Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

As his inner world and his flesh body tried to coexist, Jack felt himself strained. For a moment, he thought he’d die. Understanding arrived then.

He had an idea. In an instant, amidst the warring realities of his body and inner world, he knew what to do. And, to achieve it, he needed tremendous amounts of energy.

The inner world and his body were fiercely attacking each other—both of which were tempered to the extreme. Their cataclysmic clashes were suppressed by Jack’s Dao, but he let that go for a moment. Intense ripples spread outside his body, like he’d swallowed a blacksmith hammering an anvil. They crashed into the walls, shaking the entire pyramid. The various treasures lining the shelves of this room were also sucked into the ripples. They burst apart, unable to endure the impacts. There were dozens of them, many being Overlords cores or items on the same level. All their power erupted at once, filling the chamber with a completely terrifying amount of energy. Jack was suffocating. This was more than enough for multiple people to break into the A-Grade, and the pyramid’s enchantments kept it from dispersing.

He realized Brock had closed the door. Good bro.

Jack felt his body cracking under the pressure and quickly got to work. His Daos burst into action, sucking in the energy like vacuums, forming several colored whirlpools around Jack. The massive amount of energy came under his control, if temporarily. He immediately put it to use.

His body and inner world, which were fiercely clashing, were forced to fuse. Energy was funneled into them, ironing out their differences. Jack’s Daos worked at full force. The fusing proceeded, all problems solved by his Daos or hammered down by his fist, the two realities slowly becoming one.

His organs turned into planets. His stomach, lungs, spleen, those and all else were now covered in tiny continents. His flesh dissolved into energy, turning into the starry vacuum of space, with its properties dictated by the Dao of Life to operate the same way flesh did. The purple fist sun took the place of his heart, and his bones absorbed its radiance before exuding it, turning into mini suns themselves. His blood turned into rivers of stars which brightened the cosmos. Only his skin remained the same, turning dark and starry from the inside to resemble the endless horizon of space.

Jack opened his eyes to find he was no longer human. He had transcended. His new reality was hard to come to grip with, but he knew it would happen. For now, he remained in breakthrough. The tons of energy he’d unleashed before had been partly consumed to fuel the fusion of a small universe into his body, but parts of it still remained, and Jack intended to use them to make his breakthrough as perfect as possible.

The portals to the Black Hole World and Green Dragon Realm had been pulled into his body alongside his inner world. They now hovered aimlessly, sticking out like sore thumbs. Jack knew they could be better.

With a tug of will, he reached through the portal to the Green Dragon Realm and pulled it in. The entire realm disappeared from the dimensional sea and reappeared inside Jack’s body. Its intense Life energy spread out, helping Jack adapt to the change—and, at the same time, the stability of his laws reinforced the realm, which had been slowly deteriorating for millions of years.

The Green Dragon Realm wasn’t empty. It contained many animals and a few cultivators—Jack had let them live there a long time ago. His body didn’t reject them, which was good. Their power was too low to be a problem anyway.

On their side, the beasts and cultivators of the Green Dragon Realm witnessed the change. The ground shook under their feet. They saw the sky above them distort, then get ripped away like cloth to reveal an odd starry dome. A purple sun hung in the distance—vaguely shaped like a fist. Long celestial bodies hovered in various directions, some glowing more than others, all reflecting the light of the sun like moons. Rivers of stars crossed the cosmos, while the far distance was also littered with stars, sparkling in various intensities and colors—this was the inside of Jack’s skin, where different areas simulated the glittering stars of the universe.

On the surface of the Green Dragon Realm, a frog-eyed man and a human girl watched the sky with a mix of terror and marvel. “What the hell…” Borkuren Madiba muttered.

Sassa gazed upward, her mouth hanging open, the stars reflected in her eyes. “It’s beautiful…” she said.

Between them, their teenager child balled its fists, excitement rising inside it as it sensed the laws of the world subtly change.

Jack didn’t contact them. He repeated the process for the Black Hole World, ripping it out of the dimensional sea and embedding it into his body. The people sitting in benches at the top of the world witnessed the colorful void warp and be replaced by a starry sky. For the first time in a billion years, they saw stars. Their eyes widened. They hugged each other, a feeling of anticipation overcoming them.

Mia and Grand Elder Pasan, who also happened to be there, were stunned. Tears fell from the elder’s eyes. “This is…a new era…” she muttered, falling to her knees. “We didn’t disappoint you, Ancestor… We survived… Our children, your children, will be free!”

Meanwhile, Mia clutched her hands before her chest, worship rising in her heart. “Thank you, Jack Rust…” she whispered.

Jack sensed the changes inside his body and was satisfied. He had perfectly combined his inner world and the two small realms into himself. He was now more than a man. Deep in his heart, the feeling of wrongness was gone. He’d stepped onto the right path. He suspected this wasn’t the only way to achieve this level, but it was the way for him.

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“Universe of the body…” he muttered, chuckling. “Cultivation never stops, does it? It’s just a gift that keeps on giving. I wonder what lies at the top. Does it even exist?”

As far as he knew, he was the first person in history to achieve this Universe of the Body realm—as he decided to call it. He had already diverged from the cultivation path everyone else followed. Suddenly, he understood why everyone was stuck at the Archon realm, why it even existed. Archon was just a name for those who surpassed the A-Grade without having set the foundation to proceed to the next realm.

