Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

Jack surveyed his inner world. The matter previously created had forged a solar system, with his fist as the sun and various planets circling it. In the accelerated time of his inner world, Jack had already seen these planets go through a series of geological changes to settle on a somewhat more stable state.

Of course, these changes weren’t the exact same as what Earth had gone through. His Dao and the universe’s were subtly different—and that was expressed in everything that occurred inside them, whether big or small. Jack looked forward to discovering what the lifeforms he created would look like.

With the planets no longer erupting or getting smashed by a hail of meteors, Jack thought it was time to move to the next step. He manipulated their growth. Slowly, an atmosphere appeared around most of them—barring the ones too far or too close to the sun—followed by oceans. Millions of years passed in the blink of an eye, Jack manipulating the flow of time freely.

After the first oceans appeared, Jack descended on each of these worlds. His body was the size of a continent. He bent down, taking a deep breath and blowing into the oceans. The wind of his breath made them overflow, temporarily flooding the newly created continents—but it also contained the very first hints of life, a wealth of living cells placed in a safe haven. Jack moved from planet to planet, breathing life into each of them, then calmly stepped back to watch.

The bacteria began multiplying erratically. He saw, through his omniscient gaze, single-celled organisms adapt and thrive in their new environments. At the same time this happened, Jack himself experienced several changes. The flow of time, which he’d freely manipulated so far, now felt heavier, as if anchored in place by the very life he’d infused into his world.

To his surprise, even single-celled organisms possessed souls, their unique life signatures, and pulling the fabric of time under their feet was like tugging at a piece of cloth carrying multiple sharp stones. It was still possible, but it risked getting torn, and it was certainly heavier than it used to be.

Seeing that bacteria had souls, Jack laughed. At the very start of his cultivation journey, he’d been told that only cultivators had souls, while monsters did not. That was a load of crap. If amoebas could have a soul, then so could a three-meter-tall wolf.

Soon, however, his laughter was replaced by a frown. As life populated his world, he was beginning to get a distinct sense of wrongness.

Why?

He inspected everything, passing his gaze from the tiniest pebble to the sun itself, through every single creature in his world. There was nothing wrong. Why did he feel that way?

The more creatures that appeared, the slower time got. At the start, even a billion years could pass in seconds, but the resistance had increased now. Jack saw the single-celled organisms evolve into more complex structures and eventually step out of the oceans. He watched as they developed limbs and sentience, ecosystems forming. He was their God—a unique feeling.

Yet, that feeling was undermined by the constant, growing sense of wrongness. Like this wasn’t the proper way to do things. Some instinct, deep in his heart, insisted he was making a mistake.

Jack took a deep breath. By now, it had been over a year in the outside world. A year in which Ebele grew and the Church fought a bitter war. This was precious time. He took another breath, pressing his eyes shut, then snapped them open. He waved his hands—fleets of meteors appeared in his world, large and shaped like fists, then came crashing down on the planets.

Animals ran around in panic. Jack saw the flames reflected in their eyes. He let the meteors crash, eradicating all life, changing his planets’ trajectories, resetting his inner world to the empty, timeless state it had originally existed in.

He felt weary—an angry god, one of slaughter.

Jack had interrupted his own breakthrough. He clutched his chest, bringing a hand to his mouth to catch the coughing blood. Yet, when the pain abated, his eyes remained sharp.

This wasn’t the right way, he knew it with certainty. It was the breakthrough method every text and A-Grade had described, yet, for him, it was wrong. His heart told him so—as if he was choosing a lesser path, one which didn’t express his true potential. Eradicating all life and wasting a year of real time was an acceptable sacrifice to retrace his steps.

Jack didn’t begin recreating life immediately—if he did, it would only end the same way. Instead, he sat down cross-legged on top of his purple fist sun, meditating on the feeling of wrongness which remained warm in his heart.

“What’s the problem?”he asked aloud. “What did I do wrong?”

No answer came. Jack relaxed, taking his time. He sank into meditation. His senses turned off, letting the feeling of wrongness expand naturally in his heart until it became clear. He could see its desire. A larger universe—no, a more thorough one.

“Is my inner world incomplete?” Jack wondered. No one answered. No one could. This was his path to forge. All he could rely on was himself.

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“No, not incomplete,” he replied. “Just…not whole?”

It was a confusing feeling. The sense of wrongness in his heart didn’t judge anything in his inner world, but it still viewed the entire world with contempt. A sense of disjunction was prevalent. There wasn’t something wrong, it just was. Somehow. Ṝ𝐚

Jack opened his eyes again. Rising panic threatened to swell his heart—he knew there was no breaking through if he didn’t resolve that feeling, and the more he waited, the more time he wasted. His family and people needed him. Across the universe, millions were dying for his incompetence.

Yet, he gently put that feeling down. It wouldn’t help, only make things more difficult. His road was simple—to solve this problem—and he would do it because he simply had no other choice. If he failed… Then, with a heavy heart, he’d have to settle for an incomplete breakthrough. He could still help the war like that. He wouldn’t sacrifice everyone for a revelation which might never come.

