"Billions! Damn! How much will they get from these?!!" Lina got tempted, the same as Ibra and William as well.
"It's not that easy to build a portal," William sighed, "aside from the need of many space element spirit masters, lots of masters with engineer elements, there is a scary cost for these portals. This place must have spent hundreds of billions before starting to work."
"..."
The other two sucked in a cold air of breath, while William found their reaction a bit funny.
"What? Did you two mistake that doing such a business is cheap? If so, then why would I not try to do it? Why not every single academy would aim to build such portals there?"
"Well… If we get a portal zone back at the city, and aside from getting lots of wealth from it, we can gain access to locations away from the Scorching Lands zone. Like this, we don't need to struggle or fight the same kind of monsters inside that old man's worlds… Tsk! We need to do such a thing later, ok boss?"
"Why do you always call me boss whenever you want something insane from me?" William rolled his eyes, without expressing his thoughts.
Of course, what Ibra said was true. Having such a place back in the city would help in solving most of the current problems people living there faced. Not to mention it'd be a great source of income as well. And it would attract lots of spirit masters to move and live there as well.
Yet William also knew it was a headache to run, a bottomless pit for wealth if one wasn't careful.
After all, sending people to any location wasn't the main problem, getting them back was. If the Scorching Lands city focused only on sending people out to adventure and do missions without securing a way back, things would be impossible for any spirit master.
No one would accept such an offer even if the region of the Scorching Lands was safe. To secure such return points, William had to secure lots of places outside the Scorching Lands area, build lots of fortified points there, working as settlements that could defend against any grand monster tide or something.
After all, with the presence of such space cracking portals in any place, it'd create a weird phenomenon called the Monster Magnet!
Monsters were sensitive to such spatial changes, and seemingly they'd assault such places in grand numbers from time to time. So William knew establishing secure spots in the forests around the Scorching Lands was something impossible for him, for his guild, or even for the entire forces in the city.
But that didn't mean William didn't place that move in his mind. Yet it was for a later time, a time when he'd have at least ten times the size of the current power the guild got.
Even if this would take longer, William didn't like the idea of sharing such a hot cake with anyone else. Especially when he'd make most of the hard and dirty work himself to begin with.
"Smith took much longer this time," the three of them kept walking inside that grand space filled with portals for hours, and yet they didn't hear a single word back from Smith.
They already checked on the portal they'd board, got familiar with things there, before turning around and toured the entire area.
"Where are you?" William took out a Bullet, sent this message over to Smith. Usually, Smith would answer in a few seconds, but this time a few minutes passed without sending back anything.
"Something is off," even Ibra felt the same, "he never delayed answering his Message Paper, not even once!"
"Yes, something must have happened…" William tried for more times, without getting any response at all, "let's go and check on that Spar Arena."
"With the three of us?!" Ibra was surprised by this, "won't we call the team? He might be in danger or something."
"If he was, he'd have run towards us," William laughed, "besides we got you. Don't tell me you are afraid to face danger! I'm sure the three of us can handle anything together, right? As for finding him in the middle of such a grand place, then your spirit sense can cover the entire arena and find him for us."
"Tsk! Always asking me to do little stuff like this, why not let me wash your laundry as well?"
"You wish," William laughed, not taking Smith's absence anyway seriously. But soon enough, he'd learn that he'd underestimated what truly happened.
The three of them went towards the direction of the Spar Arena, to find an expected heated up scene around it.
The arena was much larger, at least twenty times larger than the Spar Arena of the Aspire academy. In fact, there wasn't just one arena, but ten grand ones, with tall walls that made each look like a stadium or something.
From inside, the three could hear loud cheers and awes coming from many directions. The audience inside seemed to be more excited about these battles, more than what William experienced back at the Aspire academy.
The arena was situated in the middle of a grand plaza, an open space that wasn't any lesser in size than the portal area they just came from. The place wasn't empty, but overcrowded with many masters who were trying to get inside, forming lots of long lines that filled the entire plaza.
"Locate him," William removed the thought of Smith getting entrapped in one of these lines. It wasn't a logical explanation to how he didn't pick up his Bullet and answer him. Not to mention the speed of these lines moved with was fast enough to let anyone at the end of the line get inside in less than an hour.
"Hmm… Weird…" After ten minutes of waiting, Ibra only muttered this. Lina also started using her spirit sense when Ibra took more than five minutes without saying anything.
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