The Path of Ascension 6: A LitRPG Adventure

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Matt didn’t hesitate as he grabbed a window ledge and hoisted himself up.

Like in the bat caves on the first sub floor, climbing as a Tier 11 was a simple task, and he was quickly a dozen stories above the ground. But just as he was passing a window, using it as an easy ledge to climb on, his gut screamed at him to move, so he took a leap.

Throwing himself off the building, he noticed a hand with finger-long claws reach out through the shattered glass of the window with his spiritual sense, right at where his chest had been.

He didn’t need his AI to know that if he had been hit, his unarmored flesh would have been easily pierced.

Matt landed on the ground with a grunt and started his climb once again. No monster was going to stop him from getting that butterfly.

With half his attention scanning for his attacker, he tried to find the now vanished trail of the butterfly. Unable to pick it back up, he just climbed the building where he had seen it last. When he reached the roof, he found the butterfly flitting around a rooftop flower garden.

Matt was tempted to rush forward but hesitated and decided to slink forward with the most delicate approach.

He couldn’t be sure that the butterfly operated under the same restrictions that he was, with only his spiritual perception working.

A dozen steps away, he noticed a man-like being crawling over the edge of the wall.

Now that it wasn’t inside a room and ambushing him, he could see it like a distorted nightmare version of a human, long and stretched out. If it wasn’t hunched over, even climbing, it would have stood at least seven feet tall. But no, it seemed to be made out of a living shadow to his spiritual perception.

Matt knew that letting it reach the butterfly meant the end of his little exercise, and he rushed forward, startling the butterfly up into the air.

Still, Matt was a peak Tier 11 with all his cultivation in his physical core, and he had the speed to match. Just as the butterfly was taking off, he reached out and almost landed a finger on its leg. The moment it slipped past the butterfly’s limb, his tiny guide vanished into nothing, and Matt once again found himself transferred to a new location.

This time, he found himself in a snowy tundra, and despite not being able to feel it, Matt knew that he couldn’t allow this round to linger without risking hypothermia. The butterfly again landed on Matt’s nose, lingering for a much longer time than before and letting him absorb more of its energy. Doing so caused his spiritual perception to become sharper once again.

After a set amount of time, the butterfly fluttered away and ten seconds later, Matt was set free. He was unable to catch the butterfly that time and earned a lesser amount of the spiritual perception increase, but he still got a boost.

They repeated that game of tag two more times, with the shadow becoming faster and sneakier each time.

In the fourth round, Matt found the shadow trying to ambush him and pulled out the metal pole he had picked up, rushing forward to meet it. If he could end this threat, he was sure that he could catch the butterfly once again and earn the full reward of this challenge.

Matt came around the corner and slammed his pole down on the slashing claw, swung through, and assumed that he broke its bone. He took a swipe along his leg but felt nothing with the floor theme blanketing all the pain.

Kicking out, he caught the lanky creature in the knee and knew it was broken as his kick traveled clean through the joint.

As it tumbled down, the monster wrapped an arm around his chest and tried to grapple him, but that was something he had no fear of.

On the ground, he was shorter but stronger, and he quickly had the monster in a choke hold and kept squeezing. Eventually, something broke and his fist touched his bicep.

At that point, a wave of energy not unlike what the butterfly gave him washed over Matt.

It wasn’t exactly the same though; there were some differences.

Matt found that while his increase in perception was noticeable, his danger sense also increased. While they were all well capable of sensing attacks before they happened simply to cope with the speed difference of higher tiers, now he found his senses could distinctly tell just how dangerous something was in a much more solid way than before.

And it was currently screaming that something around the corner was going to kill him.

Scrambling to his feet, Matt fled through the streets as a larger and bulkier version of the lanky monster chased after him.

Thankfully he seemed to be faster and was able to escape.

After that experience, Matt focused on the butterfly and not the shadow monster.

He fought and killed two more, but that was only when they attacked him.

When he finally caught the butterfly, it happily flitted around on his palm and sent a constant stream of energy into his body that dissolved into countless smaller butterflies within his spirit. Each one bestowed slightly more information to his senses before fluttering outside of his spirit and into his surroundings. They seemed to cover every surface within his spiritual sense before simply…melting away, with only the increased detail in his spiritual sense remaining.

If he didn’t know the scaling already, he would have thought that his spiritual perception had doubled or tripled in efficiency. It felt so much more than the twenty-five-ish percent that he, as a Tier 11, should have expected from the theme appearing on the first floor. Matt could see colors just as Luna said he should be able to, but it felt more significant than she reported. That might have only been from him going from nothing to something, which made the increase feel more impactful than it was, but he felt like blind man given sight.

After a minute of the butterfly flitting on his hand, it vanished, and he found himself sitting on the ground in a stone cavern with a large pillar, not unlike the challenge room pillars extending from floor to ceiling.