Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

After the auction was over, the crowd didn’t disperse right away. They couldn’t if they wanted to. The streets were so packed that people formed long lines, many monsters fighting each other in the confusion.

As everyone was struggling to leave the square, however, some people noticed a peculiarity. There seemed to a gathering on the now-empty auction stage. Several people sat on it cross-legged, exchanging cups of wine and laughing. Their pleasant conversation spread throughout the square.

“What’s going on?” a monster asked its friend.

“No idea.”

Whispers spread. As more people turned towards the drinking group, the square began to quiet down.

One monster decided to go for it. “Hey,” it asked. “Can I join you guys? It’s better than waiting down here.”

A double devil on the stage grumbled. “I don’t even know why I’m here,” he muttered, but another wine-drinker spoke over him—a gorilla-looking monster, who turned and raised his cup.

“Sure thing, bro,” he said. “The more the merrier. There’s enough wine for everyone.”

The asking monster laughed as it jumped to the stage, receiving a cup the brorilla removed from his space ring. The joy was infectious. In some odd way, everyone relaxed as they eyed the gathering on the square, and even the occasional fighting stopped. They wanted to be up there as well. They wanted to belong in that group.

The brorilla laughed again, then turned to address the square. “There’s enough wine for everyone,” he repeated. “Come up here, bros!”

***

Brock and Starhair had said they’d remain for a while, but Jack had things to do, so he returned alone. He now sat cross-legged in the middle of his room. His bare thighs rubbed against the polished floor, while the faint scent of wood permeated the room. It was much more spacious than he was used to, containing an entire kitchen and bar alongside a king-sized bed, but those didn’t concern him. Comfort was temporary. Power was forever.

The broken Dao manual rested on Jack’s legs—a dark sphere inlaid with motes of blue light. It was like seeing a small universe from the outside, with all its million stars.

Those stars were swimming constantly. Some followed set trajectories. Others jumped around erratically, while a few shimmered in and out of existence as if about to die. Those movements visually clashed against each other, giving any watcher a jarring feeling.

The auctioneer was right. This Dao manual was thoroughly broken. Moreover, because of its innate complexity, it was impossible to tell which stars were intact and which were faulty. Attempting to study this was like reading a book whose words had been randomly scrambled.

However, that didn’t mean it was useless. Jack calmed his mind, sinking into a meditation state. He then pierced his perception into the sphere, carefully combing through it. He was slow and thorough. An hour later, he hadn’t even gone through a tenth of it.

While the sphere was broken and jumbled up, that didn’t necessarily apply to all of it. There could be sections which were relatively intact, and though they offered little to the untrained eye, they could benefit someone already familiar with the basics. It was exactly those sections Jack was looking for. The reason he’d spent so much to acquire this sphere.

Yet, even after a few hours and combing over half the sphere, he’d come up with nothing. A rueful smile was forming on his lips.

Some risks don’t pay off, he thought. That is part of the road to mastery.

Suddenly, he noticed something. A tiny section where the jarring feeling was missing. Eleven stars in a circle, falling together and narrowly missing each other before spreading out again. It was a mystical sight—and it spoke of mastery. All thoughts were wiped off Jack’s brain as he focused, bringing his full attention on that tiny part of the sphere.

He observed and studied the movement of the stars. Soon, he realized it wasn’t just them that were moving, but also the darkness between them. Space was weaving through itself, and there was also something more, something heavy and dark which wasn’t space. It reminded Jack of death, but not quite that either.

Dark matter? he wondered. The thought was quickly banished. Dark matter, or dark energy, was what Earth scientists used to call the extra energy they measured in the universe, but which they could not find. It had stumbled them for decades. After the Integration, it had become apparent that dark matter was just the ambient Dao particles swimming through the universe.

But that wasn’t it. The dark energy swimming between these stars wasn’t just Dao particles. It took Jack a few moments to realize where he’d seen it before.

Right! The dark surfer!

His second-to-last Dao Vision had depicted a man on a black surfboard riding the currents of a black hole. He’d been trying to copy it. In his attempts, he’d summoned the exact same type of energy—a foamy, encroaching crystallization of space death. A form of hungry nothingness.

This realization gave Jack hope. That black foam represented the dark surfer’s greatest insights, and he was an Archon. If the same kind of energy was present here, tightly controlled, it meant the creator of this Dao manual had reached the same level. This wasn’t a peak A-Grade inheritance, but an Archon inheritance! Maybe it was even connected to the same dark surfer!

But, he was getting ahead of himself. Jack refocused, diving into the stars with renewed vigor. He didn’t dare keep his hopes up—for all he knew, this section of stars was a minor part of the inheritance, or even worse, part of a fractured whole.

Time flowed ceaselessly. At some point, Jack’s surroundings began to fade. The stars became his whole world, and through it, he saw another image. It was colorless and vague—nowhere near the clarity of a Dao Vision. In this image, he saw a red-scaled lizard man standing in an undistinguishable environment. The man bent his knees, lowering his center of mass as he swung a halberd behind his back, ready to unleash it forward.

