Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

Chapter 420: Animal Abyss

The universe remained dark. Endless stars glittered in all directions.

How horrifying this could be, Jack imagined, leaning against the glass window. To be isolated here without a starship or the ability to fly… This is a prison of another kind, an inescapable loneliness. No matter how you float around, the closest salvation lies many light years away…

“We’re getting close!” Nauja shouted from the helm. “We’re in the territory of the Animal Abyss. No more teleporting. Jack, keep an eye out!”

His irrelevant thoughts disappeared. He sharpened his mind, becoming like a different person as he spread out his aura to its maximum range and constantly scanned space. Brock and Gan Salin joined them on the bridge.

“Stop!” he yelled after a half hour. Nauja brought the bromobile to an instant halt.

Jack frowned. He had sensed something different just now—as if space was slightly wrinkled ahead of them, its nature almost imperceptibly different from everywhere else. Slowly, he focused his perception there, attempting to investigate without alerting whatever that thing was.

His perception pressed against the wrinkles, seeping through them like water soaking through paper. It was like a second layer of folded space hidden behind the normal one. In it, Jack could sense a bubble-like layer covering an incredibly vast area. It was so large, in fact, that he could only barely sense its curvature—if he didn’t suspect it encapsulated the abyss, he might have perceived this as a wall instead.

“What is it?” Nauja asked.

“A formation…” Jack replied, furrowing his brows in concentration. “It’s not meant to stop us, but to alert someone to our presence. It surrounds the entire Abyss at a radius of a million miles.”

“Really!?” Salin raised both brows. “That’s big!”

“Yeah. Even for a B-Grade proficient in spacetime, creating such a large formation must have taken millennia—and I doubt it’s the only one.”

“Can you break it?” Nauja asked.

“Not without alerting whoever controls it. However, if it’s just getting past… I think I can do that.”

The four of them exited the bromobile, which Jack shrank and received into his pocket. Then, he wrapped the four of them in a space bubble and slowly approached the formation. He spent three hours examining it. Then, when he was sure he could succeed, he very slowly pushed their bubble forward.

While he had called this a wall, it wasn’t really one. Instead, it was a collection of energy streams circulating at extreme speed. They all passed by a central node at the core of the formation, so if any energy stream was slowed down, whoever controlled the formation would be able to detect it. These streams even sank into the underlying levels of space, making it so nobody could teleport past them.

Bypassing this formation was the equivalent of crossing a river without touching the water.

In Jack’s understanding, there were two ways to achieve this. The first was to sink deeper into space than the streams could reach—space was separated into layers, with one’s speed increasing exponentially the deeper they went. This was also the principle behind teleportation.

However, whoever made this formation wasn’t an amateur. The streams reached deeper than Jack could go. To bypass them, he would need to teleport with the efficiency of a high-level teleporter—which was impossible for the current him, as well as almost everyone in the B-Grade.

The second solution was to divert the streams, making them pass around his bubble without touching it. He would also need to use the Dao of Time to accelerate them just enough that they covered the extra distance in precisely the same amount of time as if he wasn’t there. However, since there were multiple streams superimposed over each other and moving at different speeds, this was more difficult than it sounded. Even with Jack’s current understanding, he didn’t have a hundred percent certainty of success.

But he believed he could do it.

The bubble pushed against the formation and slowly, at a snail’s pace, passed through it. Jack was fully focused. His perception covered the surrounding space, catching all streams and diverting them into a precise trajectory at an exact speed. With every inch the bubble moved forward, he carefully released the streams behind them and took control of the ones they’d just entered. His control wasn’t perfect, but he was confident it was good enough to not alert the formation. After all, miniscule discrepancies were expected in such a large area.

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They advanced one inch at a time. Jack didn’t dare to hurry at all, devoting all of his attention into manipulating the streams of space energy. This process required all of his expertise.

Finally, however, they made it through. Jack released the last energy stream and groaned, his body going soft. His eyes swerved from exhaustion.

“Did we do it?” Salin asked.

