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

Noah looked at the two notifications, then at the two gods. He couldn’t help but curse again and asked. “Can you show me what the better blessings give?”

“Now, where would the fun be in that?” Eldar replied with a grin still on his face.

Noah saw that grin paired with that handsome elf face and suddenly had the urge to punch the god in front of him. Of course, that would be foolish and dumb… and idiotic… “God, I want to punch him so bad.” He thought, but he didn’t let it show on his face.

He just smiled and said. “In that case, I’ll do my best to get as many elements as possible. Now, uhhh, how do I get out of here?”

“Just tell the system that you’re finished.” Aelia replied.

“Okay, thank you Aelia. Guess I’ll be seeing you guys around?”

“Hmmm. Maybe if you live long enough, and I hope you do. Just do your best, Noah.”

Noah smiled and nodded at finally being called his name. “Will do! System, I’m finished!”

---

As suddenly as he arrived at the hall, so too did he find himself back on Earth, waiting for the rest of the remaining deliveries to arrive. He happily hummed to himself as he checked out his new stats.

In a blink of an eye, his mana was now nearing five thousand. With an eighty percent boost to his intelligence and regeneration stats, he was getting really close to doubling both raw stats with his soul cultivation, title, and now his blessings.

He could feel himself so full of mana that he actually didn’t know what to do with it all. He tried conjuring a normal explosive spear and found that it barely put a dent in his mana pool now. This presented a new problem, though. “What kind of single-target spell can I make with all this mana?”

Noah legitimately didn’t know.

He would need to figure it out soon, though. With how the last fight went with the war chief, the spear was becoming a bit too weak for his taste. Of course, the next logical step was to make his spell out of metal, but that felt a bit too boring.

He tried to think about the weapons from the old world and slumped his shoulders. All humanity did was make bigger and bigger explosions, after all. That or figure out ways to throw stuff at things really hard.

“There has to be a better way to do this than just make stuff go boom.” He pulled at his hair, trying to think of something, but his mind was just blank. “Ugh. Magic exists and all I can think about is blowing shit up!”

“Sir! This is the last shipment of necessities today.” A voice on his right said.

Noah turned his head towards the voice and saw that it was John Harris from the spider extermination mission.

“Oh! Hey John! Is this the last for today, or are we ready to get out of here?” He asked while looking at all the trucks gathered around them.

“We’re ready to go, sir.”

“Come on, none of that sir business. You’re making me feel old!” Noah said as he laughed. “Now come on, let’s put these trucks away and gather everyone else. It’s finally time to go!”

“Yes, si… Noah”

“That’s more like it!”

With that, Noah walked toward one of the trucks and summoned a portal leading to his artifact. He enlarged it until the truck could safely fit into it and told the driver to go in.

The driver wasn’t all too convinced by the magic portal since before this, all they had to do was dump everything at a designated place and, a few hours later, it would all disappear. This, however, was a whole new thing.

Noah saw the hesitation in the driver’s eyes and reassured him that it would all be ok by walking into the portal himself, then coming out immediately after with the most welcoming smile he could muster on his face.

He saw the driver finally shift gears and slowly move the truck into the portal. Satisfied, he walked toward the other trucks and had them all go in the portal.

Then a thought occurred to him. He turned to John who was following behind him and asked. “Quick! Most outlandish magic spell you can think of!”

“What? Uhhh… uhmm… Teleportation?”

“You’re just saying that because of the port… wait… space manipulation, of course!” He excitedly went into his artifact to study the space in it. After all, what better way to study space than going into an artifact that holds an entire planet in its pendant sized body?

He waved at the drivers who were talking amongst each other in the forest of alien plants and moved to sit a few hundred meters away from it.

Noah spread out his mana in a one-meter sphere around him and tried to manipulate the space through it, like with what he did to the piece of metal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. All he managed to take control of was the air.

“Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy…” He sighed and decided to try again.

… He tried nine more times after that, but he just couldn’t sense space. Sighing, he got up and was about to exit the artifact when Gaia appeared in front of him, startling him in the process.

“Noah, were you trying to sense the space around us?”

“Gaia! You startled me!” He said as he calmed himself down. “And yes, I am. I’ve been wanting a more powerful attack, and a friend mentioned teleportation which led me to space manipulation.”