“Ten more years,” he promised himself. “Well within the deadline of my duel. If I don’t succeed until then, I will settle.”

Since his thirty-year declaration of a duel with Elder Hero, he’d spent four absorbing the Overlord core, five fusing Entropy into his black hole, one in his failed breakthrough just now, and several months here and there. It was over ten years in total. His adventures were like sharp flashes—the vast majority of his life was occupied by uneventful meditation. He could see now how cultivators could live for hundreds of thousands of years without going mad. If he wasn’t on the clock, he would have liked to settle down somewhere for a few millennia and ponder on the Dao.

Less than twenty years remained until his duel, but that was plenty of time. Jack returned to the problem at hand. He fell into deep meditation, tuning off everything else, focusing on the seed of wrongness which he now acknowledged in his heart. His overall cultivation was in disarray—but why?

“What is my path?” Jack asked himself, speaking with eyes closed as if in a dream, listening to his own voice. “My fist, which I follow. My Dao, which I discover. My body, which I temper. My inner world, which I cultivate.” Silence fell for months. Jack pondered silently. Finally, he spoke again. “That is incorrect. My fist, my Dao, and my inner world are connected now. They are three parts of a whole. Only my body is separate. I use it as a physical medium to my strength—sooner or later, no matter how I cultivate it, it will fall behind my other aspects. My four aspects will become three, one wasted. My path will be lesser, a fourth of it wasted.”

His eyes snapped open. A green light shone inside them—the Dao of Life, which made up the bodies of people.

“I must combine my body with the rest of my cultivation,” he realized. The moment he perceived this notion, he knew it was correct. Why had he never heard of it? He’d asked various A-Grades and read many texts about breaking into the A-Grade, yet nobody mentioned such a thing. Was it relevant to Jack’s specific combination of Daos? Was it about his extreme understanding into the Dao giving him insights the others lacked? Or did it have to do with his tenth Dao Fruit and ten thousand miles breakthrough, which no one else possessed, granting him a perfect inner world?

He did not know, but at this point, it didn’t matter. He had a job to do.

Jack rose to his feet. The world around him, which had waited silently for a long time, suddenly flared to life. Dao and energy erupted. Green sparks of life emerged from the void, drawn out of the folds of reality they’d been hidden in. Jack made a grasping motion at the Life Drop, which dislodged itself from the portal to the Green Dragon Realm and flew into his hands. It was potent, radiating intense Life energy.

Jack smiled, then squeezed it between his fingers. This divine object, which had once been impregnable to even his mightiest efforts, crumbled like a popped balloon.

“YOU DID WHAT!?” the turtle screamed from inside, but Jack only laughed. The Life Drop and its current inhabitants would be fine. He’d just emptied it rapidly, not truly broken it.

Unimaginable quantities of Life energy flooded the world, taking it over. The purple sun was tinged green—the planets spontaneously burst with trees and animals which quickly died to the lack of living conditions.

Combined with the constant stream of Life energy pouring out of the Green Dragon Realm’s portal, Jack found that his inner world was completely suffused with the energy of Life, even pushing his other Daos aside. It was a temporary imbalance he could accept, because his body was also made of Life Dao. This was the best way to connect them.

“Brock,” his voice echoed in the real world. “Close the door. Now.”

He didn’t even know if the brorilla had heard or responded. He was too deeply entrenched in meditation. He just hoped for the best.

Jack pictured himself. A human body, tempered to the extreme, hiding in its center the gateway to his inner world. Both inside and outside were filled with the Dao of Life—the most potent life force. Jack knew what he had to do. He also realized this was a very risky procedure, but there was no going back. He didn’t want to. His path was the pursuit of mastery, and now, for the first time, he felt so close to it. As if, more than his breakthrough to the B-Grade, this would firmly set him on a path far surpassing any other.

Or it would kill him. But that risk was a small price to pay for eternity.

Jack focused as deeply as he could. His inner world was an island in the dimensional sea, a bubble of its own universe connected to his body through his Dao and willpower. He pictured them as a portal. With a deep breath, he grabbed his entire inner world and pulled it through the connection to make it physically enter his body. The entire solar system and the laws which regulated it were warped and sucked through a tiny hole. They reappeared in Jack’s physical body.

For a moment, he was stunned. The reality of this state was staggering. Planets coexisted with his organs, each pushing against the other. Twenty thousand miles had been compressed into six feet of human. The spacetime laws which served as the borders of Jack’s inner world were rapidly unraveling, unsupported by the stricter laws pertaining this universe compared to the lax dimensional sea, and Jack felt his body on the verge of exploding.

For a moment, the irony of all this crossed his mind. What would Brock think if an entire solar system suddenly spilled out the door?

He wiped that thought, focusing fully. His spacetime laws rushed to the fore—all his expertise came into play, skillfully weaving the broken laws back together, creating new seals and warps to replace the quickly waning ones. His inner world, which had begun to unravel, slowly restabilized.

Jack could make a universe fit inside his body, but that didn’t refute the fact that he still needed organs and flesh inside him. He needed to quickly find a way to reconcile the two warring realities—and master the Dao to make it happen.