A bodiless roar echoed in Jack’s ears. On the halberd’s head, a dark sphere appeared. It floated right along the blade, swallowing its middle part, and it only kept growing darker. Deeper. Heavier. The bricks making up the floor were sucked into the sphere. So was air. Every Dao particle in the surrounding space was absorbed, further enhancing the sphere’s terrifying weight until the entire world seemed to be falling into it.

The man’s face flashed with surprise, joy, and panic. He teleported, reaching a region of emptiness, then swung his halberd. The sphere flew out. Where it hit the ground, everything was sucked into it, forming a lake-sized crater into the earth. The man laughed.

“The center falls, the world helps, the hole forms!” he shouted. Though the visuals were fuzzy, his voice was crystal-clear in Jack’s ears.

The vision dissipated then. Jack was back in his room, panting on the ground. He didn’t know when he’d fallen. He didn’t care. The vision had inspired him—because, in creating a miniature black hole, the man had only used the power of a peak A-Grade!

Of course, it was a weak imitation of a black hole. Even B-Grades had ways to form that lake-sized crater. However, that didn’t matter, because it proved something important which Jack had been missing. It was possible to create imitations of a black hole at lower levels!

So far, he’d been trying to recreate the real thing. The death of space, the end of time. True nothingness. Such a concept stood at the very peak of the universe, only approachable by Archons. Jack had experimented just for the insights. However, if there could be weaker versions…

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His mind was already roaring with possibilities. The man in the vision had used a peak A-Grade’s power, but his space and death Daos were exquisite. Superior to Jack’s, though not by much. Maybe he couldn’t recreate the feat, but could he pursue the principle?

Jack returned to his meditating position and temporarily put away the Dao manual. Closing his eyes, he entered his inner world, a mostly empty universe littered with floating pieces of earth. Somewhere in the center, a large figure was hunched over a chessboard made of the planetary fragments flying around.

Venerable Saint Thousand Shell was deep in thought. He pointed his head at a piece, which floated and slowly moved towards another position.

“You picked it up! Now you have to play it!” the Stone gloated from its position at the other side of the board. “This was a mistake! You should have taken my knight. Queen takes knight, then I would be forced into a long sequence! Still winning, of course, but longer! Or you could have moved your a2 pawn—always a good choice.”

“Will you shut up?” the turtle groaned. “I’m trying to think.”

Wrinkles creased its reptilian face, as every road it saw ended in defeat. Finally, it placed down its queen in a square surrounded by enemy pieces, none of which could actually touch her.

“I thought you’d do that! You miscalculated!” the Stone exclaimed. “Bishop at e4, check. I can use this tempo to ensure a winning endgame!”

The Stone had no limbs to move the pieces, but Copy Jack was there. At its command, he ran over and grabbed a bishop-looking piece, then moved it to the indicated position. He nodded in approval all the while.

“Hey guys,” Jack said. Nobody had noticed his arrival, so all three jumped. The turtle accidentally kicked over the chessboard.

“Whoops,” he said. “Guess it’s game over.”

“No worries!” the Stone replied. “I remember the position. We can recreate it!”

The turtle gave it a death stare before turning to Jack. “How’s it going, kid? You can’t be having a worse day than me.”

“Pretty good, actually. Listen, I’ll be experimenting a bit over on that side. Try not to get killed by the energy ripples.”

“...Okay.”

“Hi Jack!” the Stone said, hopping in place. “Do you want to play some chess? It helps you work on your Dao!”

Jack laughed. “Thank you, Stone, but I’m a little busy. You already got a gaming partner.”

“Oh, please,” the turtle grumbled. “This is ridiculous.”

“You know,” Jack said, “for how long you’ve been alive, I thought you’d be good at chess. You had a lot of time to practice.”

“I did practice, and I am good. That’s why it’s ridiculous. I hate losing.”

“Huh.” Jack threw a glance at the Stone, which was currently spinning around itself in joy. “Well, have fun. I’ll be a few thousand miles that way if you need me.”

Leaving the three to their fun, Jack teleported away, quickly reaching the fringes of his inner world. Walls of starry dust indicated the borders, while the terrifying emptiness inside was his to command.

Experimenting in his inner world wasn’t ideal because it had small differences to the outside one. However, he didn’t want to leave the city right now, and even if he did, he wasn’t familiar enough with the Space Monster World to wantonly destroy the wilderness. As for experimenting inside Empty Star City, that was far too reckless.

For now, the inner world would do.

Jack spread his arms wide, summoning the power of space. He quickly created a large bubble of sealed space. He then used his Dao and willpower to compress it, shrinking it from a mile in diameter to roughly three feet. This wasn’t his limit, but it was good enough to stop and think. The space particles were going wild inside it.

