The old fox told him that the supreme goal of the Transformers here was to revive the tenth pillar. And they were close from doing this.
They were planning to wipe out the spirit masters in this fort using forces on their side from the inside and outside the fort at the same time. What this message lacked was any intel about the ones from the inside who worked for these despicable Transformers. And that told William it wasn't easy to find them.
"At least I got information about dark spirit masters in the region," William took a deep breath, organising everything he learnt about, before turning his attention around.
There were lots of things here, lots of closed chests. He didn't know what these chests included, but the first thing he did was to check the statue.
The statue wasn't huge as he expected. It was just enough to be held on his back, almost close to his height. William tried, and he couldn't take it into any of his rings.
The statue was made out of green material, looking like some sort of gem or something. When he touched it, he felt like he was touching a real person's face. And that told him the spirit of that old fox was residing inside this one.
"It's a regret that I can't get this thing moving," William even tried to move the statue from its place, trying to see if he could carry it around. But it didn't even budge an inch. It wasn't that heavy, but it looked as if it got glued to the ground.
That meant he'd not be able to move far from here for a long time, or else he'd risk missing the benefits from this statue. "This dude… Why did he have to do it this way?!" William resigned to such fate. He didn't try to absorb anything from this statue as he needed to do something first.
He got to select a suitable training manual for himself. He never thought about doing such a thing before as he already had his heaven defying devour ability.
But to start receiving the spirit power and knowledge stored in this statue, he had to use a training technique first. His devour ability was only useful towards monster cores, not anything else.
He already had tons of training manuals in his memory, with lots of suitable ones for him. But he decided to postpone this for now and check these closed chests first.
"They are sealed…" he checked and found out that each chest was sealed by an array, "even if he let the one who came from the vast world seal them, it won't stop me."
William started to examine these arrays, to finally find out their true nature by pure accident. When he ingested his spirit power into one of them, testing to see if special symbols or marks would appear there, he noticed the flickering of many symbols that he recognised. But when he did recognise this array, he hurriedly threw the box away, "Sh*t! That damn jerk… Are you trying to kill me or what?!!"
*Boom!*
The chest he tried to inspect using his spirit power just shone in bright red light, before that light expanded, releasing a torrent of wildfire all over the place.
William didn't take such fire lightly, turned instantly into a fox and endured the incoming burning heat.
This array was something that was used as a decoy, trying to kill anyone getting greedy while being here. "Cough cough! That damn bastard! It's lucky for him to be dead right now. Or else I'd have choked him to death myself! Cough cough!"
The fire kept raging wild for ten minutes straight, before finally dying down. William had to use his bottle of elixir, saving his life by replenishing his lost spirit power.
He didn't know why this old fox placed such traps here. But he was now quite sure that all the chests here were booby traps. "And here I thought I was going to have something nice… What a waste!"
William eyed that statue and thought about absorbing part of its spirit power. But when he thought about the need to select a good training manual for him, he hesitated.
He had to find a training manual that could support different spirit elements. There were lots of training manuals for each spirit element, even for those extremely rare ones like time, space, karma, and luck spirit elements.
As he planned to merge more monster spirits with his, adding more spirit elements to his arsenal, he knew he had to carefully select his training manual.
"I can train many manuals at the same time, however that will be time consuming and not that effective in the end… No, I shall think about it more thoroughly…"
He knew that he had no such legendary training manual to cover all the spirit elements in the world. So, the only way to do this was to come up with a new training manual, a totally new one.
Or he should simply ditch the idea of absorbing anything from this statue and focus on absorbing monster cores instead.
There was a negative side of his devouring ability that he already was aware of. For example, he was now at bronze grade, but even silver cores wouldn't give him lots of points anymore.
That was indeed solvable at this point. But when he'd reach the dark gold grade, he knew he'd face a great problem.
"Hmm… I need to go back first," he knew deciding on this dilemma wasn't something he should do out of impulse. He needed to thoroughly think about all this, trying to find the right path for his future.
But right now, he had to find a way back to the surface. He didn't know for how long he descended here, and so it wasn't practical to try and climb his way up.
He took a tour around the place. Aside from being just like the cave he met the Transformers at before, nothing else was out of the ordinary or of significance to him.
