The address came through at 9:47 PM.
Ye Chen memorized it, then watched Li Wei delete the message with shaking thumbs. His roommate's fear was palpable—sweat darkening his collar, eyes darting to the door as if Zhao Feng might burst through at any moment.
"You don't have to come," Ye Chen said, pulling on a faded jacket. The original owner's clothes—cheap, ill-fitting, smelling of detergent and defeat. He'd burn them eventually. "Just the entrance fee."
Li Wei counted out crumpled bills. "This is my food money for two weeks. If you lose—"
"I won't."
The certainty in Ye Chen's voice wasn't bravado. It was memory. Three centuries of combat against cultivators who could shatter mountains, dodge lightning, kill with a glance. Even with his current pathetic qi reserves, even with muscles that had never thrown a proper punch—he knew exactly how weak these underground fighters were.
Mortal. Untrained. Slow.
The venue was a converted factory in Jiang City's industrial district, surrounded by rusted chain-link and graffiti that promised violence in spray-painted characters. Ye Chen counted seven security cameras, four visible guards with concealed weapons, and two hidden sniper positions in the upper windows.
Amateur. In his previous life, he'd have sensed these without looking. Now he had to rely on pattern recognition, on the telltale glint of glass lenses and the subtle weight distribution of armed men pretending to be unarmed.
Li Wei stopped at the gate. "I can't. My cousin said if they recognize me—"
"Go back. Wait for my call."
Ye Chen walked through alone.
The interior was humidity and neon—sweat, smoke, and the copper scent of recent blood. A sunken pit in the factory floor served as the ring, surrounded by tiered metal bleachers packed with shouting spectators. Men in expensive suits beside workers in factory uniforms, all united by the desperate hunger in their eyes.
Gambling addiction. The great equalizer.
He approached the registration table. A woman with scarred knuckles and a ledger looked him up and down.
"Name?"
"Ye Chen."
"Record?"
"None."
She laughed, showing gold-capped teeth. "Fresh blood. Entry fee's a hundred. You win, you double it. You lose—" she nodded toward a side door where two men dragged a limp body, "—hospital's three blocks east. We don't call ambulances."
Ye Chen placed Li Wei's crumpled bills on the table. "Who's the current champion?"
"Black Wolf. Twelve wins this month. Ex-military, dishonorable discharge." She leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Kid, you look like you sell phones at a mall. Walk away. First-timers don't walk out of Black Wolf's matches."
Ex-military. Ye Chen filed this away. In his previous life, mortal soldiers were barely distinguishable from peasants. Here, with his current limitations, he needed specifics.
"Height? Weight? Fighting style?"
The woman's eyebrows rose. "One-eighty centimeters. Eighty-five kilos. Muay Thai mixed with army combatives. Broke his last opponent's spine in two places." She studied him. "You asking like you know what to do with the answer."
"I do."
His name went on the board: YE CHEN vs. BLACK WOLF — 10:30 PM
Forty-three minutes to prepare.
Ye Chen found a corner behind the bleachers, ignored the sticky floor and the roaches, and sat in meditation. The Nine Heavens Thunder Scripture cycled through his damaged meridians, each rotation clearing microscopic blockages, each breath pulling trace spiritual energy from the polluted air.
Pathetic. The density here was less than one ten-thousandth of his previous world. A cultivator would starve to death before reaching Foundation Establishment.
But he wasn't trying to cultivate. He was optimizing .
The original Ye Chen's body had never been trained. Coordination was off. Balance was wrong. He spent thirty minutes recalibrating—adjusting stance, aligning center of gravity, programming combat reflexes into muscles that had only known keyboards and textbooks.
Then he studied his opponents.
The undercard matches revealed everything. These fighters were tough by mortal standards—years of conditioning, pain tolerance, practical experience. But they were linear . They fought like men who believed physics was absolute, who had never seen qi accelerate a punch beyond muscle limits, who didn't know the body had pressure points that could end consciousness in 0.3 seconds.
Black Wolf entered to cheers.
Ye Chen watched him climb into the pit. The man was exactly as described—heavy with muscle, scarred across the brow, moving with the economical grace of someone who'd learned efficiency through violence. He radiated the specific confidence of a man who'd never met his superior.
Twelve wins. No losses. No concept of true power.
