Time passed quickly for Jen. After unlocking Zen Garden and Mana Sense the rest of her day settled into a pretty simple routine. Jen rotated between spending time meditating, and then using the mana she regenerated to work on her Stone Shaping skill while either improving her existing Zen garden or creating a new one. The increase to mana regeneration in an area was useful to her, and it turned out that Rocky was also able to benefit from the boost. As such, her second garden was centered around her pet. Unfortunately, she wasn't quite sure what metaphysical nature best fit her pet and wasn't able to tailor the garden to his nature as much as she would have liked. Rocky still seemed to appreciate her efforts though, and the additional mana the garden provided seemed to encourage him to be more active. His root tendrils were now constantly moving; feeling out the space around him while he tried to chase down the densest points of mana in the constantly changing field.

Jen's own efforts were slightly more successful than her pet's since she had the support of Mana Sense to better understand what was happening. The skill wasn't very advanced yet, but even the vague impressions it gave Jen were helpful, especially when she was working on an already complete garden. It took a bit of time for any changes she made to have an effect, but Jen could feel the new flows start to change the existing ones. At first she had the faint idea that she would be able to figure out whatever pattern the System was using to determine how the mana cycles were generated, but after the third change she made she gave it up as a lost cause. The process was simply too organic and too involved. Jen had taken the time to form a few large freestanding stones that she could move around freely, but even a small shift of a single stone would alter everything in the Zen garden, from the length of the cycle to the intensity of the regeneration effect at different points. Even when Jen tried to make a garden consisting of nothing more than a boundary and a rock she still wasn't able to figure out any relationship between the location of the rock and the flows it created and ended up switching her methodology to maximizing the regeneration rate provided. Even if she couldn’t figure out the specifics of how her skill worked the generalities were much easier to come by.

It quickly became clear that size had a significant impact on the regeneration rate. Gardens had to be a certain size to count at all, and even then the bonuses were anemic at best. As Jen kept making a garden larger and larger, the boost from size alone seemed to level off, having minimal effect once the garden was the size of a large room. Complexity then was the next determining factor. As Jen added more details the boost from Zen Garden became more intricate. It increased on average, but the cycle became more complex, and varied more across the garden. This increase also showed diminishing returns, where at some point adding additional items simply altered the existing cycle and didn’t actually improve it in any way. The number of objects needed for this to occur seemed to be completely arbitrary, causing Jen to throw up her hands in frustration.

That was the point where Jen switched her focus over to understanding the most abstract part of Zen Garden, believing it to be the determining factor for sufficient number of items. Jen wasn’t completely sure she understood what the skill meant by ‘metaphysical nature of the garden’ which didn’t bode well for her ability to test for it, but she gave it her best effort. Her problem wasn’t having no idea what the skill meant, but rather having too many possible answers. Metaphysical just meant outside the realm of physics, and Jen didn’t know how much of that vast category was covered by her skill, or what parts of it were irrelevant. Her success at meditating while thinking on the metaphor created in her first garden gave her one very useful data point, but Jen needed more. Working solely by her own failures and successes would take too long, given the vast realm of possibilities she needed to trim down to something reasonable, and Jen racked her brain for ideas to use as starting points.

Japanese Zen gardens had a common theme of geology writ small, and certainly played a part in her skill, given its name, but it was hardly the only school of thought that concerned itself with the abstract. What would an artist say as to the metaphysical nature of her work, or an interior decorator? Each had their own rules and trends that built upon each other to create something more than the sum of their parts, even without going into their infinite subcategories and experimenters. It was a daunting task, and Jen’s saving grace was that it was her skill. She hadn’t received it as a reward for completing a path but had unlocked it through her own actions. While there was some arbitrary degree of separation and evolution from her fumbling acts to a solid skill, Jen was still the person who had made it. Therefore, what she thought was part of its metaphysical nature likely was. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave Jen a direction for her to set up fumbling tests to learn which of her assumptions was applicable and what wasn’t.

