Following that brief, terrifying silence, the oppressive darkness of the world was violently pushed away by an intense, blinding light. The flash came first, turning the night into an artificial, searing day.

An earth-shattering roar followed a split second later, a sound so loud it vibrated through his very teeth, and lastly came the devastating wave of pure heat. William was running as fast as he physically could, but in the end, his degraded, upper-realm-weakened body simply didn’t run fast enough to outpace the expanding shockwave that surged at the tail end of the blast.

He felt his body suddenly getting scooped up and pushed forward by an irresistible, invisible force. A microsecond later, an immense, searing pain assaulted his back. He didn’t even need to stop or check his injuries to know that the flesh on his back had been severely scorched and incinerated by the heatwave.

And yet, clinging stubbornly to consciousness, all he did was pull open a few more healing elixirs with his teeth and frantically gulp their contents down before his momentum died and he landed heavily on the hard ground.

His body rolled violently across the terrain for quite some time, crashing into sharp rocks and hard dirt like a rag doll until his momentum finally stopped. Lying flat on the earth, he felt as if every single bone in his body had been completely shattered into pieces.

The agonising pain was like nothing he had ever experienced before, an unparalleled torture, and yet the world around him was still blazing brightly under the lingering effects of the massive explosion he had just caused.

Looking out toward the far distance, there was no darkness left in the world. The horizon was entirely lit by a long, jagged line of fire, one that extended for tens of kilometres across the landscape, continuously emitting intense heat and blinding light as if a colossal volcano had just erupted. And in everything that this destruction represented, it was far more volatile and dangerous than any natural volcano could ever hope to be.

It took William roughly an entire hour of lying in the dirt before he felt his body recover enough to safely stand up. He had completely lost count of exactly how many elixirs, potions, and remedies he had swallowed in the past hour, but the combined lower-realm medicines had eventually stitched his broken frame back together. Trembling, he finally stood upright and watched the chaotic aftermath of his move.

Normally, under such cataclysmic circumstances, any sensible monster or intelligent being would simply turn around and run as fast as they could away from that burning hellscape. Yet, that logical instinct wasn’t the case for the shadow monsters.

The explosion hadn’t just been deadly; the violent destruction of the veins had unleashed massive, trapped torrents of the spirit power tightly bound inside the ores. The blast had effectively turned that raging inferno into the single most delicious piece of land in the eyes of those energy-starved monsters.

Thousands upon thousands of new monsters kept pouring into the area, running as fast as they could from the outer edges of the zone, heading straight toward the blinding hell at the horizon. They were marching willingly into their own deaths, vaporised by the residual heat just to catch a fleeting taste of the leaked energy.

William stood firmly in his place, watching the beautiful, chaotic cycle of destruction with a big, triumphant smile slowly spreading across his face.

"It went way better than I even expected," he muttered, thoroughly savouring the grand, apocalyptic scene that was playing right into the palms of his scheme.

Securing the mine was only the first step of his grand strategy, yet it was undeniably the most crucial one. Looking out at the roaring inferno, William marvelled at the sheer scale of the devastation.

He had never imagined the underground vein to be this colossally huge, vast enough to light up the entire horizon in a brilliant, terrifying display of crimson and gold, or for it to unleash such copious, overwhelming amounts of pure spirit power into the atmosphere to attract all these monsters from the furthest corners of the zone.

According to his best initial estimates, he had expected only a few thousand monsters to get lured in and subsequently killed in the initial explosion. This reality, however, was a far better result than his original plan had anticipated.

This monumental success meant he no longer needed to make several other dangerous trips around the hostile territory to look for more volatile ore deposits to trigger. The single vein had done the work of ten.

All he needed to do now was to sit tight, keep his distance, and watch safely from the sidelines while his beautiful, burning hell continuously attracted and systematically killed every single shadow monster in the area.

"Still, I should look for the killed monsters and collect more cores before returning," William muttered to himself, calculating his next moves.

Now that he knew he didn’t need to spend countless more hours scouting the barren landscape in search of other hidden mines to set ablaze, his timeline had shifted significantly.

Once his business here was concluded, he would be able to return immediately to his friends, the girls, and the other masters of his guild to officially initiate phase three of his plan. But first, he needed to successfully fulfil phase two: getting his hands on the precious cores of these fallen monsters. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

To successfully pull off phase three and establish a true foothold in this higher plane, he needed to not only strengthen himself but also needed to do the exact same for a vast number of his followers.

The absolute minimum number of individuals required to fulfil the conditions of his upcoming plan was five hundred spirit masters. And because of the harsh requirements of the ritual, that meant he needed to harvest at least one thousand intact cores so he could fulfil his plan conditions without any room for error.