“Yes…” Jack replied, his voice weak. He took out the bromobile and flew into it, slumping into a couch. “Just…give me some time. Let me restore myself before going deeper.”

“Absolutely! Good job!”

Jack smiled, then entered meditation. His tense mind slowly recovered, regathering its energy and re-entering its apex state. A few hours later, Jack finally nodded. “I’m good,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The bromobile kept advancing. Nauja guided it forward slowly, so Jack could scan the space ahead of them. Though it was only a million miles, which would normally take them less than an hour to cross even without teleportation, they covered the distance in two days.

They could still see nothing in the distance. The Animal Abyss was a black hole, so detecting it with their eyes was impossible. However, from this close, they could make out the distortion in light surrounding it—the stars seemed warped around a section of space as light curved around the black hole.

Finally, as they reached within ten thousand miles, Jack stopped them again. “There is another formation,” he said. “Let me check.”

He flew out, already frowning. This formation was far more intricate than the last one. It followed the same principles but with ten times the energy streams, and it also contained something like a spatial barrier—without vibrating at a specific frequency, it would be impossible to pass, and discovering this frequency couldn’t be done in a short amount of time. If anyone tried to enter without discovering this barrier, they would be stuck here for several minutes, enough time to let the B-Grade guarding the abyss arrive.

Of course, the formation could also be broken through with force, but that required far more power than Jack could currently wield.

He spent ten hours inspecting this formation. He tried all sorts of discreet experiments and ran various scenarios through his head. Finally, however, he was forced to admit he was outclassed. He could not cross this formation without alerting it.

“It’s no use,” he muttered as he re-entered the bromobile. “I found the frequency to bypass the barrier, but I cannot control the streams well enough. If we so much as touch it, whoever controls the formation will know.”

“Well, you did your best. It was worth a shot,” Salin tried to comfort him. “Our goal was just to take a look, anyway. See there? That area of warped light? That’s the periphery of the black hole. It’s an area of warped space which renders one’s perception useless. B-Grades can enter it to look for treasures, and so can C-Grades who understand the Dao of Space, but there is always the chance of running into a space anomaly and getting sucked into the abyss without a chance to resist. Many of the Animal Kingdom’s Elders have died in such a fashion. However, that area is precisely where the treasures appear, so they still send people every now and then.”

Jack frowned. The more he heard about this black hole, the more abnormal he realized it was.

Archon Green Dragon’s inheritance contained a lot of insights into the Dao of Spacetime. That included knowledge about black holes, which were the natural end of all spacetime. After studying that inheritance for three years, Jack could be considered half an expert—and he knew with certainty that the spacetime surrounding a black hole was highly warped but also completely smooth. The area of irregular space that Salin described was impossible, because the black hole’s gravitational pull would straighten out any and all spacetime disturbances.

Could it be something else? he wondered.

There were more celestial bodies with intense gravitational fields. For example, neutron stars. Those could be surrounded by a field of irregular space, but they wouldn’t possess the light-swallowing capabilities of a black hole. As Jack considered the issue, he realized that if this wasn’t a black hole, he had no idea what it was.

Could it be a mutated black hole? he wondered. Perhaps existing in a spacetime anomaly itself, or maybe surrounded by another spacetime phenomenon which is responsible for the irregular space field? But it still doesn’t make sense. Could it be some extremely rare but previously-undiscovered celestial body?

The more he learned about this place, the more curious he became. He wanted to check it out. Unfortunately, since he couldn’t bypass the formation, it simply wasn’t worth the risk.

Not to mention that, if he did check it out, he would likely come out with nothing. The Animal Kingdom had many B-Grades and a million years—if this enigma was easy to unravel, they would have done it already, and they wouldn’t have to sacrifice people to look for treasures.

When I get stronger… After I destroy the Animal Kingdom… I should return to have a look, he told himself, sparing a final glance at the mysterious black hole. Then, Nauja turned the starship around and they flew back out, penetrating the previous formation again to reach the outside space.

“Let’s go,” Jack said. “We still have to find Shol and Earth. Everything else can wait.”

They broke through space, teleporting a trillion miles in an instant, and just like that, they were gone.

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