The Underground Black Boxing Arena

Chen Fan stopped cultivating and walked over to Gu Ci, who had stood as still as a stone statue for two months. He asked, puzzled.

"Teacher Gu, I've reached one hundred calories, but my Qi and Blood won't increase any further."

A flicker of understanding passed through Gu Ci's lifeless eyes.

He finally spoke, his raspy voice ice-cold.

"One hundred calories is the limit a mortal body can contain."

"It is the first shackle the laws of this world have placed on all prospective martial artists."

"Mortal Shackles?"

Chen Fan frowned slightly.

"That's right." Gu Ci's tone was utterly flat. "The Federation's education system only teaches you how to reach it. It never tells you that you can... break it."

"After one hundred calories, every increase is no mere accumulation of quantity. It is a challenge to the very level of your life, an effort to shake and break free of this mortal shackle."

"For every extra calorie you break through, your foundation will be that much stronger than others at the same level, and your future potential will undergo a qualitative transformation. That is the true gulf between a monstrous talent and a genius."

Gu Ci looked at Chen Fan. Deep in his lifeless eyes, a storm seemed to be brewing.

"But breaking the shackles cannot be rushed. It takes tremendous perseverance, wisdom, and opportunity to grind them down inch by inch and pry them loose bit by bit. If your heart is restless, you will only damage your foundation and throw away all your previous efforts."

After hearing this, Chen Fan was not discouraged in the slightest. Instead, a flame burned in his bright eyes, fiercer than ever before!

So that's how it is!

This is the real challenge!

He finally understood just how terrifyingly difficult the minimum threshold of 110 calories truly was.

Seeing the undisguised, blazing fighting spirit in Chen Fan's eyes, Gu Ci's perpetually unchanging, deathly face showed a hint of admiration.

He slowly turned around, his icy tone carrying a note of unquestionable resolve.

"Cultivation through sheer hard work and potions alone can no longer take you further."

"To break the shackles, what you need is real... stimulation."

Gu Ci's gaze seemed to pierce through layers of metal and rock.

"Get ready."

"I'm taking you somewhere."

He quietly left Jiangnan No. 1 High School with Chen Fan, and they boarded a hover train.

The hover train threaded through the crowds. In the end, rather than heading for the city's bustling districts, it descended slowly into an outlying area where dragons and snakes mingled.

The air no longer carried the scent of ink and spiritual energy found at a school. Instead, it reeked of a pungent mixture of industrial exhaust and food waste.

Gu Ci led Chen Fan into a dark, damp back alley that smelled of swill and rotting garbage.

At the end of the alley stood a mottled wall covered in twisted graffiti.

Gu Ci stopped and extended a withered finger, knocking three times, neither too hard nor too softly, in a peculiar rhythm with no discernible pattern.

"Thump... thump thump."

The wall slid inward without a sound, revealing a pitch-black passage just wide enough for one person.

A murky blast of hot air, mingled with sweat, blood, cheap alcohol, and feverish excitement, rushed into their faces, nearly knocking them off their feet.

Chen Fan did not so much as frown. He calmly followed Gu Ci into the bottomless darkness.

After walking nearly a hundred meters down a spiraling staircase, their view suddenly opened up.

An immense underground space appeared before them, no smaller than a small stadium.

In the center stood an octagonal iron cage enclosed by thick alloy bars, stained with blood and giving off a nauseating stench of rust and sickly sweetness.

The tiered stands around it were packed with hundreds upon hundreds of frenzied spectators. Their eyes were bloodshot and the veins stood out on their necks as they roared and shouted themselves hoarse, wildly hurling colorful Federation banknotes and electronic betting slips into the arena.

This was a lawless place where order and sunlight could never reach.

"This is the stimulation I spoke of."

Gu Ci found a shadowy corner where no one would notice them and stopped. Amid the deafening uproar, his raspy voice seemed to carry at some special frequency, reaching Chen Fan's ears with perfect clarity.

As soon as he finished speaking, a new match began in the arena.

"Roar!"

With beastlike roars, two burly, brutal-faced prospective martial artists charged in from passages on opposite sides of the cage.

The fluctuations of their Qi and Blood were both around 85 calories, quite formidable to ordinary people. But Chen Fan needed only one glance to make the most precise assessment in his mind.

Hollow and impure.

It was an amount built up purely through potions and time, its quality far inferior even to his own Qi and Blood before compression.

The fight had no rules whatsoever, not even a referee's whistle.

The moment they stepped into the cage, the two became beasts fighting desperately for survival, crashing savagely into each other!

Fists and feet met with dull thuds.

One of them seized an opening and abruptly dropped his body, driving a vicious elbow upward into the forearm his opponent raised to block!

"Crack!"

The grating sound of breaking bone rang out clearly amid the frenzied howls.

The loser's left forearm snapped outward into a grotesque V, the stark white bone piercing through his skin and jutting into the air.

"Ah!"

His agonized scream echoed throughout the arena. Rather than stirring any sympathy, it whipped the spectators into even more morbid excitement.

A beastlike glint flashed in the victor's eyes. Ignoring his opponent's screams, he closed in and drove a heavy punch, infused with all the Qi and Blood in his body, squarely into the man's temple!

"Bang!"

The loser's scream cut off abruptly. His eyes instantly lost their light, and he crumpled to the ground like a heap of sludge stripped of every bone.

Blood mixed with white brain matter slowly seeped from his ears.

Soon, two workers in black uniforms entered the cage, their expressions numb. They dragged the still-twitching corpse out like a dead dog, leaving only a glaring streak of blood on the floor.

Gu Ci had not looked at the arena once from beginning to end.

His lifeless eyes were fixed unblinkingly on Chen Fan beside him.

He wanted to see even the slightest trace of fear, discomfort, disgust, or any other emotion a normal child ought to have on the nine-year-old's face.

This was the first test for which he had brought Chen Fan here.

A test of character.

But he was disappointed.

Chen Fan's face was as undisturbed as an ancient well.

His startlingly bright eyes passed through the feverish crowd and over the bloody cage, precisely capturing every detail of the brief fight.

The techniques used to exert force, the timing of each burst of Qi and Blood, the opening in the victor's defense exposed by his wild joy at the final moment...

The bloody scene, enough to give even adults endless nightmares, was to him nothing more than combat data he could retrieve, analyze, and learn from at any time.

The angle of the elbow strike was off by three degrees. If it had been a little lower, it could have crippled his opponent's shoulder blade outright instead of merely breaking his forearm.

That last punch scattered his Qi and Blood, wasting at least thirty percent of its power. If he had concentrated it at one point, he could have blown the man's head apart outright instead of leaving him half-dead like this.

Chen Fan calmly reviewed the fight in his mind, even with a trace of barely perceptible... disdain.

Too crude.

This is how adults fight to the death?

It was a far cry from the art he had imagined, where every calculation was taken to its extreme and every bit of power put to perfect use.

Gu Ci could not read Chen Fan's private criticism, but he could clearly sense that what radiated from the nine-year-old was not fear or revulsion, but longing.

A born madman, born for battle!

Deep in Gu Ci's eyes, lifeless for ten years, a flame called admiration flickered to life.

He slowly withdrew his gaze and spoke softly in a tone devoid of emotion.

"Your task: ten consecutive victories."

With that, he jerked his chin toward a crude tin shed not far away, where a sign reading "Fighter Registration" hung.

"Go on."