A World in the Palm of my Hands: A LitRPG Apocalypse

It was a cloudless night with a clear view of the stars when they arrived back at the apartment building. They went up to the tenth floor to invite Talal for dinner but, he didn’t answer the door so they assumed that he was out hunting for food or levels. Then Noah and Mark went outside to eat and make a tally of their gains today, or more like, Mark’s gains as he actually got two levels from the five orcs and that put both his strength and constitution at thirty-five each. “Status”

Mark saw that his strength and constitution were at a respectable three times the average of ten. But he was not satisfied. He wanted more power, more skills, more spells, especially skills and spells that could make use of his growing stamina pool, he could only hope that there would be a class evolution mechanic to the system like in the various webnovels he’d read.

“Not bad, I got two levels out of those five orcs. There are probably diminishing returns when you kill stuff lower level than you but otherwise, those Invaders definitely gave more experience than the random animals we’ve killed” Mark noted as he analyzed his gains, then he remembered the axe and looked to Noah to get it analyzed.

One step ahead of his cousin, Noah had already taken out of his artifact and used analyze on it. With his [Analyze] skill already at level 7 he was confident that he could at least get some useful information from the axe.

“Huh, it says it’s tier one and that we can sell it for five mana stones! Give me that fire axe you’ve been using.”

Mark picked the axe up off the ground, it was already pretty beat up with cracks all over the head and knicks covered the whole length of the shaft from blocking that scout’s axe repeatedly. He walked over to sit next to Noah as he analyzed the axes.

“Well damn, it’s tier zero and we can’t even sell it for anything. No wonder though that that axe you got from the orc cut through its head like it was butter, weapons apparently have tiers now.” Noah weighed the two axes in his hands as if trying to ascertain if weight had anything to do with tiers but, he found that the fire axe actually weighed more than the war axe.

“Hmmm, so we’ve got five axes, I’m definitely keeping one for emergencies, you’re keeping two so you can dual wield or just have one as a spare and that leaves us with two that we can sell for ten mana stones.”

As mark listened, he couldn’t help but think out loud “Wonder if wands and staffs are a thing, you know, like in harry potter. I’d imagine that that would be the weapon of choice for a master of all four elements like you”

“Great idea! Let’s check out the store, I’ll go look up wands and you look up staffs.”

As they were scrolling through the store Mark couldn’t help but notice that the lowest tier a staff could go was tier two and those ones cost hundreds of mana stones each, he pressed his finger in the air so as to receive more information on the cheapest staff.

It looked like a normal stick that you’d find on the side of the road except that it had a glowing red gem at its tip which was unnaturally wrapped in snake like segments of the wood.

“No luck on staffs, the lowest tier on here is two and the cheapest one costs nine hundred and ninety nine mana stones… How you doing on wands?”

“Much better than you, looks like wands are much cheaper than staffs but at the same time pretty trash in its effects. Most of them just give access to some basic spells, though I guess having one is always better, you can apparently charge the mana stones embedded in them so you don’t have to draw from your own mana pool which is pretty cool.” Noah said as he was ruminating whether to buy a wand “They’re all pretty cheap and for ten mana stones, I could buy one of the cheapest tier zero ones…”

“OH WAIT. We should have fifty stones each as a reward for killing those orcs!” Noah hurriedly checked his quest window expecting to get some mana stones but was only left confused as he saw that the counter only showed that the number of orcs decreased.

“Damn, guess we can’t cheese the system” Noah remarked dejectedly while looking at the ground

“Don’t worry I can give you the fifty stones so you can buy a wand. Besides, we’re gonna need your damage if we want to kill that Warchief of theirs”

Noah looked up and smiled at his cousin “You are really the best cousin a guy can ever ask for!”

“Don’t forget about the armors and the bodies, we can probably sell those for a pretty penny too.”

“Yup yup, on it.”

With that, Noah brought out the corpses of the orcs and analyzed them and their leather armors.