A garden consisting of a boundary of rocks and mushrooms writing out the word mushroom was her first exploration into Zen Garden metaphysics. Jen was sure that there were subtle messages that could eventually be derived from her hasty work, but she was interested in testing the effect of a very direct metaphorical message. Her first session of meditation had only worked once she was meditating on a theme that aligned with the garden. There the connection was abstract enough for her thoughts to roam, to explore that connection and learn more about herself in the process, but Jen didn’t want that freedom of association. This was a garden about mushrooms, plain and simple. With her experiment set up, Jen proceeded to test the relationship between metaphorical nature and mana flows.

Jen was probably too successful with her first attempt. The mana cycling through this place was far more mentally intrusive than she had expected, even with her prior experience for comparison. While the mana around her meditation recliner felt like waves that lapped against her mind, the mana here had the feel of roots that entangled her thoughts and mentally tripped her up, causing her to quickly lose her focus every time she tried to think about anything that wasn’t ‘mushroom’. The metaphor wasn’t perfect, but Jen had never before experienced a sensation quite like this. Her closest previous experience would be her introduction to Delayed Audio Feedback, where her ability to talk was almost completely shut down simply by having her voice echo back out at her. Here it wasn’t her voice echoing, but the mental pressure from her environment that provided the dissonance, causing her to stutteringly lose her train of thought.

Even mushroom related subjects were affected, and the effect was so blatant that Jen was aware of it pressing on her perception even when she wasn’t attempting to activate her Meditation skill. After spending a few points of mana to get a mushroom glowing, Jen managed a five minute period of Meditation by staring directly at the mushroom and thinking of nothing else, which worked until the light faded into blackness and Jen’s mind began to wander once more. Satisfied with proving that it was possible, Jen wasted no time in returning the mushrooms to their cracks and starting work on another garden, one that hopefully wouldn’t leave her with a headache once she was done. The headache gave her the idea of creating a similar garden to eventually train up a mental resistance skill, but Jen judged her current odds of making it work as low enough to leave for another day. Instead, she threw herself into her next experiment with a will.

Jen managed to keep up her experiments far longer than she expected. Part of it was that she was assiduous in taking regular breaks to regenerate mana, part of it was that the work was so varied. She was casting spells, moving rocks, arranging artistic details, and her mind was constantly challenged with new information to puzzle over. Her stomach was still painfully hungry, but it was only a mild inconvenience compared to other pains she had recently endured. The distraction that truly captured Jen’s attention was her clothes. She only had the one set, and while washing them in the lake had helped a bit, she had been wearing them long enough for them to begin to wear on her instead. The cave wasn’t freezing, but even with the knowledge that she had completely explored the area, Jen wasn’t quite ready to take up a nudist lifestyle. Instead, she decided to take another break and make her way back to the lake for another bath and session of cleaning her clothes.

Infrared Vision and a general sense of what direction to head let Jen arrive at the stalagmites and stalactites in short order, and soon after that Jen was sitting down at the edge of the pond. Before she had been limited to the small amount of light she could make, and in the dark the pool had been mysteriously deep and large, stretching out into the blackness forever, but the reality was slightly more disappointing. Jen still couldn’t see how far down the water went, but she could just barely make out the walls of the cave circling around to meet on the far side. Knowing her surroundings gave Jen the confidence to actually swim instead of clinging to the safety provided by the edge, and soon Jen was making a lap around the pool, occasionally feeling out with her legs to give her at least some idea of what lay beneath the surface. All Jen found was solid stone, no hidden treasures or underwater passages she probably wouldn’t ever explore. Not even a fish or a plant, both of which could prove useful, and maybe add some variety to her mushroom only diet. Of course, if there were fish, there wasn’t anything saying how large they could get…

Jen shook the thought off as silly, but still found herself getting out of the pool not long after. Her clothes weren’t dry yet, and Jen took a moment to look around at her surroundings and wonder. There was beauty and complexity here that her gardens couldn’t match, but the mana seemed as stationary and stable as it did elsewhere. All Jen was using were rocks that she literally grabbed off the ground. Why wasn’t there anything like her Zen garden that was naturally occurring?

