process, and Jen’s first attempt to push it towards her test garden resulted in her shoes losing traction and slipping out from under her. Getting back on her feet, Jen reconsidered her options. She could build the garden around the model to cut down on travel distance, but she still needed to be able to move it into the correct orientation. Her solution was to prepare the ground right next to the model, lowering it slightly and smoothing it out as much as she could, before preparing to shove the rock again. With better footing, Jen began to push, utilizing every bit of her System granted capabilities to nudge the rock forwards. There was a soft scrape and the rock slid forwards a couple of inches, and Jen scrambled to keep it moving, allowing it to finally grind to a halt once it was clear of its starting position. Moving it further would be a difficult task, but one that she could hopefully manage.

The rest of the garden was constructed in a blur. Wanting the main focus to be her scale model, Jen kept it simple, with most of her effort directed towards avoiding any directional symbology. Her hopes of this working were flimsy enough without sabotaging it further by creating alternate directions for it to align to. Satisfied with the simple circular barrier and clean interior she had created, Jen began testing.

The best tool available to Jen was not her Meditation or her Mana Sense skills, but was instead her summary screen. Mana Sense gave her information that was too vague to be reliable, and the Zen Garden was focused on the connection between model and reality, not some metaphysical statement that Jen could focus on to help her meditate through the fluctuating mana. Instead Jen would rotate the large piece of stone a couple of degrees, swearing under her breath while she did so, before spending the next few minutes recovering and keeping an eye on her regenerating rate. The boost she received wasn’t constant, but it was easy enough to track the maxima for any alignment and Jen used that to tell if she was getting hotter or colder in her search for synchronization.

A couple hours and 470 degrees of rotation later and Jen was satisfied that she had done all she could. Her maximum regeneration was at the global maxima for the garden, and both Meditation and Mana sense agreed the effect of the garden was strongest in this position. What sealed the deal for her was that the difficulty of maintaining Meditation decreased significantly for only this placement. It wasn’t proof, but Jen couldn’t think of any other reason for such an effect.

Knowing now which way was north, Jen oriented herself to face in the direction of the closest surface and began to pace forwards, leaving a mushroom beacon behind her to keep her path straight as she made her way to the wall. Building the mountain ridge had taken a good amount of mana, but Jen felt she still had enough to test her digging capabilities out.

While Earth Spike was her fastest spell in terms of moving large quantities of stone, Jen believed she could be more efficient by using Stone Shaping to dig by hand. She was also hoping to take advantage of a side benefit of using Stone Shaping to dig. Marking the wall for later, Jen made her way back to her camp, only to return a minute later carrying Rocky, a tangle of roots trailing behind him. Placing him down a little distance away, Jen cast Stone Shaping and began to dig. Each hand sized rock she pulled away was grabbed by her pet, but she already could tell that he wouldn’t be capable of keeping up with her. More than that, she knew he would only grab the rocks while he was hungry, further reducing his capability. While his continued growth would improve both aspects, Jen wondered if it would be worth the investment of making an additional myconid or three, before tabling it for a later planning session. Her focus right now was determining what digging a tunnel would look like.

As she worked, Jen wondered just how fast she was actually tunneling. For all that her job consisted of simply scooping out handfuls of stone and dropping them on the ground for her myconid to retrieve, the fact of the matter was that the sheer volume of space that a tunnel took up meant that it would take a lot of time to complete.

Jen looked down at a rocky scoop that she had just pulled off the wall. The shape was clumpy and irregular, but Jen was willing to roughly estimate it’s dimensions as six inches by three inches by four inches. It was a good size for a rock, but Jen would need to dig out twenty four such handfuls to excavate a single cubic foot. If she was planning on making a tunnel tall enough for her to stand up and move comfortably in, Jen was looking at a tunnel six feet high by three feet wide. Every foot of progress would therefore take her 432 handfuls of rock. Even more discouraging was converting that number to mana expenditure and then hours of regeneration to recover that mana. Using the rough estimate that Chronos’ heart gave her for time, Jen was averaging two handfuls of rock every second. Thirty mana, or two and a half hours of recovery for every foot of progress. Her current casting of Stone Shaping came to an end and Jen stepped back, leaving a hungry myconid and a significant hole behind her.

