With a shout Jacen blocked the shaft of the hammer welded by the "Crimson Hammer" with his forearm. He didn't know what made him wince more, the dull ache from having parried half a dozen similar blows or the pompous nickname of the so called champion of Blackrock's underground. Jacen new that for most competent sect fighter's underground matches like this one are considered beneath them yet he hadn't had much choice.

Stepping into the gard of the off-balance fool Jacen delivered a sharp elbow strike to the man's face. Capitalizing of the move he followed up by slapping his weapon down and landing a kick to his opponent's midsection folding him over like a fallen tree. "Winner and new champion of the Blackrock underground I give you Jacen of the black turtle sect" the announcer crowd to the small underground stadium. Jacen did his best not to snear at the drunkards, mercenaries and whores in attendance as he walked back into the entrance of the little arena.

"What the HELL is this!?" Jacen slammed his hand on the willy merchant, smuggler and ruler of the undergrounds Morgan's desk. "We had an agreement" " had being the key word there" shaking his head with a chuckle Morgan continued "if I'm being honest I only promised you that because I'd thought you'd lose". Jacen was taken aback by the man's shamelessness " selling the crowd a story of a sect disciple coming down to the underground only to get crushed by my fighter would have been a great draw for my clientele but alas the black turtles famed durability was able to overcome". Sighing with a smile on his lips he seemed to be trying to provoke Jacen to attack him and it took all his good sense not to do just that.

He had no clue what level of cultivation Morgan was at but it was rumored to be at least in the middle core realm. That didn't tell him much about his true abilities as power varied wildly from core cultivator to core cultivator from many factors like quality of materials used in foundational realms, techniques, manuals and what kind of core was developed but this matterd little to a forth step foundational realm cultivator like Jacen. Just before he decided to try his luck out anyway Morgan spoke "I'll make you a little deal, I'll give you two of the promised six foundational coins now and if you can defend your title for let's say five challenges I'll give you an additional eight coins, how does that sound". "And if I lose" Jacen said through gritted teeth knowing that if he decided to Morgan could simply keep his money and no one would question the head of Blackrock port's criminal underground. "I'd keep it of course and make ludicrous amounts of money dragging a lofty sect warrior through the mud of the arenas pit" Morgan said with a laugh "you've got a deal" Jacen said with a growle.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Jacen immediately left the underground arena to his sect compound with as much haste as possible. He got to the quartermaster's office and handed in the two coins over with no little amount of regret. He had recently taken out a loan from his sect to access the bone tempering formations. While usually this was a rather relatively inexpensive training method he had his entire skeleton reforged from the ground up. He had been tricked by some scam artist that it would allow him to preform the iron shell technique without backlash. He was furious that not only did it not allow him to preform the technique but it had actually cost him to take a step back from fifth to fourth rank foundational realm. He had immediately rushed over to the dive bar the scam artist was at and was planning on breaking every bone in his body only for some lord to show up and save the lucky fucker. After some time calming down he realized that there was some benefit to the reforgeing as though the quantity of energy he contained had dropped its density and the durability of his body had increased.

Now with the loan hanging over his head and the sect mission to raid the surrounding cultivation families territory requiring at least fifth step foundational realm to participate he had no other option than to fight for a man with as poor a reputation as Morgan. "If I ever see that scam artist Pryor again I'll kill him".