Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

The world creation Dao Vision remained hard to untangle. Jack was stumped. He was convinced that the level of his Dao understanding rivaled that of most Archons by now. Yet, even after seeing the Vision a thousand times, even after comprehending the individual Daos it relied on, he was unable to crack its secrets.

How? he thought, gritting his teeth.

He dove back into the vision. A green-robed woman sat patiently in space, overlooking a bubble of empty space. Only a handful of particles filled it, crossing the massive space haphazardly at great speed. This had been happening for a long, long time.

Suddenly, two particles crashed, and a new world was born. Reality unraveled. The particles exploded, and a million different Daos sprang into existence as if each of them had contained a world. The massive, empty bubble was consumed by a large explosion which left in its wake liquid matter. The Dao of Time inside it wobbled and realigned itself on a new axis, forming a timeline perpendicular to the one of the universe around it, yet one which moved at a different frequency.

The rest of the elements stabilized then, attuned to that particular frequency, and a new universe was born in the bubble, one whose every particle differed from those of the previous universe on a level Jack wouldn’t even realize was possible without seeing it. It was like discovering a new color. Reality and the physical laws quickly diverged from what Jack knew, all their transformations based on that universe’s Dao of Time.

This whole sequence happened instantaneously. Even Jack, with his sharp senses and perception, could only get glimpses. He understood the basic principles of what occurred—a new universe had been created, defined by the unique frequency of its Dao of Time—but the actual process was far too vast and complex. There were so many moving pieces that understanding them all would take an eternity.

He even suspected this was a concept on a higher level than Entropy or the black hole, though he really had no way of knowing. It was certainly more complex.

With a sigh, Jack left the Dao Vision for the thousandth time. “This is too difficult,” he muttered. “Either I’m missing something or my current state of being is not enough. Probably both.”

With a decisive tug of will, he forced the problem away, out of his mind. He would revisit it when better able to. Jack then rolled his shoulders, standing up after a long period of meditation. The stone room around him remained the same—shelves over shelves were filled with crystal spheres.

“Hmm. Probably several hundred million years.”

“What!?”

“What?”

“I meant from the time I started meditating in this room.”

“Oh. Then, like, five years. Venerable Saint Thousand Shell has gotten better at chess.”

“I was ALWAYS good at it,” the turtle’s voice rumbled. “Anyway, nice job comprehending that black hole thing, kid. I got good news as well. The Divine Blood is almost fully charged.”

Jack smiled. “That’s great.” The Divine Blood was the official name of the Life Drop.

Five years… he thought, instinctively raising his gaze to the sky, only to meet a stone ceiling. I wonder how the rest of the universe is doing. I’ve been gone for a long time already…

The Dao room had already given him everything it could. He stepped out to reach the ruined chamber on the other side and sat down to relax. The golden beam from five years ago had already disappeared, but neither Great Silver nor the Stone Scholar had returned. They probably couldn’t.

Through the open door of the cultivation chamber, Jack caught sight of Brock. He instantly shot to his feet again. The brorilla radiated pure, unadulterated power, as if he was the cradle of all life, the center of the universe. His cultivation had gone through a qualitative change, completely incomparable to what it used to be.

“Brock!” Jack exclaimed with joy. “You’ve reached the A-Grade!”

The brorilla opened his eyes and smiled. “A year ago,” he said, slowly rising to his feet. “I was just stabilizing.”

“How did you manage to break through so quickly?”

“You’ll see. Come on—it’s your turn, big bro.”

“My turn?”

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“Right. Your turn to break through.”

Jack was stunned. He eyed the room, its vast reserves of cultivation resources barely dwindled. Brock stepped out, exuding vast power, and suddenly Jack yearned for it as well. He desired to step into the highest realm. To claim the power he deserved.

“I’ll be in the Dao room,” Brock said with a smile. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Jack didn’t reply. He walked into the Cultivation room as if in a trance, spinning around slowly to survey the walls, covered in shelves hosting all sorts of wondrous materials. There were Overlord cores, extreme treasures of various kinds, body tempering resources… Everything was at the Overlord level. The golden earth lotus Brock had enjoyed before would fit right in with the contents of this room, and it wouldn’t be a particularly impressive one either. In fact, Jack noticed the compressed essence of another golden earth lotus just sitting on a shelf. The treasure so many A-Grades had risked their lives for wasn’t considered anything special here.

“The seventh floor lives up to his reputation,” he whispered, licking his lips. “Can I break through here?”

He was aware of the method to reach the A-Grade.

At the start of the B-Grade, the cultivator formed an inner world inside themselves, the larger the better. Then, throughout that Grade, they gradually purified that world, instilling it with matter and higher Dao workings. They made it realer. The threshold to entering the A-Grade was to generate life and cultivators inside their inner world.

