The sun was going to set behind a thick layer of purple clouds to silence the day and allow the night to fall when a large wave of sparkling lights appeared at the land below.

This was a vast open stretch of land, looking lavish and filled with different plants, looking quite fertile. And yet, despite all that, this was considered one of the most desolate places in the upper realm, the spot where William and his selected guild masters appeared in succession, covering up a huge area of this land.

It took roughly an hour for everyone to ascend and come to the new world. William appeared at the first batch, alongside his girls, friends, faction leaders, and their most trusted subordinates.

"Is this the upper realm?!" In the early batches, Fang ascended. In the first ten minutes, he looked the same as others, looking weak and confused, unable even to stand erect.

Everyone had to sit on the ground against their will, struggling just to take in their breaths. William couldn’t help but savour the familiar old feeling, having a surge of emotions that took over his spirit.

"I’m finally here," he clenched his fists, while letting everyone adapt to the harsh environment and the brutal spirit power in the upper realm.

He moved his eyes, and the good thing was that everyone came prepared. He knew they wouldn’t suffer like most, at least not like when he first came to this world back in his past life.

He already shared a lot of tips and insights with them before they would take the leap. After William finished the battle on the side of his fox spirit and other spirits, he returned to his world, to find most still immersed in their training.

He had to wait for roughly a month for enough to ascend with him, forming the first wave of the Fox Guild regular ascension waves, taking the early steps of the Fox Guild, starting an adventure that would be globally known later.

Yet like any great tale, the first steps weren’t smooth, weren’t as easy as William imagined. And that was all thanks to how their luck turned out at their ascension.

Usually, the masters ascending to the upper realm would appear in randomly picked areas. That was why even when William and the Blue Purgators moved at the same time through the underground city’s portal at Lara’s city, they didn’t appear together.

Even when Becky moved with them, even if Sara’s mother also ascended, they didn’t appear with William and his guild masters.

That was thanks to the laws of the upper realm. For those who were already part of the world, they wouldn’t appear randomly. Instead, they would appear next to the areas they vanished from when coming to the lower realms.

As for those from the lower realms and ascending for the first time to the upper realm, they had to appear in different spots. That was why William had to wait for enough of his guild masters to finish their training, so they would all appear at the same spot and not get randomly allocated.

This would be true for any master ascending from the lower realm in a day time. After that, they would appear at different spots, unless William did something. And he intended to do so at first.

He left clear orders back home that, regardless of how many finished their training, they would have to wait for him to return and give them the signal to ascend.

He knew there was a loophole in the upper realm’s rules, which was the portal itself. Once the portal opened at one spot, it’d leave traces of space element behind, ones that William could harvest later and use to establish another portal.

In such a scenario, if he managed to establish a portal at the same spot he appeared at, then the portals at the two different realms would get connected. And his future guild masters would ascend normally to the same area he just appeared in.

Unluckily for him, the upper realm rulers seemed to decide to pull a prank at him. It was as if some higher power didn’t like it when he intended to use the loopholes against the world. So the area he appeared at wasn’t any normal zone, but one of the most forbidden areas in the entirety of the upper realm!

And he was about to learn about that in a bitter way.

"The world is so hard to move in," Fang kept speaking, testing everything after the passage of one hour and the arrival of everyone. Around him, around William and the core of his guild masters, slightly over fifty thousand masters were present.

This figure greatly surpassed William’s wildest imagination. And it was all thanks to the hard training the Blue Purgators gave them before William sat in the three different training zones.

"Do we know where we are?" Anjie finally came back from arranging her faction masters. After the early batches arrived, and the spirit masters in the first batch adapted better to the new world, William gave them the first order: Go and arrange your forces.

As he warned them before coming here, ascending meant starting fresh. Regardless of how many masters each faction had before, once they arrived here, they had to work with the spirit masters who ascended with them from their factions.

The largest, without any surprise, was Lang’s faction. Even if the faction was considered weaker compared to others, he still had the greatest pool of talents among other factions. It wasn’t a surprise to see double the regular number of faction masters in Lang’s faction.

Then it came down to the top five, Anjie’s, Lara’s, Berry’s, Sara’s, and Ro’s factions to come one after another in ranking, with few differences between each of them.

Once they arranged their factions, it looked like a grand gathering of small forces in the area.

"We need to scout," William sighed, "we can’t use spirit sense anymore. And so far I can’t recognise any of the area’s features. It’s all open land for miles."