Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

Chapter 432: Star-Eye Wonder

The nothingness was impressive. There were flickers of light, multi-colored curtains washing over the void reminiscent of Earth’s auroras. They swam and wrapped around each other in the sky, yet they did not exist—nothing but visions the mind invented to protect itself from true nihility.

“What do you think?” Mia asked, puffing up her chest. “Isn’t it impressive?”

Jack gave a small smile. He’d seen this before. The so-called nothingness was the interdimensional void, the gap between dimensions in which the Green Dragon Realm was also situated. Perhaps even the whole universe was just an island in this massive sea where space and time held no meaning, where distance and size were irrelevant.

Maybe, much farther down the road of cultivation, Jack would have the power to traverse this sea. But he definitely didn’t now. If he tried to fly into it, he would just…disappear.

“Have you never tried to explore it?” he asked. He remembered that the Black Hole People used to have A-Grades in their ranks.

“Explore what? The nothingness?” She chuckled. “Don’t be silly.”

Jack nodded. He’d expected that. Yet, interacting with this interdimensional sea shouldn’t be impossible. Archon Green Dragon and the ancestor of these people—Archon Black Hole—had both established their own small world inside this sea. It was a frontier meant for those at the highest peaks.

Jack looked away, choosing not to bother with things so far beyond him. The Black Hole People were right—they called the interdimensional sea “nothingness” and had established lounging spots here, at the top of their eighty-third layer, so people could relax and enjoy the view. Just by looking to the sides, Jack could see many groups of wealthy individuals eating under the aurora.

“I cannot pierce this sea,” he said. “There is no point staying here. Let’s go.”

“Mm.” Mia nodded, leading him back to the ladder they’d come from. “Where do you want to go now?” she asked. “Back home?”

“No. Let’s visit the Vortex as well.”

Mia smiled. The Vortex was the core of their world, the area situated at its very center. It was also the place most closely connected to the wider universe—if Jack was interested in it, he must have decided to look for a way out. That made her happy.

“Are you really going to save us?” she asked through the long journey down. The two of them had entered a large elevator connecting the eighty-three layers. It was usually reserved for the highest occasions, but Jack’s existence qualified as such.

“You don’t need saving,” Jack commented. “You’re fine here. Maybe your world isn’t infinite, but so what? It’s vast enough.”

“It’s not about size!” Mia protested. “We want to be free! To see the stars, and the moons, and the rivers, and the endless void, and to experience distance! Anything longer than forty-two miles!”

Jack smiled. He’d heard these words before, almost the exact same. This had been Nauja’s wish as well, when she was trapped with her tribe at Trial Planet’s Barbarian Ring.

The children of the Ancients are like fairy tale princesses, he mused in a rare moment of humor. Always trapped somewhere, eager to see the outside world, and needing rescue.

Then again, weren’t the Ancients the same? Peaceful, kind, and brave. Trapped in a galaxy-sized prison before Enas gave them the secrets of cultivation. Then, they became explorers.

Jack gazed at Mia with new eyes. For a moment, he thought he saw a vision of the past; an incredibly distant ancestor casting its shadow on this innocent girl with big dreams.

“Is it beautiful?” she suddenly asked, breaking him out of his reverie.

“Is what beautiful?” he replied.

“The universe!”

“...It’s dangerous.”

“I know that. You’ve said it, like, a thousand times. But is it also beautiful?”

Jack hesitated. For reasons he couldn’t quite decipher, he didn’t want to answer this question. It felt too bright, too cheerful, and to indulge would be like abandoning his current state of mourning—letting down Eric one more time.

He kept his mouth shut. Mia didn’t push him, but soon, his own stubbornness did. Since when was he afraid of a simple question? Had he become such a coward that he couldn’t even state some facts?

Something tiny softened inside his heart.

“It is beautiful,” he finally replied. “There are endless rivers of stars washing through the cosmos. I’m talking, humongous. A grain of sand compared to your Black Hole World is about as big as your entire world compared to a single one of those stars, and they are millions. And the distances between them—you cannot even imagine. Forty-two miles is all you’ve ever known, but just one star to the next can be separated by trillions of miles. And then there’s galaxies—each of them houses billions of stars, and they are almost infinitely far apart from each other. The universe is so unbelievably massive that nobody can even fathom it.”

Mia was starstruck. The image Jack painted with his words came to reinforce the one she’d built in her mind, and the combined awe left her giggling.

“And are there people on all those stars?” she asked.

“People don’t live on stars—those are just giant balls of fire. They live on planets, smaller boulders which orbit the stars. Of course, even the tiniest planet would be far larger than the Black Hole World, but you don’t necessarily lose out on living space. Planets are only occupied on the surface.”

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“Only the surface?” she exclaimed. “That’s so wasteful! What about all the empty space inside?”

Jack laughed. “It’s not empty. There are rocks, and lava, and tectonic plates on which entire continents are seated. It would be difficult to live there, and there is no need—just the surface is large enough.”

“Oh! So every planet has more people than my world?”

“Not exactly. Only a tiny minority of planets can sustain life—most are barren wastelands too hot, cold, or toxic for us. However, even this tiny minority adds up. There are maybe a million inhabitable planets in my home galaxy—if each of them contains just a few million people, that’s a terrifying amount.”

Mia was like a child eating the first ice-cream of the season. Her eyes drooled with wonder. “Tell me more!” she shouted.

Jack laughed again. “There are many species of people in the universe. Some look like you and me. Others seem half-human and half-animal—though they’re actually humanoids evolved from animals other than monkeys—while many are just plain weird. Just in my short travels, I’ve seen small blue people wearing turbans, large red ones with bushy beards, people made of stone… There was even a species whose people are rectangular and made of glass, like the windows you see in every house. To speak, they vibrate themselves at specific frequencies, the same way we vibrate our vocal cords.”