Jen had no clue how long her tunnel would need to be, but she highly suspected that she wasn’t all that close to the surface. ETRI had been relatively deep inside the mountain, having been built with the help of modern machinery, and Jen suspected that when everything had changed and the world had been reverted to a more natural state she had simply been shunted to the closest open space. Since that wasn’t the surface Jen could put an upper boundary on how far she might be equal to her depth inside ETRI multiplied by two. If she assumed a figure in the ballpark range of 1,000 feet for ease of convenience, she was looking at 2500 hours to gain the mana she would need, call it a hundred days.

It was an off the cuff estimation, but it still gave Jen hope. She wasn’t doomed to be stuck down here for years, but rather just months. Not a short period of time, but manageable.

Of course, that only really mattered if her many assumptions were correct. She could have been teleported somewhere else entirely, or her model might have misled her direction of tunneling. She might be inside a mountain, but it was part of a mountain chain, and the wrong direction of tunneling could easily lead her nowhere. There were answers to these concerns though. Angling the tunnel upwards would guarantee that she would eventually escape from her cave, wherever it might be, but it wasn’t much of a comfort. The steeper the tunnel Jen tried to carve the more difficult it would be to both work and traverse. Theoretically tunneling straight upwards was a good idea, but in reality Jen wasn’t confident enough in her capabilities to attempt it. Sure, she would have a much smaller profile, would be travelling in a guaranteed direction towards the surface, and would have gravity help remove any rock she excavated, but on the other side Jen wasn’t that comfortable with heights, wasn’t sure how exactly she’d be able to keep herself up, especially with her hands covered in a Stone Shaping enchantment, wasn’t sure how exactly she would get the rock she excavated past her easily without it constantly hitting her on it’s way down, and she would have no idea what exactly she was tunneling up into. Even if she did somehow manage to find a stable working method of tunneling upwards, a section of rubble, or water or snow could all take her by surprise and knock her loose. That left picking a direction to tunnel in and sloping it upwards as much as she could, something she’d have to figure out as she went. The upside was that while Jen could see problems in her assumptions that might increase the amount of tunneling she would have to do, she also had ideas to decrease the effort needed to tunnel.

Jen had watched a documentary on the Vietnam War in high school, and had been struck at the time as to how narrow and small the underground bases the Viet Cong had lived in were. She sympathised a lot more with them now as she planned her route out. While a part of her wanted a full size tunnel that she could walk up and down, the truth was she didn’t really need it that large. She wasn’t swinging a pickaxe that would require enough space for that full range of motion, nor was she using dynamite that could easily break up larger sections of stone. While she might try and replicate the strategy of digging out and around larger chunks of stone, she really should base her tunneling strategy more on those of the natural world. Most animals tunneled in dirt instead of stone, but with her skills she could treat stone like dirt. It wasn’t a perfect comparison, but she could use a similar technique, where as long as she had enough space to scrape with her hands she could advance the tunnel forwards, and she could always expand out the sides in a second pass if it felt too cramped when she wasn’t actively digging. Instead of a mining tunnel Jen was now planning on creating a tunnel more similar to a burrow, and from a six foot by three foot cross section she was looking at something closer to a quarter of the size.

Movement might be difficult at first, but Jen figured she would get a crawling skill if it really was a challenge, and her increased physical stats should help compensate for any unusual muscle requirements. Beyond that, the idea of tunneling four times as quickly would help make up for the discomfort. It would have been nice if the duration of stone shaping had increased as she leveled the skill, but the improvements it did provide were still quite useful. The area affected was slowly increasing with each level, allowing Jen to more easily dig deeper or move a larger area of stone, it was subtle, but Jen also felt that the viscosity of the stone was decreasing as well. A small change wouldn't have much effect on anything, but the easier it became to mold the earth to her will the less effort Jen had to exert to push and pull stone like it was clay or water, the more efficient her digging could become.

Pulling up her status screen, Jen noticed she still had twenty-odd mana left. A part of her wanted to hold onto it; she wasn’t planning on sleeping for a while, and wouldn’t be getting that large refill that it provided. The larger part of her was fired up. She had held off on her escape, she had worked to gain stats and skills, and now it was time to put them to use. Reaching the surface had been impossible, but was now an achievable goal. With an air of determination, Jen began to dig.