William’s only viable method to scan for such hidden resources without wasting too much precious time was by manually ascending the highest local hills and carefully looking over the wide expanses of terrain stretched out underneath them.

"This particular ore is good..." At one point during his frantic scouting, he fortunately stumbled upon a high-quality ore mine with tons of heavy, loose rocks scattered across the surface for him to easily grab and store. Further along a jagged ravine, his eyes lit up again. "And these herbs... they possess the exact dense properties that can help in making a localised darkness array..."

He kept tirelessly searching, surveying, and collecting different natural materials for two days straight, moving across a massive geographic area until he could no longer even see the faint, bloody redness hue radiating at the horizon, the distant, burning mark of his cataclysmic hellish trap.

During this extensive scouting trip, he noticed several entirely different types of roaming monsters that he hadn’t even known were present in the zone. This troubling realisation significantly broadened his scope of the local ecosystem, making the alarm bells ring incredibly hard deep within his spirit.

"This zone... it really deserves its legendary title as the most dangerous forbidden zone in the world," he muttered, ducking behind a jagged ridge.

At some point, the raw danger became so palpable that he even feared advancing a single step beyond a certain valley, knowing that if he did, he would likely get brutally killed at the hands of a scary pack of Wrathers.

The Wrathers were an elite type of monster that possessed immense, towering bodies, heavily reinforced armour-like skin, razor-sharp claws capable of rending steel, and, most dangerously of all, their deadly, concussive roars.

These apex predators used the sound element to its absolute fullest capabilities, effortlessly turning something completely intangible and harmless into a localised, flesh-shredding shockwave. William wouldn’t risk a single encounter with these monsters if he had any choice in the matter.

At this current, weak level of his personal power, their sonic attacks were fundamentally undefendable, and their massive bodies were entirely impregnable to his current weapons.

Therefore, instead of foolishly advancing further into their territory, he immediately altered his path and started to circle back around the region in a tight, defensive spiral manner, slowly closing back in toward the centre of the zone where his guild masters were stationed.

By the time he finally arrived back at their coordinates, two more days had fully passed. He had overstretched his scavenging adventure significantly longer than he had originally planned, but that tactical delay was thanks mainly to the complete absence of any stronger shadow monsters in the immediate vicinity, as the entire local population had been successfully drawn away by his fiery decoy.

"I have managed to gather enough specialised materials to properly handle the aerial bird threat, but those underground worms are still going to be the main, lingering headache for me..." he inwardly sighed.

He knew that even with everything he had painstakingly gathered over the past ninety-six hours, it still wouldn’t be quite enough to construct a truly flawless, impenetrable trap line all the way around his guild masters’ massive sector. But this was the reality of what he had managed to find during the past four days, and he simply had to do the best he could with whatever tools he had in his inventory.

"Wow... they did quite a great job indeed..."

The moment William finally came close to the camp, he stopped dead in his tracks, thoroughly surprised to see the sheer, monumental scale and size of the trench circle his friends had successfully led their masters to dig.

In his mind, he had merely imagined a simple, rudimentary circle that spanned a modest dozen kilometres in radius. Yet, his resourceful friends had completely outdone his expectations!

They hadn’t just dug a standard perimeter; they had brilliantly branched out dozens of interlocking semi-circles along the outer walls, adding a massive amount of strategic space and high ground to be actively used as proper, fortified defending posts and firing lines.

On top of that, the defensive trenches they had dug were incredibly deep and remarkably broad, making the massive fortifications look more like natural, impassable mountain valleys than man-made ditches!

"Hahaha, do you like what we’ve done?"

Seeing his familiar figure finally drawing closer to the line, his girls, along with the other prominent faction leaders, happily moved up to meet him outside the borders of their grand, hand-carved new home.

Lara wiped a sweat from her brow, a proud smile on her face as she added, "We tried our absolute best to make something spectacular out of your orders."

"It’s absolutely fantastic!" William honestly complimented, reacting enthusiastically to Anjie’s proud words. He moved his eyes among the gathered leaders, allowing them to see the genuine admiration and relief, expressing his true feelings.

"You all have done an incredible job, but now we need to immediately move to the next stage of our operation. Gather up exactly one hundred elite members from each of your respective factions, and bring them over here to the centre. We have a massive amount of technical work to do, and very little time to waste."

"One hundred from each faction?" The girls looked at each other in sheer confusion, quickly calculating the numbers in their heads.

"William, that means we are pulling together a total force of ten thousand spirit masters." Fang paused, stepping forward as he furrowed his brows in deep thought before adding, "What exactly are we going to do with a workforce of that size? And what about the rest of our people? What will the remaining thousands do while we are busy?"

"The rest of the guild members need to immediately begin building our permanent houses, levelling the terrain, and preparing the designated grounds inside the perimeter for our upcoming long-term training sessions."

William responded firmly, before adding, "As for the chosen ten thousand, we will need their collective physical help to manually place the traps, arrays, and localised defences all around the outer edges of this massive area."