He kept thinking about this and decided that starting with silver cores would add more points fast but would render all the bronze cores worthless.
He didn't want to end up having no use for all the bronze cores he got aside from using them to replenish his lost spirit power. Especially when he got most of his cores in bronze grade.
He kept walking until he arrived near the array again. There, he heard monsters roaring and violent sounds kept coming from the deepest and unclear parts of the forest.
It was a dark time, and it was the most dangerous time to venture into the forest.
Monsters would grow stronger at night, especially those with a darkness element. William fought three special gold grade monsters so far, and two of them got the darkness element within.
That meant most of the monsters driven out from the deep parts of the forest had an element of darkness. And that made him suspect that the scary monster which drove all of them away must have an element that scared these monsters all the way to here.
"My best guess is lightning and light elements…" William knew these two elements were the most effective and scary ones against darkness.
"I'll rest here then," he selected a spot in between a few trees in this region. The array surrounded a part of the forest in the first place. And that made the entire area filled with trees like any part of the forest.
Even when he and others scanned and killed any monster they spotted, William wasn't one hundred percent sure the area inside the array was quite safe.
So he didn't just sit down and start his work. He first found a space that was hidden from the eyes, a small hole in between three strong and big trees.
They surrounded it like a triangle, and William scattered his concealment array materials around these three trees, hiding everything inside from the senses of anyone or anything.
After doing this, William felt a little relieved. And yet he kept his vigilance, waiting for half an hour for any sign of any monster lurking around.
If a monster was eyeing him, then after escaping from its senses, it'd start searching and sniffing around, looking for its prey.
"It's all safe," William sat on the ground at last, taking out the lots of bronze cores he gathered. But before doing any of this, he started to examine his spirit power level at this point.
"I got three hundred and thirty-two points so far… That's much better than I thought…" William tested his spirit power, and after counting the bronze dots, he knew he got much stronger than he expected.
"Time to cross the five hundred mark!" he cut his hand and used his blood to cover up one core after another. After absorbing ten bronze cores, he assessed and found out that he only gained three spirit power points at the end.
"Tsk! I should have started with the bronze cores when I was still at half this threshold," he shook his head in regret, while knowing that he didn't have enough time nor the choice to do such a thing back then.
After which, he started to madly absorb the cores, and kept assessing how much these bronze cores added to him.
By the time he reached the four-hundred-point mark, he needed to absorb almost thirty bronze cores to get a single point.
"It's pointless to keep doing this," he still got hundreds of bronze cores, and yet he got the impression that all of them would only add less than twenty points in the end.
It wasn't worth his time. And instead of wasting them here, he should store them up and use them later when he'd need to replenish his lost spirit power without his training technique.
And if he didn't even end up using them all this way, he'd get to sell them at the market and gain spirit crystals back.
Bronze cores weren't like white grade ones. They could be sold for a better price than the white cores. He decided to keep these few hundreds stored inside his ring, use whatever he'd need, and sell the rest later on, add a few thousand spirit crystals for his team's wealth.
Then he started to take out the silver cores.
Before, he estimated that each core would add from ten up to fifteen spirit points each. But at this point, and after reaching such a stage in the bronze grade, he could only get ten at most from each core.
"Four hundred and twenty… Four hundred and fifty… Four hundred and ninety…" William kept absorbing the silver cores in batches, then assessed his strength again and again. He kept climbing up fast, and the moment he exceeded the five hundred mark, the amount of spirit power points he gained decreased again.
"This time it's eight points at most… And I got less than fifty more cores of the silver grade… That means I could get over seven hundred mark at most…"
William started this adventure while his spirit power was stagnant around one hundred and seventy points.
He gained all this when he ventured into the forest for one week. And since then, he couldn't add up a single point. Even after attending such a grand scale battle at the Long clan, he didn't end up getting a single monster core he could absorb or use for his personal benefits.
And so, seeing his spirit power starting to pick up pace again, getting increased by at least two folds by now, and was going to end up crossing the seven hundred mark, made him want to cry out of joy.
"Seven hundred mark! At last!" Unlike what he expected, not all the silver cores gave him lots of points. When he absorbed the remaining cores he got, he noticed that many gave him three up to five points, while few gave him ten or even twenty points.