'This is…!'

As soon as I was transported into the gate, I was immediately surrounded by 5 targets, this was astonishing in itself but that was merely the beginning!

My quickened sense had already noticed the other peculiarities that made the gate much more complicated than it looked on the outside.

Firstly, the whole diameter of my perception circle governed by 'Omni-viewing Eye' has reported nothing, simply nothing. Even using my simple long distance eyesight showed no other entity in the gate so far, it appeared as if the gate only had these five enemies...

Secondly, even these five immediate enemies didn't appear to be normal…

The surrounding five seemed to be a new type of monster that even the monster encyclopedia that I read had nothing concerning them, in fact, the only ones that came close to them was the death knight I met in my very first gate. However, as a player who had a different world's knowledge, these monsters appeared to be infinitely similar to a very popular monster back in reality…

'Zombies?'

The five monsters who had lost some of their flesh and their body seemed to be mostly rotten each held a metal weapon as they jointly attacked me, seemingly very orderly in their cooperative attack, they didn't seem to be fast enough though, so I was able to dodge after momentarily activating 'Body of Elements'.

Still, just as I was going to start attacking back to end this quickly and examine the empty gate, I was given another surprise once more.

These zombies were employing Elemental Weapon Techniques!

Not only that, judging from the fluctuations left by the empty attacks, all five of them seemed to share a very distinct feature, all of them were at the peak of Tier-6 when it came to weapon practice and at fresh entry to the 3rd stage when it came to elemental practice!

They were simply at the state of fresh sect geniuses at the Elemental Blade!

'They are…'

My interest could no longer be held as I stalled for a whole minute before finally confirming my realization.

'They are the same five that had failed to accomplish the mission…'

The miscellaneous information that were mentioned in the mission details about those who failed and were reported missing during the last year had actually come to play as I managed to more or less distinguish the identity of these zombies.

Two Wind sword practitioners, another Earth spear one and lastly two axe practitioners one them using Water while the other used Fire.

So far, the corrupted monsters that I have met barely had one path of the two, with this much details matching up as well as their use of the combined path, it was pretty obvious.

The color of their elements also spelt out a lot of information, the total answer to this, of course one that's based on guessing quickly came to mind.

'Enforced Corruption.'

I did already know that this was possible back then when I found my first corrupted elemental crystal which had a similar effect of forcefully corrupting the one that absorbs it, but I didn't know that it would produce such monsters that appeared to have some battle intelligence in comparison to normal corrupted monsters, even then they were still mindless in the rest of the aspects just like them.

The mystery to this was how were they even corrupted, there has been no sign of anything else moving so far and this gate seemed like it was completely devoid of life. That intrigued me more than the fact that how they still sent so many geniuses to this 'grave'.

Finally reaching such a conclusion, I no longer evaded passively as I threw out five wind essence swords to disturb the cooperative formation that they employed as I already drew 'Lightning Cloud' before morphing it into the spear phase.

Considering these zombies' nature, 'Freezing Venom Spear' seemed to be a good counter attack as their nearly dead bodies caused by the forced corruption had no natural resistance to freezing venom and could take care of them easily. Such a method would probably be a good replacement for the mob arrow shower that I used to take care of the base demons who were mostly physical brutes.

[ You have absorbed the blood essence of a 'Corrupted Soldier', purification in progress… ]

[ You have received 118,596 EP! ]

[ You have absorbed the blood essence of a 'Corrupted Soldier', purification in progress… ]

[ You have received 114,836 EP! ]

[ You have… ]

[ … ]

The battle ended quickly as I held nothing back to put these half-senior sect brothers of mine to rest quickly and release them from their half dead misery, this time I was no longer facing my equal so 'Freezing Venom Spear' had shown its might and ended the whole formation of five under a few minutes, especially since I also used 'Aerial Sword' to make it easier.

Unfortunately though, these half-senior brothers of mine had a somewhat low level of 135~ as their bodies weren't that strong just like most practitioners who relied of their elements and weapon energy, receiving this much EP was already considered good as a result, but it didn't even fill 10% of my level bar.

'That's good.'

That wasn't upsetting at all to me as I actually hoped that I wouldn't level up somehow and consume my gains in the gate long before I entered the gate, after all, while about half a million of EP wasn't worth much to me, it could be considered a feast to someone else!

[ 'Essence Sharing' has been activated! ]

[ Transferring a total of 558,951 EP to blood companion 'Light (Three-eyed Lightning Cat)... ]

The essence that had flew out the five corpses on the ground and integrated with me flew out once again as I felt a similar feeling to that of losing a few strands of hair, but I ignored it as I stared at that essence heading towards little Light's bag, interested in what might be the result of it…

[ 412,569 EP has been successfully transfered! ]

[ 'Light (Three…)' has gained a level! ]

[ 'Light… ]