Thinking about accumulating one thousand upper-realm cores just a few hours prior would have sounded completely crazy, but it wasn’t an impossible dream anymore.

He had completely lost count of how many hundreds of monsters had sprinted blindly past his side in the past half an hour. And he knew for a fact that much more would keep flooding into the roaring hell he had created as the energy signal continued to ripple outward.

William started cautiously walking forward toward the perimeter of the blast zone, taking a good, sharp look over his immediate surroundings. He found that he wasn’t even fearing the monsters anymore. The creatures were entirely driven by their primal, singular obsession with the leaking energy.

Even if he stood directly in their running paths, they would simply bypass him, fluidly evading any obstacle in their way just to reach their most alluring spot faster than the other monsters racing beside them.

No monster would be in their right mind to stop and fight him now, even if he started openly using his spirit power to defend himself. And yet, despite his confidence, he didn’t want to needlessly put his theory to the test. He played it safe and simply ran forward through the stampede without circulating any of his spirit power.

Not to mention, his current spirit power reserves were simply too low to make any real difference in a fight anyway.

As he closed the distance, a new anxiety cropped up. He feared accidentally stepping upon a patch of ground where that volatile, great mine vein stretched to beneath the surface, ending up getting unexpectedly wrapped by the subterranean fire of his own making.

To avoid a gruesome death, he made sure the ground he trod upon was completely cold, solid, and dark, devoid of any glowing cracks or signs of that volatile ore buried underneath for a large area around him.

Once he came close enough to the outer edge of the crater, he was met with a breathtaking sight: piles upon piles of the dead bodies of monsters that had fallen early, vaporised or crushed thanks to the initial explosion and the devastating shockwave that followed it.

William didn’t plan to venture any deeper into the heart of the scorched hell itself; the heat was too intense. Just standing this close to the margins was enough to make him feel a suffocating, burning heat slamming violently against his face and body.

"That’s quite the harvest," William breathed, his eyes scanning the carpet of dead beasts.

Wasting no time, he dropped to his knees and began extracting and cleaning the cores. Within a short period of frantic harvesting, he had already gathered around two hundred pristine, glowing spheres.

Looking at the wealth in his hands, a sudden urge gripped him. "Let me first ingest a few of those before continuing the harvest..."

He picked up one of the freshly harvested cores and put it straight into his mouth. The effect of the upper-realm energy was instantaneous and magical. The moment it crossed his lips, the solid core dissolved completely into his mouth, turning into a sparkling, liquid stardust of pure spirit power. The energy seeped deeply into his tongue before violently stretching all over his entire body, filling his parched meridians.

The profound effects didn’t just stop at pushing his total spirit points above the critical one hundred threshold, officially making him a recognised white spirit master of the upper realm; he also experienced a grand, fundamental change in his physical body.

Newly ascended masters in this realm didn’t suffer mostly due to the lack of their internal spirit power; rather, their vulnerability was thanks mainly to the great, staggering difference in raw body strength and speed between the lower and upper planes.

The physical changes that were happening to William right now were vastly different in their core essence from any evolutionary change he had ever experienced before in his life.

Even when he had successfully reached the legendary dark gold grade back in the lower realm, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t even close to this level of absolute genetic restructuring.

He could literally feel his flesh, muscles, and bones getting rebuilt from scratch on a monumentally strong foundation, one that was durable enough to make him feel as though he had been merely crawling through life before, and now he was finally running.

And this newfound strength was just the surface of all the miraculous changes that occurred in his body. If he could run fast before, his heightened reflexes and dense musculature now allowed him to execute a short-distance flash that looked like a real, instantaneous teleportation to the untrained eye. It was one of the most iconic, sought-after combat moves in the upper realm for spirit masters below the gold grade.

As he stood up and thoroughly savoured the amazing, intoxicating feeling of true power returning to his veins, he looked around at the large, seemingly endless number of shadow monsters still running like moths to the flame toward the hell up front. A deeply greedy, ambitious look settled onto his face. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

"Just one core and I’ve already reached this far," William laughed softly, his eyes glinting with anticipation. "A few more of these and I’ll easily hit the green grade threshold. Yet after that, my rapid growth will inevitably stagnate, as these monsters are almost all green grade, with only a precious few at the silver grade..."

William decided to collect every single core he could possibly find, deliberately circling the immense, blazing perimeter of the apocalyptic hell he had created. Initially, his plan had been modest; he had only intended to harvest the cores from a single, concentrated spot near the outer edge before heading back.

But plans change when opportunity knocks. Now, looking at the overwhelming wealth of resources laid out before him, he wanted more. He wanted it all.

He moved across the rocky terrain with fluid, blinding speed. Even without utilising a single drop of his internal spirit power, his newly reconstructed body naturally sprinted at a velocity that easily rivalled, if not surpassed, his top speed back in the lower realm when he was at the pinnacle of the gold grade.