Jack knew, with absolute certainty, that he could progress further. The A-Grade was just another stepping stone for him. He would become the first S-Grade, and he would create a path to let others follow him in the future, to let the cultivation world overcome its bottleneck and take a major step forward. After all, cultivators as a whole were still in their infancy. They had colonized seventy-three out of billions of galaxies. Jack would become the pioneer to a brighter future.

If he survived this war.

He smiled with anticipation. Achieving this Universe of the Body boundary had massively increased his powers to an extent he couldn’t even calculate right now. His physicality had grown multiple times more robust, while his ability to perceive the Dao had shot upward, inscribed onto his very bones. However, he wasn’t done. He still needed to break into the A-Grade.

Sinking back into his body, Jack gazed at the wrung out Life Drop in his hand. With a grin, he tossed it out, burying it deep into the Green Dragon Realm and letting it drink from its energy.

He then gazed at his organs. Each had been made into a planet, temporarily bare. That would change soon. The strength of an A-Grade cultivator depended on the strength of the cultivators living inside their inner world, so Jack needed to create some. Technically, he already possessed powerful cultivators in the Black Hole World and Green Dragon Realm, but as they were mere visitors instead of being born of his Dao, their power didn’t add to his.

Waving his hands, Jack temporarily isolated the two realms from the rest of his body—an invisible curtain, one they wouldn’t even perceive but which would protect them from the time acceleration he was about to use.

The barren planets of his organs began to move and shake, going through a series of geological changes. Meteors crossed the starry void which used to be his flesh, crashing into the planets to shape them. Eventually, the universe stabilized. The planets didn’t spin around themselves or orbit the sun—they were, after all, his organs—but Jack’s Dao created the right laws to make them work.

His mental image descended again. He stood over the oceans and blew into them, upsetting the waters. Tiny organisms were infused. He stepped back and let them grow, watching them multiply and evolve as they populated his planets. Amoebas turned into fish, which turned into amphibians, which turned into land animals. Birds appeared. The worlds of his organs grew richer, the lifeforms on them sporting great diversity.

His stomach held large, dinosaur-looking lizards. His spleen was a world of poison, its creatures colorful and deadly, while his lungs became windy realms populated mostly by flying creatures. His intestines sported long worms. It was interesting how the nature of each organ affected the growth of its inhabitants. At the same time, the influence of Jack’s Dao of the Fist was prevalent, his every planet favoring the birth of fist-wielding animals. Most species were barbaric and warmongering, but they also enjoyed their lives, living fairly and straightforwardly.

Jack found himself loving them like a father.

His ability to accelerate time lessened again, burdened by the many souls he now contained, while the creatures inside him kept evolving. He saw the first sapient beings appear, not all of them humanoid. They multiplied and developed. The moment they acquired true sapience, his time-accelerating abilities fell out hard. He could still do it, to an extent, but the flow of time inside him now approximated the real world. It was perhaps only ten or twenty times faster. He assumed it would accelerate again as he delved deeper into his Daos, but the creatures inside him would also grow stronger and more populous, restraining him further.

The growth of an A-Grade cultivator depended on two things—resources and time. The more resources one had, the more treasures would be created inside them, and the thicker the Dao would be, letting their newborn cultivators grow faster. The more time they let pass, the more their inner cultivators would progress, growing their overall strength and therefore the A-Grade cultivator’s.

In time, he pictured his organ-planets covered by sprawling civilizations, using the rivers of stars which were his blood to travel from one organ to the next, spreading and exchanging insights. It would be glorious. He really looked forward to it.

Jack possessed incredibly rich Dao. He was certain his inner world would develop far more efficiently than most, but there was nothing he could do to lessen the restraints of time. His next breakthrough wouldn’t happen for a while. Probably until long after the Crusade had ended. This was the highest realm he would reach for now, any further gains limited to his Dao and techniques…but he didn’t mind. He had a feeling this would be enough. His current strength was unfathomable—certainly near the very top of the universe.

Elder Hero wouldn’t know what hit him.

As Jack thought about these things, his inner world had kept growing. The Dao was so rich that it practically begged the native creatures to discover it. Jack found a host of gorilla sapients. With a smile, he descended to them invisibly, nudging their minds in the right direction.

A golden-furred gorilla going through a life-or-death struggle suddenly grasped something majestic. Its entire aura changed. It used these fledgling powers to defeat the beasts attacking it, then gazed at its fist.

This was the first creature in Jack’s universe to touch the Dao. More would come, their overall strength quickly rising. The moment the first appeared, the Dao in Jack’s body began to circulate subtly, propelled by the insights and utilization of its cultivators. A self-contained system.

At the same time, the moment that golden-furred gorilla touched the Dao, Jack knew he’d truly broken into the A-Grade. His inner universe had stabilized. He opened his eyes, gazing at the dark and destroyed room around him, sensing the massive changes inside his body. Everything felt different—now that he no longer needed to guide the development of his inner universe, he could take some time to get used to his new body.

For now, however, he couldn’t stop grinning.

He had ascended. He had transformed. And he was ready to kick some Immortal ass.