“Wooow!” Mia exclaimed. “How do you know they’re people and not windows?”

“They have a head and limbs,” Jack explained. “Though I admit, I have no idea how their bodies work. I should look into that when I have the time. Before becoming a cultivator, I was a biologist—a scientist studying the mysteries of life.”

“That sounds awesome!”

“It was. But tiring, too. Science is fun, but doing it properly takes a good deal of patience. You wouldn’t believe how many edge cases I had to cover just to almost finish my PhD.”

“What’s that?”

“My scientific research.”

“Ohh! What was it on?”

“The evolutionary history of grasshoppers. I wanted to see in what order they developed their telling characteristics.”

“And did you?”

“Kind of. I came up with some reasonable hypotheses. All that was left was to write them down and get them peer-reviewed, which can be a bitch. That was when the System arrived to my world. If it had been just a few months late, I would have been Dr. Rust by now.”

She gave him an odd glance. “You, a doctor? Yeah… I think you should stick to being a cultivator.”

Jack was surprised, then burst into laughter. “Not that kind of doctor! But, just so you know, I am a healer! I studied it as part of my training. I can heal a lot of things!”

Except my own heart.

He was surprised at how this thought popped out by itself—but also at how okay he was with it. At the very least, it didn’t stun him with grief. That was a welcome change. It was only then that he realized how swept up he’d gotten in the discussion. He smiled. Not all was lost.

“Thanks,” he said in a softer voice. “I needed that.”

“Hmm? Needed what?”

“It’s okay. Just, thanks.”

Mia blinked in surprise. “You’re welcome?”

A soft ding came from above. The massive elevator doors opened, revealing a flat patch of ground. Some guards looked at them with questions but swallowed them back down when Mia flashed them a badge.

“This way,” she said, leading Jack deeper into this layer. The corridors were empty here and the illumination sparser. It looked more like an administrative space than living quarters. “This is the first layer,” Mia explained. “Not many people are allowed here because it’s so close to the Vortex, but we get a pass!”

“Shouldn’t the Elder Council be situated here?” Jack wondered. “Seems like a great center of authority.”

“That’s exactly why they’re not here. The Council needs to be one with the people, not overlooking them from the distance.”

“...That’s actually pretty nice.”

Finally, they reached a spiraling staircase heading downward, painted completely black. There were more guards here, both of them D-Grades—and, this time, they did question them. Jack remained silent—it was Mia who handled everything. They seemed to know her.

Which made perfect sense. Mia had been the one to find him when he first arrived at this world, and he had to have been spat out by the Vortex. She could only have found him if she worked here as a guard—or something similar, given her weakness relative to these D-Grade guards.

“Come on,” she said five minutes later. “Let’s go!”

They descended the staircase. Mia, who was leading the way, was not in a hurry. In fact, as they advanced deeper and deeper, Jack could sense her growing scared. She did her best not to show it, but how could she fool Jack’s perception?

“Don’t worry,” he said. “With me here, nothing bad will happen to you.”

He cringed at his own promise. How could he say such words after the death of his son? Yet, Mia seemed pacified. “Thanks,” she replied, believing in him. Her steps quickened, and before long, they’d reached the end. The staircase ended at nothing—just a landing before pitch-black darkness. Jack sent his perception into it, and he easily discovered that what lay ahead of them was a roughly mile-wide sphere of distorted space. There was no gravity, nor was there air—it was similar to the vacuum of space.

“I cannot follow you further,” Mia said timidly. “But, uh, I’ll be waiting at the top of the staircase, okay?”

Jack shot her a glance. This void was harmless to him, and if he wanted to, he could easily carry her along and protect her. But there was no need.

“I may cultivate here for a bit,” he said. “If you grow tired, just return by yourself. I can find the way to my house.”

“No way! I’ll wait for you!”

“Whatever you prefer. See you later.”

With that, he turned and flew into the darkness. He didn’t really go yet—instead, he hid himself and waited until he was sure Mia had returned to the first layer. Only then did he actually venture deeper.

Well, as deep as there was to go. The darkness could not hinder his perception. He could see the core of this world directly in front of him—a small black sphere spinning in reverse, emitting a unique form of radiation and unraveling itself little by little. The energy packed inside it was as vast as an ocean, so the process was extremely slow, but Jack could sense that this core, whose existence had supported the entire Black Hole World for over a billion years, was nearing the end of its life.

If nothing happened, this world would collapse in another million years or two. Jack shook his head. Did the Elders know and were keeping it a secret to avoid frightening the populace, or had their cultivation degraded to twhere they couldn’t sense such a thing?

It seemed obvious to Jack, but the rate of decay of this mini black hole could only be perceived by those possessing deep spatial understandings.

“I guess I have to save them,” he muttered, sitting cross-legged before the black hole—at a respectable distance away, though there wasn’t any suction force. This object was an oddity. He could sense that this was the true form of the Animal Abyss, the black hole with the fragmented event horizon. It served not only as the core of this world, but also as its connection to the wider universe. In order to open a passage, Jack would need to fully attune himself to this object.

A normal C-Grade, or even a B-Grade, would be helpless. Jack, however, had already assimilated with the Life Drop, a treasure very similar to this black hole. He had confidence that, given enough time, he would be able to at least let himself out.

But all those were impossible if he did not repair the crack in his Dao. That was his first order of business. And so, with a deep sigh, Jack closed his eyes and sank into meditation.

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