I didn’t like the idea of summoning useless bulls and monkeys and adding them to my forces.

And then I started the fire, burning the entire tree zone as usual.

Burning the trees and driving the monsters inside to face the bulls, this was my plan. After gaining control over the first zone, things started to snowball in my favour with less work to do.

But I noticed that letting these monsters fight each other took slightly longer than the first time. I estimated it took roughly fourteen hours to arrive at the second gate.

Once I saw it, I forgot about anything and only cared about this gate.

It looked like the first gate, or slightly taller than the first one. But it was also covered with the same thick dust layer as well.

*Clang!*

This time I used one of my swords to test my theory out.

You activated the hidden quest of this gate

And like I hoped for, this gate gave me a hidden quest and gave me three skills to unlock.

The Sword Tulip skill: Rare grade skill. Moving your sword fast, it will release a full of twelve attacks at different directions at the same time. Each strike will cause triple the initial damage of the sword plus two folds penetration power. Cool down: One minute. Price to unlock: One hundred thousand coins

The Sword Splash skill: Rare grade skill. Moving your sword in a certain trajectory will create a fan shaped damage that will jump from one opponent to another. The maximum covering range of this attack is one hundred metres, with each attack causing five folds the damage of the sword and three folds penetration power. Cool down: One minute. Price to unlock: One hundred thousand coins

The Sword Dance skill: Unique grade skill. Waving your sword in a curve from down upward will make you jump directly towards the next opponent you select with your instincts. Then you’ll keep jumping from one foe to another for one minute. Maximum distance to cross with each jump is fifty metres. Each strike will cause ten folds sword basic damage and five folds its penetration power. Cool down: Two minutes. Price to unlock: One million coins

“Unlike them all!” I was very thrilled by this. In fact the three skills looked so damn cool, especially the last one.

But I noticed a pattern here. It seemed each gate would grant me two rare and one unique skill. The prices of the rare skill were fixed at one hundred thousand coins. As for unique skills, they’d reach one million coins.

Did this mean that higher grade skills would require higher prices as well? But how could I get a higher grade skill then?

I looked up at the gate. It seemed these gates came in grades as well, or that was what I hoped for.

Armed with my past experience, I took out my glaive and hit the gate using the Heavy Blow skill. But the unexpected happened!

*Clang!*

The gate stopped my glaive without even budging an inch. Not a single speck of dust fell from the gate, making me frown.

I looked at my glaive and knew the issue wasn’t in it. It was the gate.

“So the hidden quest determines which weapon to take down the gate? Interesting,” I switched again to my sword, while looking at the gate in doubt. “Which skill shall I use?”

The sword skills were all cool and all that, but they lacked the strength in the glaive skills. Comparing the two together, the sword was meant to kill fast and many enemies and the glaive was for killing the strongest foes in a few strikes.

But I was trapped with my sword. If I couldn’t deal with it, how would I deal later with my dagger skills? Or should I not use my daggers?

No, I couldn’t waste such an opportunity like this. I’d then try the Sword Tulip skill.

*Bang!*

The gate shocked and the dust fell. It worked! I looked at the drawings on the two doors and they looked similar to the ones before.

I didn’t care too much about this and looked at the star in the upper part. I jumped and hit it with the same skill, slightly pushing the doors open.

After seven attacks, the gate finally fully opened. Another pitch black abyss awaited for me, and I didn’t hesitate to step into it.

Like before, a new hexagonal basin zone appeared in front of me. But this time the fur over the monsters wasn’t like before.

“Metallic fur?!! That’s… New,” I muttered in surprise when I saw the monsters waiting for me.

Other than their fur changes, there was nothing else worthy of mentioning. But when I started killing them, their fur showed its value in defence.

Previously I only needed one hit to kill them, but now I needed two. Even their heads were covered with this fur and got extra boast in defence.

But that didn’t stop me. I kept killing them using the same old tactic. Then I went to burn the forest down.

As the bulls showed a chance, these agile monsters also showed a new thing. Instead of having one arched tail, they got two.

On one side, the bulls got an upgrade to their defences. On the other hand, the agile monsters got a boost in their offence. But the upper hand this time leant towards the agile monsters.

The last couple gate zones I fought at using this tactic ended up with few weakened and poisoned bulls. But this time it was different. What remained behind after setting the first tree zone on fire was a group of over a hundred of these agile monsters.

Just from the look of it, I knew the difference wasn’t in the strength in their attacks or the number of darts getting doubled; it was poison.

One dart was enough to poison the bull monsters. Even when few remained alive in the end, they were unfortunate to not survive long enough, fall on the ground and die out of poison.