“Hmmm. Yes, space is a very powerful element, yet it is also a hard one to sense, let alone master… Fortunately…”

“Fortunately?” He asked expectantly.

“Yes. Fortunately, this artifact can help you with your goal…”

“MhmM. How’s that?”

“In here, space is amplified and easier to sense. So all you need to do is make a place devoid of air so as to not distract your mana from sensing space.”

“Of course! I’ll get right on it!”

And so he did. He ran to where all the scrap metal was dumped and activated [Metal Manipulation] to form a seamless, air-tight box around him, just around ten feet across. Next, he manipulated all the air into a ball to surround his head so he could breathe, leaving a vacuum everywhere else in the box.

With all that done, he sat down in a meditative position and spread out his mana to fill the metal box. He focused on his [Mana Sense] and felt the space around him.

It was odd, to say the least. All the books and theories said that the space between celestial bodies, therefore space, had gasses and dark matter in it. But with all the air condensed around his head, and this place being inside his artifact, whatever he was sensing couldn’t be any of those.

And he was sensing something… and nothing at the same time. “That’s just weird.” He thought, but he continued with his experiment and tried to manipulate the something.

When he did, though, he felt his mana drain out of him at unimaginable speeds. Even with his regeneration stat at seven hundred and twenty, it did little to stymie the drain. It was like using a piece of cloth to stop a leak; it wasn’t very effective.

It did its job though and bought him enough time to compress the space just a bit before immediately cutting off the mana.

 

“FUCK YEAH!”

He pumped his fists and did a little dance in celebration.

Checking his mana, that small compressing of space actually cost him close to six hundred mana. “Welp, I guess there’s no ‘one step mile’ in my immediate future.”

Despite that, he was excited at the prospect of manipulating space itself. With it, he could potentially influence gravity, teleport around, make portals that led to places other than his artifact. The possibilities were endless.

But then he thought of the nothing that he sensed. “It was weirder than space, that’s for sure. Hmmm…”

He sat down again and did the process all over again, but this time focusing on the nothing.

Five seconds later, he collapsed on the floor, panting. His mana was at zero, with a headache that threatened to make his head pop. He hadn’t felt his mana bottom out ever since that fight with the boar at the start of the apocalypse. He smiled, though, as he stared at the notification in front of him.

 

Although it was obvious that he wouldn’t be able to make use of this particular skill anytime soon, he was excited at the thought, nonetheless.

No more was he just a simple guy that only made bigger and bigger explosions (of course, he’d still feel satisfaction at the sight of a massive explosion). No, now space and the void itself was at his fingertips.

He couldn’t wait for the future to arrive where he could cast spells without worrying about his mana bottoming out.

With his new and improved regeneration stat kicking in, he only needed an hour to get from zero to full mana. “Maybe I should put more stat points into regen soon?” He asked himself, but then shook his head. “Maybe… but not now. When my mana reaches 10k probably.”

“Congratulations, Noah.”

Suddenly, Gaia’s voice came from behind him as he quickly turned around to see a faint smile that almost immediately disappeared on her face. It was gone so fast that he doubted if he was just seeing things.

“Ah, yes. Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.” He awkwardly said.

“Nonsense. It is what this artifact is for, to support you.”

“Still, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I sense that this conversation will not go anywhere. Just say my name if you want assistance.”

And just like that, he blinked, and she disappeared. He looked around once, then twice to make sure that she wasn’t going to surprise him again, then exited the artifact. “She really needs to wear a bell around her neck or something.”

---

Once he was outside, and in the real world, he rushed over to the police station while amplifying his voice.

“EVERYONE! IT’S TIME! GATHER AT THE POLICE STATION!”

Then he paused as a thought struck him. “Is sound an element? I’ve been amplifying my voice but I haven’t gotten the manipulation skill for it… hmmm…”

He tried making vibrations in the air to try to get the skill, but nothing worked. “Hmmm… Maybe I have to imitate actual sounds?” So he hummed to himself and carefully tried to imitate how the air moved in response to his voice.

When that didn’t work, he tried to imitate actual coherent sounds and not just humming, starting with letters in the alphabet.

He did a fist pump and celebrated. He was feeling good.

“Three elements in a single day.” He smiled. “Today’s a good day.”