Last time, he’d tried compressing this sphere to the limit, hoping to achieve a gravitational singularity. All sorts of weird phenomena had occurred, including an elementary form of the space death foam. In the end, however, he hadn’t even come close to creating a true black hole. Though he’d gotten a bit stronger since then, he was still way, way off.

Which made perfect sense. Black holes were some of the most powerful forces in the universe. Even Enas, the leader of the Old Gods, had been trapped inside one for a billion years. If Jack could create it, that would be almost unfair.

What did the red man do? Jack asked himself, thinking back to the vision. That man had created something like a black hole, though far weaker than the original. Unfortunately, the vision was too fuzzy to make out how he did it.

What clues do I have?

Jack revisited everything he’d seen, the entire sequence. The black hole-like thing had formed on the blade of the man’s halberd. That didn’t necessarily matter. Maybe it was the focal point he was most familiar with. Soon after forming, it had begun sucking in its surroundings, so it really did work like a black hole.

Afterwards, the man had taken this black hole and teleported away. That was the first clue. If he could teleport it away, it was under his direct control. A real black hole could never move that way because it couldn’t interact with space in any way other than consuming it.

What happened next? Jack’s eyes flashed. The man had thrown his black hole against the ground, where it created a massive crater before disappearing.

It disappeared! Black holes didn’t do that! If it was a real black hole, it would have just kept growing until it swallowed the entire Space Monster World.

So it really isn’t the real thing, Jack deduced. It has to be some sort of artificial creation which mirrors some qualities of the black hole… But how?

How is a black hole created?

Too much matter gathers in one place. Its gravitational pull becomes more and more intense until even its atoms can’t bear it. They collapse, gathering into one spot of endless density. Since its radius is zero, the gravity very close to it is infinite, absorbing even light and timespace. The more it absorbs, the greater the radius in which gravity is so powerful where nothing can escape. That is the event horizon. That’s how black holes are created.

How could I imitate it?

Jack looked down at his own hand. A realization popped up in his mind.

He used his halberd because it has mass! The black hole needs actual matter as its core, not just space particles like I’ve been doing!

He let the bubble dissipate. Space particles erupted outward, but Jack paid them no mind. He created a new mile-wide bubble, this time centering it around his own fist. He took a deep breath, then compressed it.

The pressure ballooned quickly. He wasn’t sure how powerful it was, but he knew a regular B-Grade would have been crushed. He compressed the bubble until his torso was outside of it, then kept compressing, the edge of the bubble sliding across his forearm. The pressure was staggering by now. Even his durable body found it hard to endure. He was thankful he’d spent so much time tempering it, otherwise there was no way he’d able to do this.

Finally, the sphere compressed enough that it encapsulated just his fist. The space particles were going crazy in there, zooming around frantically as they tried to escape. His hand was feeling the pressure. The bones were slowly giving way. The pain was horrific.

Jack clenched his teeth and focused his willpower into compressing further. His hand shattered with a sickening crunch. Bones and flesh were pulverized, becoming a pressurized mass which rushed to the very center of the bubble and hovered there. The space particles already behaved differently, gravitating towards that mass and struggling to escape. A few fell into it, sticking to the mass, increasing its gravity. Hints of black foam appeared as the space particles began dying despite their best efforts. The pressure was more than Jack could handle. The bubble was destabilizing.

It went better than last time, but this was still far from a true black hole.

“Fuck!” Jack said, throwing the bubble with all his might. It flew towards the center of his inner world and exploded before it traveled a mile. Intense fluctuations of space and death flooded the world. Thankfully, this was his world, so Jack neutralized most of the impact. He was mostly unhurt.

“Fuck,” he said, clutching onto the stump of his wrist. This wasn’t his real body, but the pain was real. “Still not enough…”

His eyes flashed with calculations. This had gone far better than last time. Indeed, it was better to use some matter as the center of the black hole, and preferably his fist, which he was most familiar with. He’d learned that much. But he still hadn’t achieved the level of the red man who created the incomplete Dao manual.

He knew he could do it. His understandings weren’t too far off from that man’s. He could create at least a weaker variant of a black hole, he just had to figure out how. There was still something missing.

“Well, I’ll get it,” he promised himself. “Already, this can almost work as a weapon. I just need time to charge it.”

The explosion of the compressed sphere wasn’t a black hole, but it contained the black foam, a terrifying force of nature. Even Jack wasn’t sure he could survive a direct hit. This was a very powerful skill he was cooking up—he just needed to solve a few more problems. Mostly the charging time, which right now was too long.

If he figured out how to actually summon a black hole, like the red man had done, his battle power would skyrocket. He had a feeling the potential of this move was far above Supernova’s.

While Jack was absorbed in his inner world, that didn’t mean his real body was defenseless. He always left part of his consciousness on lookout. At this point, as he pondered on the mysteries of the universe, that part of his consciousness registered a knock on the door.

Jack returned fully to the real world. He stood up, stretching his limbs. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened, and in came Elder Puerto.