He slept for five hours before opening his eyes on a repeated knocking on his door.
"Who? What?" Still lost in the world of sleep, he shouted in slight annoyance.
He hated it the most when someone interrupted his sleep. Especially after spending his past night reading through all the documents.
"Rise and shine little prince, it's already past noon!" Berry's voice came brightly and loudly from behind his closed door.
"One minute," William rose up, took a shower before heading out. He found Berry sitting in the big hall of the entrance, seemingly having an annoyed look on her face. "What's wrong?"
Seeing her like this made him slightly puzzled. She wouldn't get mad just because he took half an hour to get out, right?
"It's that jerk," she said in an angry voice, "I hate him!"
"Who?" William felt like he missed something here.
"Who else but that damn Guanin?"
"What did he do?" William got interested at once. It wasn't because she was mad about Guanin. After all, when speaking about such a jerk, who wouldn't get mad?
But William paid close attention to any news about the dark spirit masters. And Guanin was just one of them.
"That jerk is the one behind all the rumours regarding my clan!" she said such a thing in a very angry voice, making William on the verge of letting out a laugh.
He couldn't believe she was still focusing on such a thing! "Just let him do whatever he likes," he lightly said, "he is just jealous of your clan, a perfect example of a bitter loser."
"Humph, and he should be," she showed such an arrogant expression before adding, "by the way, I passed here at night but didn't find you. Where did you go? Train?"
"I went to the library," William didn't hide his visit to the library, which made Berry give him a weird look.
"Why? It's just a boring place!"
"I wanted to read the documents there," William said the first thing that came into his mind, "by the way, how is your training going?"
"I haven't trained since that battle," she showed a depressed look before adding, "but I intend to start training tonight!"
"Good," William nodded, turned around and noticed the two girls were playing outside. "By the way, do you know if others returned from the clan?"
"Kong and Lang?" she paused, and he nodded, "they are coming tomorrow night."
"Good, let's meet them after classes then," William thought for a moment before asking, "by the way, do you have a map about the academy?"
"I got one of the entire kingdom," she touched her ring and took out one scroll, "you can have it."
"Thanks," William wanted to get a copy of the area around the academy, yet he ended up having a grander map of the entire kingdom.
Berry didn't stay for long as she excused herself when the lunch time came. William was all silent during the meal while Tina kept talking nonstop.
His mind was burdened with thoughts and plans of the future. He already got enough assets to start training the kids he sat his eyes on, but he lacked a suitable place to do so.
But now this wasn't going to be an issue. He wanted to rent or even buy out a place in one of the cities not far from here, a first step before heading to the kingdom's capital later on.
The kingdom had lots of towns, and few cities. And William wanted to visit one of these cities.
After the meal, he retreated to the study room where he started to consider lots of things.
The first thing he decided was what he should give to the Forging department here. He got tons of forging manuals, but all depended on totally different concepts than those known in this world.
Finding good manuals that wouldn't expose too much and would still provide great help to the spirit masters here was a big dilemma. Yet after six hours of serious thinking, he decided on ten forging manuals, and wrote them down.
He made sure to explain the concepts behind forging these gears, making sure anyone without any prior knowledge would learn how to forge these gears without a problem.
The gears he selected were two greatswords, one knife, one sword, two bows, one boot, one helmet, and two shields.
From all of them, he'd select the boots to be the best of value compared to anything else.
These boots would make the steps of any spirit master quite faster, adding the ability to jump higher, and that was quite valuable in any fight.
Unlike the rest of the gears he selected, these boots would bring up quite the stir, provided that spirit masters realised their true value.
As he got done with such an issue, he started to work over another thing. He took out the map he received from Berry and started to slowly examine it.
The map was fully detailed, showing lots of areas and regions known to man. Aside from the immensely huge forest, there were a large number of towns around the academy.
William saw that most of the clans belonging to the academy weren't that far away from the clan, all except for Guanin's clan.
"Hmm… They are situated far from here, almost three days of travel… That's quite suspicious."
William knew by just this far away location; the Bronze Lizard clan would give excuses for not taking part in any big war. Just like what happened with the Long clan, they'd arrive long after the end of the battle.
William spent many hours studying the map until a plan formed in his mind.
The next day, when the sun was in the middle of the sky, William headed towards the Forging department to meet Ellina.
During this time, it was class time. Disciples were busy attending different classes, and so the path towards the department was already void of any spirit master.
William reached the place where he found a small row standing in front of the tightly shut gates of the Forging Department. He looked around, and all he could see was older spirit masters, almost at fourth and beyond classes, with serious looks over their faces.