The announcer—a thin man with a wireless microphone and the dead eyes of a longtime debt collector—called Ye Chen's name to confused silence.
"Who the fuck is that?" someone shouted.
"Fresh meat," another voice answered. "Black Wolf's gonna paint the floor."
Ye Chen descended into the pit. The concrete was stained dark in patches, uneven where too many feet had shifted and stomped. He felt the crowd's assessment—scrawny, young, probably desperate for money, certainly suicidal.
The rules were simple. No weapons. No eye-gouging. Submission or knockout. Death was discouraged but not prosecuted.
Black Wolf smiled, showing the gaps where teeth had been replaced with titanium. "You owe someone money, kid?"
"Something like that."
"Walk away now. I break something permanent in round two."
Ye Chen settled into a stance that existed in no martial arts textbook—something between a cultivator's rooted meditation and a predator's coiled tension. His qi, meager as it was, concentrated in his lower dantian.
"I'll finish in round one."
The bell was a wrench striking steel.
Black Wolf came forward exactly as Ye Chen predicted—feint left, low kick right, the Muay Thai rhythm that had served him through twelve victories. Fast for a mortal. Telegraphic for someone who'd fought cultivators.
Ye Chen didn't dodge. He intercepted .
His left hand caught the kicking ankle—not blocking, but guiding, applying pressure to a specific tendon cluster that mortal anatomy texts called the common fibular nerve. Black Wolf's leg went numb from knee down.
Surprise flashed in the veteran's eyes. He pivoted on his good leg, throwing a right cross with genuine force behind it. Enough to shatter a normal man's jaw.
Ye Chen's head moved two inches. The fist passed through empty air, momentum carrying Black Wolf forward into the range Ye Chen wanted.
Three strikes.
Index and middle fingers rigid as iron, driven into the sternum at the convergence of the conception vessel meridian—Zhongji point. Not hard enough to kill. Hard enough to disrupt diaphragm function, to steal breath and balance simultaneously.
While Black Wolf gasped, Ye Chen's elbow rose to meet the descending chin—precise angle, precise force, channeling the last of his qi reserves into a shockwave that traveled through mandible to temporal lobe.
The third strike was unnecessary. Black Wolf was already falling.
He hit the concrete with the sound of meat dropping on stone. Unconscious. Respiration steady. No permanent damage—Ye Chen had measured exactly.
The silence was absolute.
Then the announcer's voice, cracking with disbelief: "Winner... Ye Chen?"
The crowd erupted. Not cheering—arguing . Accusations of fix, of drug use, of some elaborate con. Ye Chen ignored them, climbing from the pit to find the gold-toothed woman staring at him with something between greed and fear.
"Two hundred," she said, counting bills with trembling hands. "You want another match? Triple or nothing. Iron Fist Tang. Fifteen wins. Underground legend for six years."
Ye Chen took the money. Felt the paper's texture, the weight of capital in a world where capital meant survival.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Same terms. But I want five percent of the betting pool, not double my entry."
"That's—" she started to protest, then looked at Black Wolf being dragged out, at the efficiency of the violence she'd witnessed. "That's crazy. You'd need to win ten straight. No one's done that."
"Then find someone who can authorize it." Ye Chen turned toward the exit. "I'll be back at 10 PM. Have your answer ready."
He walked into Jiang City's night, two hundred yuan in his pocket, qi completely depleted, every muscle screaming from the strain of techniques this body wasn't built for.
And he smiled.
Because he'd felt it during that fight—a microscopic response from the environment. When his qi channelled through that final elbow strike, the air had resonated . Just for an instant, a frequency that shouldn't exist in a sealed world.
There's more here than I thought.
His phone buzzed. Li Wei: ???
Ye Chen typed back: Rent covered. Food covered. Tomorrow we start building.
He looked up at the stars, barely visible through the city's light pollution. Somewhere up there, beyond atmosphere and gravity, the powers that had killed him once waited thinking him dead.
Let them wait.
Let them believe the heavenly tribulation succeeded.
When we meet again, I'll be ready.
The walk back to campus took forty minutes. Ye Chen spent every step in meditation, rebuilding his qi, planning his next ten moves in a game that had no board and no rules he recognized yet.
Behind him, in the converted factory, the gold-toothed woman made a phone call to someone who paid her to report interesting developments.
"Sir... we might have found one. The real kind."