“Okay so we get five for the bodies and nine for the armors since we’re definitely keeping two for ourselves. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“That leaves us with seventy-four mana stones all together, I should be able to buy something relatively decent with that”

And so, Noah got to work perusing the shop for the most cost-efficient wands, with the seventy-four mana stones he had, he could buy a wand that was relatively decent amongst the trash. And after a few minutes of scrolling, he finally found one to his liking.

Noah immediately bought it and perused some more. Then he had a thought “Wonder if there’s stuff for cultivation” at that thought, he went and put in the word “cultivation” in the search bar and a whole bunch of stuff came up, from pills and potions, to meditation mats that cost a pretty penny. Then he sorted everything from lowest to highest price and he found something interesting “Information Packets”, there were a whole bunch of them with specific topics per packet but what he was interested in was the one called “Information Packet – Basics of body cultivation” it only cost ten mana stones so he didn’t even think and just bought it straight away.

Obeying wordlessly, Noah took a step back and five seconds later the space in front of him warped and distorted much like when his artifact first came to him. POP. Just like that, a wand and what looked like a piece of transparent crystal popped into being. The wand wasn’t much to look at, it was obviously just a cut off branch of some tree fashioned into a wand with a mana stone sticking out of its butt. He analyzed it and sure enough, it was the same wand he saw in the shop. Next, he examined the crystal and almost immediately a new notification popped into existence

Noah immediately thought “Yes” and a torrent of information invaded his brain, it was as if the information was a bull and his brain was the china shop, it rampaged around giving him a headache then a few seconds later, the information finally settled down along with his headache.

“Why was that so painful, it was even worse than the time I got my class!”

“Oh, don’t be a baby Noah, now please explain to me what that crystal was?”

Noah grinned and teased “Nothing much, just an information packet pertaining to body cultivation”

Mark jumped up “Did you say cultivation?!”

“YUP” Noah said as his grin grew wider, he was satisfied with his cousin’s reaction

“SO?! HOW DO WE DO IT?! OUT WITH IT MAN!” Mark asked with the excitement of a child on Christmas.

“OKAY okay, just let me examine it a bit”

Apparently, he’d accidentally stumbled upon the basics with his spell [Enhance] which was to fuse every cell in his body with mana, but he needed to make it permanent and more in depth. He sat in a meditative position and sank into meditation. He toggled his innate skill [Mana Sense] on and concentrated on the mana within his body he then cast his spell [Enhance] and felt how the mana actually only wrapped around his cells, eventually dissipated and was released into the air through his pores.

“HEY!”

Noah opened his eyes with a start and blushed “Sorry about that, I kinda forgot about you hehe. Anyway, what you need to do first is to find a way to fuse your cells with mana like how I kind of do it when I use [Enhance] but more uhhh… just more, you know?”

“Hmmm, I think I understand what you’re trying to say. Can you cast your skill on me just so I can refresh the feeling in my head?”

“Sure! Anything for you!”

So, Mark imitated Noah and sat in a meditative position, closed his eyes and told his cousin “I’m ready when you are.”

Noah cast his skill on Mark and after a few minutes, he heard him mumble “again”. He obeyed and cast it again, and again, and again, until after the tenth time when black sludge started oozing out of Mark’s pores. A gust of wind came towards them and he smelled it, the most horrendous smell his nose had ever come in contact with. It was worse than vomit, worse than even the smell of sewage. It made his face crumple up and his eyes water. He immediately cast water ball and dropped it on top of his cousin’s head.

Mark was rudely interrupted in the middle of his meditation but had luckily already finished his cultivation as he was staring at the proof right in front of him.

“I DID IT! HAHA!”

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean, obviously I just cultivated a body of copper! I’m a cultivator now! HAHA!”

“Oh yeah Mr. cultivator? Why don’t you smell yourself first.”

Mark paused and sniffed “WTF! WHY THE HELL DO I SMELL LIKE SHIT?!”

“Worse than shit actually.” Noah interjected as he threw three more waterballs at Mark, hoping that he could wash it all away. But some of the gunk stuck to him like white on rice or in this case, black on sludge.

“You’re going to need soap, lots and lots of soap.”