The image I have of how matter exists is something I could spend weeks on discussing, but on the topic of a medium, it is possible I don't know the scientific meaning, so my illustration is this, a lake of water, and on its surface waves, that give off light. The light represents matter and the water the medium. Anything that appears above that water is matter, like our new friend Higgsy and his cousins which will eventually be found.
Only the water is not water, and neither does it have location, yet wherever matter exists, that is the face or surface of it, a surface which cannot be found or put in one locality. In fact if and when matter disappears, as some elements do, they become part of the energy of the medium, and can appear somewhere else, at any locality in the universe at an instant. But what complicates it is that there are two characteristics of this medium, and I have just tried to explain the one that relates to space.
I call one the space factor and the other the time factor.
If you (by thought experiement) put matter into a supposed saturation of the space factor, the material explodes in an instance and fills all space in the universe, even the heat is gone. So matter disappears.
If you place matter into the other extreme, the time factor, it implodes into nothing, but maintains its position in space, a tiny black hole that does not move.
All the physical properties of matter are variations and combinations of these two basic forces.
At the same time, naturally occuring variations of the medium, cause things like gravity wells, and weird phenomenon like tornadoes, and ships suddenly loosing their boyancy.
Your world of virtual photons I picture with Higgsy as lying just on the surface of the medium.