Jen’s thoughts kept coming back to the one difference she knew about, which was the boundary. A single application of Stone Shaping was enough to dig a narrow groove in the stone, covering an area outside the lake grotto that contained a couple of pillars and stalagmites. Perhaps it was simply that Jen was already looking. Perhaps it was her new level 5 Sense Mana Skill. Perhaps it was that Jen still wasn’t wearing her soggy clothes and found herself just a bit more sensitive and aware of her surroundings, but when Jen closed the loop around her newest Zen Garden, she noticed something. A spark of mana, far less than whatever the system considered a point jumped out to her new boundary and raced along it, leaving churned up mana in its wake. Mana that didn’t die down and return to stillness, but continued to churn until flows that Jen was beginning to recognize appeared, twirling around the pillars and splitting on the stalagmites.

In many ways Jen had been thinking of Mana as a fundamental force of nature, electricity in a different form. The more she looked at what was happening in front of her the more she realized that simply wasn’t the case. If it was, she was looking at the equivalent of a bolt of lightning deciding to arbitrarily strike the ground and start acting like it was a modern computer.

The more Jen thought about it, the more she liked that metaphor. Mana clearly wasn’t as straightforward as gravity or electromagnetic radiation. It was capable of far more complex interactions with itself and its environment, as Jen could see happening right in front of her. Switching her mental categorization of it from Fundamental force to computer with inputs and outputs might not be the most accurate in terms of what was actually happening, but as a model it would likely serve her far better. Moreover, it meant her strategy for understanding Mana would change from categorizing it to utilizing it. Instead of having to create a single unifying theory for how mana could possibly form all of her spells, interact with her body and other objects, and do so much more, she could simply extrapolate from each example individually to try and find other possible ‘inputs’ for mana that might have similar effects.

It offended her sense of scientific duty, but after thinking about it a bit longer she grew more accepting of the idea. While she had been exposed to science that was focused on exploring root causes and underlying theories, science had its roots in far simpler pursuits. Every alchemist had wanted to find a way to turn lead into gold, and while none succeeded, they did manage to create ways to distill or otherwise isolate various elements. Going back even further there weren’t professions such as botanist or biologist, simply medicine men and woman who still gathered as much knowledge as they could about nature and their surroundings, not for the pure pursuit of knowledge, but to improve the daily lives of themselves and their communities.Every note they took, every store or piece of wisdom they passed down would eventually be used as the foundation of modern biology, of scientists categorizing those herbs and plants by their properties.

It might feel like a betrayal of the techniques Jen grew up with, but magic was a completely new field of study. Every piece of information she could gather, no matter how small or self serving, would advance the field. One day perhaps, the focus could once again turn towards aggregating available information to help understand the larger picture.

The one flaw with this plan was that it required Jen to have mana to spend on researching. At the moment it felt like she barely had enough mana to use to test her abilities, and the expense of making a tunnel through the mountain loomed in front of her. Still, Zen Garden had given her a surprising boost to her mana regeneration, and Jen was hopeful that she’d find another way to improve that stat, either through unlocking another Skill or reaching the point where she could absorb ambient mana without activating Devouring Void.

The newest Zen Garden finished activating, and Jen took a moment to study it. The mana flowing around the garden was much less than Jen had expected, given her experience with making her own. Her leading hypothesis was that just as every garden required her to manually create a boundary, either by carving into the stone or placing rocks to activate the field at all, it needed her to interact with the objects in the garden to make them count towards the effects of the field.

Unfortunately, the only real item in the garden were the stone pillars, and Jen really didn’t have many ways to claim them as her own objects, with her mana currently being too low for another Stone Shaping. She tried scratching them with a loose rock for a few minutes, but it didn’t seem to change anything. Belatedly, Jen realized that it was possible that the stalagmites actually counted as part of the ground, and not objects decorating the garden. Either way, she added it to her list of things to spend time studying, put on her now dry clothes, and made her way home to continue Meditating and Gardening.