William knew the buyers weren't insane to throw away such wealth without having tons of gains in return.
As he reached that place, he decided to do everything he could to find such scrolls. He was curious about what kind of secrets they held and didn't plan to share his finding with Angelica and keep anything he'd find to himself.
The place he ended at was a secluded hall, one that spanned for hundreds of metres with only one entrance towards it. It was a tunnel, twisting right and left, up and down, filled with lots of useless traps.
When he arrived, he found stones in the walls releasing faint light all over the place. He didn't care about any of this and focused over the ceiling and walls.
"Long of time passed, and there are still unhealed cracks all over the place," William examined everything using his spirit sense. And that was why he didn't need light in the first place.
"If I was them, the first place I'd hide such a thing in would be the ground," he shifted his eyes towards the dirty ground, "but if I used my devastating technique, things would go messy."
He was worried about the stability of this place. So he didn't use his technique, and instead used his earth element techniques to dig the ground.
It was indeed much slower, but it was safer. He kept digging probing holes, going down for tens of metres, yet didn't find anything.
When he finished, the ground that was filled with rocks and dust before turned to look like a beehive. William didn't feel dejected and started to look at the walls and ceiling.
"Walls can be a perfect place to hide such an item, but I have to be extra careful when doing this…"
He started to move around the walls, digging shallow holes there. He knew if anything was hidden there, it wouldn't be that deep. He just needed to dig narrow holes, and if the scrolls were there, a black light would emerge like what Angelica said.
"Not here…" William worked for an hour or so but he didn't get any result. He stopped in the middle of this place, looked at the only spot that he didn't yet look at, the ceiling.
"This is going to be tricky," the ceiling was at least twenty metres high. In normal situations, any spirit master wouldn't be able to reach there on his own. But with his spirit body, he could reach there if he jumped and dashed around.
But that wasn't what made him stand there motionless for a few minutes. He didn't know if the ceiling was strong enough to endure his attacks and moves or not.
"Screw it! I'll use my flying weapons and stand away," he decided to not use his body to dig the ceiling and decided to bring it down using his weapons.
He expected a grand collapse of the ceiling, so he retreated first and stood in the middle of the tunnel. He was ready to dash outside at any given sign of danger. As for digging the place again, he intended to use his Holy Sword technique to do it if he needed to.
*Clang!* *Clang!* *Clang!*
Unlike what he expected, the moment his weapons hit the ceiling, he heard loud clunking noises. He didn't hear any rocks falling, didn't even see the collapse that he expected.
"I'll infuse my earth element there," William cancelled his transformation before transforming into one tailed fox version. In this version, he could use a single element proficiently, and he decided to use the earth element to dig the ceiling.
The moment he transformed, one tail appeared and wiggled behind him while two fox ears appeared on his head. In addition to that, his neck looked a bit elongated, and his waist grew thinner and taller like it was tubular in shape.
William knew this was the result of the snake spirit getting activated as well. And he didn't care about that for now. He used his earth element, infused it into his flying weapons, and heard the muffled bangs that erupted after doing this.
His weapons now could tear down the ground on par with his deadly technique. And yet he didn't feel the ceiling was getting damaged as he expected. In fact, it felt like something was resisting the strong earth element in his weapons, ending up with nothing much happening to the ceiling.
He spread his spirit sense and watched what his weapons were doing. As he guessed, the ceiling looked intact with scratches here and there, but nothing deep appeared.
"That ceiling is fortified with arrays," William's eyes shone brightly when he realised this. If he decided to use his flying weapons, he did so, fearing the fall of the ceiling over his head. But now he recalled his weapons back, went inside and transformed into his three tailed version.
He was big enough to touch the ceiling using his tails. It felt weirdly hot, as if some sort of power was running all the time inside that giant rock forming the sky over his head.
"It's supposed to handle the pressure of my attacks," William looked around, and knew it'd be quite challenging considering the tight space left for him to stack his attacks, "let me test you with a single and direct hit then…" *Boom!*
As he expected, the hit he landed using a single short dash towards the ceiling left a shallow indentation up there. Yet he could see fine cracks spreading, and the weird thing was that they only spread in all directions except one.
"Going by logic, this spot shall be the one holding the great safe of this base," William repeated his weakened attacks, and with each hit more cracks spread until a circular gap appeared around a solid rock.
When William used his tails to clear this rock, he found out it was formed out of a hot ore, one that emitted black light not red.
The source of this c𝐨ntent is freewe(b)nov𝒆l