Of course, that was as hard as it sounded. It didn’t necessarily require insights into the Dao of Life, just an understanding of the Dao so extreme that the inner world worked by itself, life produced as a result of various natural processes. In a way, it was similar to the creation of life in the actual universe, with the cultivator helping the process in a similar way Enas had.

Finding himself cross-legged, Jack reached inside himself, manifesting in his inner world. “Guys,” he said, glancing at the turtle, the Stone, and Copy Jack. “Can you hide in the Life Drop for a bit? I’ll try to break through.”

The three had been in the process of building a garden made purely of Dao. Hearing Jack, Venerable Saint Thousand Shell laughed, flicking a claw and instantly wiping the garden out of existence.

“Hey!” the Stone protested.

“Hahaha!” The turtle laughed. “I knew it! Isn’t the shrine of my ancestors brilliant, kid!?”

“It certainly is,” Jack replied with a smile.

Copy Jack gave Jack a deep glance, then turned into a ray of light which sank into the Life Drop. The turtle and Stone soon followed. The Life Drop contained its own inner world, though tiny in comparison to Jack’s, and having these three there ensured they wouldn’t somehow complicate the breakthrough.

Jack now floated alone in his inner world. He surveyed it. A sixteen-thousand-mile wide, mostly empty expanse. Newborn stars flickered here and there, while continent-sized planetary fragments floated through the void.

At the very center stood a large purple fist, the core of Jack’s Dao. The Life Drop hovered to the side—a green droplet of Enas’s blood—while the portal to the Green Dragon Realm yawned right behind it, constantly feeding its excess of life energy into the blood.

Far to the other side, a black hole spun slowly, every pulse infusing the inner world with advanced spacetime laws. Through it lay the Black Hole World, the masterpiece of Archon Black Hole.

Jack took a moment to appreciate what he had. He’d worked harder and risked more than anyone, but he also possessed access to an unbelievable amount of resources. Archons would go to war over any of these treasures—the Life Drop, the Green Dragon Realm, and the Black Hole World—and he had three of them. It was part of the reason why he stood so much higher than anyone else at his level—with the exception of Brock, who somehow kept up despite lacking a similar level of resources.

Jack opened his eyes in the real world. He took a deep breath, then flexed his fingers, making several items float his way: a green ginseng root emanating dense energy of Life, a rippling glass shard containing the power of spacetime, and a pitch-black drop of liquid suffused with a thick aura of Death. These were all top level treasures, yet here, he could use them freely.

Thank you, Gods, he said, absorbing all three into his inner world. He then settled into cultivation.

Jack was Level 513. As the three treasures orbited around each other near the center of his inner world, their energies spreading outward, he felt the density of his world’s Dao steadily increasing. He helped the process along, investing all his attention into it. An unknown amount of time later, he realized that the three treasures had dissolved fully, their energies spread across his inner world and pushing its density to the peak. It almost felt like the world was groaning by all the energy it had to contain.

With a pop, its boundaries expanded, the energy density rapidly falling. From sixteen thousand miles, it grew to twenty, achieving the final doubling of its original width. The Dao density returned to normal levels, but the sheer volume of energy present outscaled the original one by hundreds of times.

Jack smiled. He spread his perception to find that the massive amounts of Dao had increased the efficiency of all forces, including gravity. The various continental-sized pieces of earth had grouped together, forming spherical clusters—planets. They were rough and misshapen, early in their development, but Jack meticulously covered them in the Daos of Life and Time to push them along. He watched these planets fall into orbit around the purple fist which hovered in the middle of the world, then smash into each other until their final sizes and positions were solidified. Several sported their own moons. Water appeared between the volcanoes and wastelands covering their surfaces.

Jack’s inner world had started at ten thousand miles wide. After expanding at the middle, late, and peak B-Grade, it had doubled in diameter, reaching twenty thousand miles. Its volume, and therefore its energy, had increased by hundreds of times.

Even at twenty thousand miles wide, this should be nowhere near enough to sustain a solar system. However, Jack found that everything in his inner world was shrunken compared to the outside one, or perhaps it would be more apt to say space was larger. While energy couldn’t shrink or enlarge, stars and planets could, leading to a single solar system being born inside Jack’s inner world. His purple fist acted as the sun, while seven planets orbited it. To the people who would eventually be born there, he assumed the Black Hole World and Life Drop-Green Dragon Realm would be nighttime curios.

Jack had already reached the peak B-Grade realm and refined his cultivation as much as possible. He had everything he needed. With a fierce concentrated expression, he sat down on top of the sun.

It was time to reach the A-Grade.