That made him quite envious of the Long clan. They got their hands over tons of dark gold cores. If he was just stronger, he'd have gathered lots of these cores from that time.
So instead of regretting the past or praying for fate and heavens to do the impossible for him, he saw in his training techniques a way out. Even if it was much slower than his current rising speed using the Devour ability, it was better than nothing.
Starting out from the high stage of gold grade, he'd depend entirely on his training technique, not Devour ability.
His luck wasn't that good actually. He didn't succeed in his first attempts, in his first one hundredth attempts. With every fail, he learnt something, modified and edited his new training manual, before trying it out again.
At many times, his failure didn't come with any price at all, but at most times, he suffered different degrees of backlashes.
Be it physical wounds, spirit power exhaustion, even feeling so numb, tired, and sleepy, he suffered it all. In the end, he had to use his potions from time to time, to cleanse his exhaustion and mental weariness, healing all the physical wounds he suffered. As for his spirit power depletion problem, he solved it using elixir drops.
"I didn't check the rings yet…" After spending three days in that hole, he decided to give a scan to all the grand loot he had, "I should really open a stall and sell rings!"
When he saw how big his current wealth of rings was, he couldn't help but inwardly sigh. "There was a time when I dreamt to just have one ring…" he smiled, not knowing if he should feel happy or bad about this memory.
Then it came down to opening the rings and checking all their content. And to William, it felt like Christmas eve!
He found tons of spirit crystals filling all the rings. No matter which ring came from, be it normal spirit master or dark one, they all got filled with lots of spirit crystals.
William grew tired from taking out and counting these crystals when he already exceeded five hundred million count. And so, he stopped counting, started to take them out, store them away, without stopping laughing.
"The business of collecting rings is indeed profitable, hahahaha!" William kept laughing and muttering such words from time to time. It was indeed profitable. Even if he didn't trick these spirit masters back at the betting event, he'd still end up with a huge wealth right now.
He suspected he got billions from these rings alone. And that was just the amount of spirit crystals they got, not including any other stuff like gears or potions!
When he finished collecting the spirit crystals, he moved next to collect gears. And weirdly enough, he found gears in all the rings like it was a must to have in any ring!
"The rings with lots of sets of gears must have come from the dark spirit masters…" yet there was a major disparity in the number of gears in these rings.
Many rings just contained up to ten sets of gears, while others contained enough to arm up an army of a thousand spirit masters. Seeing this made William start to organise his rings first, a batch with low count gears and another with a high number of gears inside.
After doing this, he found out that he indeed collected more rings from the dark spirit masters than normal ones. He started first with the rings coming from normal spirit masters. And he didn't just take gears out, but everything they got.
Be it materials, monster cores, even potions, arrays and scrolls, he took all out and started to arrange them in different groups.
When he finished, he was surrounded with lots of heaps of loot. Coupled with the special rocky cave he was in, it made him look like a mafia leader standing in the middle of his top-secret vault.
Each ring didn't contain much gear, but it contained lots of potions, scrolls, materials and monster cores.
Before this, William wasn't that caring about monster cores. But as he planned to train his spirit purity, he needed lots of these cores. And so, seeing all these heaps of different grade monster cores made him grin. He started to organise his rings, assigning few for every single item here.
In the end, he had to use five rings at least per each item. As for gears, he already used fifteen rings to contain all the gears he got so far.
And that count was mostly going to be doubled or tripled after going through the rings of the dark spirit masters.
"Hmm… Most of these scrolls are speaking about training manuals…" he started to casually open scrolls that he found in these rings, to find lots of training manuals and fighting techniques.
He didn't care about any training manual, but the story was different if it was regarding fighting techniques. He already gained a lot of insights when he went into that library of the academy. And now he had a great harvest of fighting techniques in his possession.
All he needed to do was to simply read and study them, find out how he'd enhance these, and even might try and learn a few that were especially strong.
He gained his rings from many spirit masters, with many at gold and dark gold grades. And that meant many of these fighting techniques were quite strong, dedicated for the high-grade spirit masters. And that was alone enough to speak about their overall value.
"For another time," he wasn't in any hurry to do this task for now. He got a really scary fighting technique for himself. And his current spirit power wasn't enough to sustain using more of such formidable and strong techniques.
As for the use of these fighting techniques to his team, it was still something in the near future. He had to first assemble all the good seeds his vice leaders would find, test them thoroughly, before selecting those good to be nourished.