In the next five hours, massive preparations were completed.
First, their base was protected with a myriad of defensive formations, slaughter formations, and illusion formations—a total of 138 formations, effective within a 50-kilometer radius.
Naturally, the energy drain was going to be massive when these activated, so they also had to put in a huge amount of magic cores and crystals.
Almond told them to put everything there since he planned to get more energy from the hundreds of Dungeons whose doors were situated on Earth.
Almond wanted to fiddle with dungeons to get more energy in the first place, or their Vital Rampage Tower wouldn’t work. Specifically, it’s the 100th Floor.
Up to the 99th floor could run from the ley line sources, solar energy, and Earth’s energy, but the 100th floor required massive amounts for refinement training of Legendary and Mythical-rank powerhouses.
As such, the formations were ready as everyone brought everything they had to fuel it in case they were attacked.
Aside from that, Almond also formed teleport circles at the four Kingdoms that Earth had allied with within 1000 kilometers, and now that they were powerful, they could also go to the Legendary and Mythical-rank areas to get more allies.
He wanted to finish that first, so after the completion of the formations, Almond sent Asura with Admiral Rudra and some other old monsters to visit the stronger kingdoms.
Meanwhile, he also wanted some Legendary and Mythical-rank beasts, so he and Kexell went to hunt for monsters and forcefully captured six monsters in an hour with Almond’s scanning and teleports that made it easier to find strong monsters.
Four Legendary-rank and two Mythical-rank.
He imprisoned the monsters within a spatial prison outside the formations’ range. With a single thought, he would be able to unleash them if enemies arrived.
He removed their reasons and intelligence further with his All-Severing Blade, so they would attack mindlessly to anyone who was closer to them.
After he was done with this, Almond went back to Earth while others began training using the exotic rewards they had gained from clearing the Heroic Challenges of many floors.
Although the most amount of rewards were items that were kind of useless, Almond made use of them and devoured all of them so he could create Spirit Items for everyone.
He didn’t create them now as there were other things to do.
Aside from items, every one of the 148 powerhouses had acquired an Elemental Imprint, Elemental Scrolls, Insight Scrolls, Insight Stones, Stat-increasing fruits, skills, Skill upgrade cards, and so on.
As such, they were using those rewards to get strong, while Almond went to complete the most important task—utilizing the dungeons completely.
As they had cleared many floors at once, dungeon doors were spawning rapidly, and that too of high grades.
Almond first went to the dungeons with gold borders that were on the verge of turning black and breaking.
With Astra A.I.’s help, which monitored Earth and all dungeon doors, it was easy for him to teleport directly to the dungeon doors.
Entering an S-rank dungeon on the verge of turning black, Almond sent a pulse, scanning the entire dungeon with his All-Seeing Eyes, piercing through whatever phenomenon and power that made it complex and laying it bare to his mind like a blueprint.
‘I need a skill that is low cost and effective in killing monsters…’
Almond began cooking a skill and was done shortly.
‘Target locked,’ Almond’s eyes flickered, locking onto every single monster, including the bosses.
In front of him, a portal formed first.
‘This should be fun,’ Almond grinned.
And in the next moment, an ethereal hand with sharp, edgy blade fingers directly phased through every single monster, right towards their cores.
And in another second, the portal in front of him started dumping their magic cores in masses, hundreds of them every second, as a pile of ultimately 684 magic cores formed.
Since this clone body had 10,000 in stats, Almond had a massive amount of Mana as well as overall power.
He had also retrieved his entire mental capacity as he had reached the peak of Mortal-rank / Mythical-rank, so he was at full power right now, in a sense.
As he was done harvesting monsters and clearing the dungeon, it would disappear after 24 hours, but there was an Arcane Vein here to mine for magic crystals, so Almond contacted Astra A.I.
Shortly after Almond went to another dungeon, an aircraft arrived with twenty people of Gold-rank Adventurers to mine the magic crystals.
Usually, it would be lower-ranked adventurers, but Admiral Rudra had made sure that all adventurers remained free to take orders, as this was an important phase.
Gold-rank Adventurers would be able to mine crystals way faster with their strength. Not just gold-rank but Platinum-rank Adventurers were also on standby, ready to mine the crystals as soon as Almond cleared the dungeons.
Almond first cleared all S-rank and SS-rank dungeons as they were on the verge of turning black due to the influx of SSS-rank high-colored border that contained Mythical-rank monsters ever since they cleared the 20th Floor.
Almond’s speed of clearing the dungeon was scarily fast. He just needed Mana, but his recovery was already high, and he also had access to tons of Mana potions.
In just two and a half hours, he cleared over a hundred Dungeons total, consisting of S-rank and SS-rank, while thousands of Adventurers began mining magic crystals.
Almond also gathered magic cores of monsters he killed and thousands of Spirits that he directly turned into one-time-use spirit items.
There were A-rank and below ranked Dungeons, but he didn’t bother with them as young adventurers were onto clearing those.
Instead, Almond moved to the cream of the crops, the SSS-rank dungeons.
He didn’t just want to clear these SSS-rank dungeons, he wanted to entirely absorb them. He wanted the dungeon’s every ounce of energy and connected it to the Vital Rampage Tower.
Entering the first SSS-rank dungeon, Almond scanned it. This dungeon looked like a broken world with broken eyes, as color rifts whipped out streams of energy.
Almond knew it was just a visual effect as these energies didn’t affect the dungeon much. The dungeons were a closed dimension with a nexus that produced monsters if left by, with the nexus getting energy directly from the Grimworld Tutorial’s system.
Almond exerted his All-Seeing Eyes more than ever as he wanted to find that nexus.
He wanted the source of this dungeon in his control and to wrestle it away!
After five minutes of exertion of his willpower to empower his All-Seeing Eyes, which also almost made his brain explode, he finally found the nexus.
‘Goddamn it. Is someone trying to stop me? What was with that resistance?’ Almond frowned as he wiped away the blood that trickled down from his nose.
Clenching his jaw, his eyes ignite, ‘But I am not backing down.’
Almond made a motion of clawing as the space in front of them bent extremely before breaking as he teleported and arrived in front of the nexus.
A square cube with eccentric patterns and glowing colors.
‘Now, how do I take this?’
Almond wanted to use this energy source for his Vital Rampage Tower.
He observed the nexus, a scary amount of power in it.
‘What if I…devour it metaphysically and turn it into a Spirit using Spirit Animation? A spirit of pure energy source…which I should be able to input in the tower!’ Almond’s eyes glinted.