Once the core workforce was organised, William gathered the leaders closer and started to thoroughly explain everything about the expected incoming threats heading their way from the depths of the forbidden zone.

After detailing the behaviours of the shadow hordes, the aerial wind-and-lightning birds, and the crushing subterranean worms, he shifted the topic to the upcoming foundational training session, a gruelling process that he estimated would last for a couple of months at the very most.

"Laying out these spiritual foundations flawlessly right now is absolutely crucial for our future growth in this higher plane," William lectured, his voice echoing across the deep trench walls.

"We have already successfully enhanced our physical bodies and adapted our flesh to the heavy atmosphere of the new realm by absorbing the shadow cores, but we still severely lack in the field of our spirits. Our internal spirits are currently fragile, unrefined, and completely out of sync with the laws of this world.

We need to enhance this aspect as well, and to do so properly, we need to take our time and do it systematically, according to the specific type of elemental affinities each individual possesses..."

This upcoming training session wasn’t going to be a single, uniform routine for all of the masters. In fact, due to the intricate laws of the upper realm, each unique spirit element required a completely different, highly specialised training manual compared to other elements. A fire-attribute master could not utilise the same training manual as a water or darkness master without risking immediate crippling.

On top of that structural complexity, the masters had to simultaneously strengthen their core spirits as a whole unit. In brief, the process was a highly sophisticated combination of entirely different manuals, performed and trained in a precise, successive sequence.

They would have to master one layer, pause for mandatory intervals in between to let their newly expanded spirits stabilise, and then carefully initiate the next layer to ensure their spiritual consciousness didn’t violently crack under the immense atmospheric pressure of the upper realm.

William spoke continuously for roughly two hours, patiently and properly explaining every nuance. He used a piece of charcoal to vividly draw diagrams of the energy pathways in the dirt, ensuring the masters standing in front of him could fully grasp the weight of what they were going to do.

On top of the theoretical explanations, he also made sure to physically show them live examples of how the exact training postures should look, how they would actively circulate their energy during meditation, and how to seamlessly shift their breathing patterns between different styles to link the various manuals together without disrupting their internal harmony.

Once he was completely done with the extensive briefing, he requested a few capable faction masters to return to the main camp inside the trenches to properly explain the construction and domestic duties to the rest of the waiting crowd.

With the logistics settled, William turned his attention back to the surface, leading the remaining leaders and the ten thousand chosen elite masters out into the field to begin laying down the physical traps and spiritual arrays, rapidly strengthening the defences around his new base.

However, a glaring problem soon arose. Because his enthusiastic guild masters had dug a monumentally huger area than he had originally planned or calculated for, the raw resources and exotic components he had spent the last four days scavenging simply weren’t enough to cover the entirety of the massive new perimeter.

He didn’t have enough materials to build a continuous, solid wall of arrays. To compensate for the shortage, he had to constantly improvise and alternate between different types of localised defences, fluidly shifting his tactics and completely abandoning his initial layout design in favour of a patchwork, segmented defence network.

"Now that the physical components are buried, I’ll show you exactly how to manually activate the defensive arrays and trigger formations, and how to properly target both the flying thunderous birds in the sky and the giant worms coming from deep underground."

William announced. After finishing all the baseline structural preparations, he gathered the faction leaders around the primary control nodes to talk about how to operate them in various battlefield situations.

"What shall we do in the event that the traps and formations get completely destroyed by a heavy attack, or simply run entirely depleted of their stored power?" Fang asked, his pragmatic mind identifying the biggest flaw in their current setup.

Hearing the question, William couldn’t help but let out a heavy, tired sigh.

"We simply can’t replace or repair much of anything at this current point," William admitted, rubbing his temples. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

He had already gathered every single useful scrap of material he could find during his four-day sprint, and under his original spatial calculations, he thought he had brought back more than enough to keep a standard-sized defence network running smoothly for the entire duration of their two-month training.

But after the grand, unexpected expansion of their base into a valley-sized fortress, that comfortable safety margin was no longer a viable option.

"The absolute best we can do with our current resource pool is to keep the primary defences running continuously for two weeks at most," he paused, letting the grim reality sink in, before adding, "Therefore, our timeline has to adapt. On day ten of our meditation, I’ll personally lead an elite scouting team consisting of a few of you.

We will head back out into the wilderness toward different resource spots I mapped out. During that trip, I will teach you firsthand how to safely traverse the extreme environmental dangers in this part of the world, and exactly how to efficiently excavate and harvest the specific ores and herbs we need to keep our arrays fueled."

He knew deep down that constantly depending on himself to provide for thousands of people wasn’t going to do the guild any good in the long run. He desperately needed his guild masters to become self-sufficient, to move out into the upper realm confidently, and start digging for these volatile ores and collecting the rare spirit herbs and conductive tree branches on their own.