C13 Part2

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Chapter 13: Internal Troubles and External Onslaughts (Part 2)

After the Spring Season began, Ji Xiangkong officially entered his “retreat” mode. Every day, he only had time before he went to bed to give Qiu Ying a short video call. Qiu Ying discovered that he hardly ever told her about the negative things, always attempting to use different ways to tease her and make her happy. It was as if the dull hardships of training, the conflicts and contradictions with his teammates, and the pressures that came from competitions and the audience all did not exist.

In the time they’d interacted, other than him drinking too much after Legend had kicked him out back then, he rarely exposed his defenseless side to her. In most other times, he’d silently helped her, gently comforted her, smoothed the wrinkle between her eyebrows, gave her the strength to move forward. It made Qiu Ying both happy as well as anxious.

This type of anxiety, after seeing a ticking time bomb like Fu Miya, kept unendingly growing within her mind.

Two weeks after the Spring Season began, STV and Tanuki Streaming Platform co-organized a Conquer All-Stars Competition to open up the curtains as well. This extremely eye-catching exhibition game was composed of top professional players, commentators, and first-line stars. This year, other than the singing king Zhou Cheng and the newly-crowned Film Emperor Ruan Mohuai1 arriving on scene, they also invited the goddess who sparked the loudest cries from otakus, Fu Miya.

The thing that Qiu Ying had never expected was that Fu Miya said that her Conquer skills weren’t skilled enough, requesting that Ji Xiangkong to be her teacher and double-queue with her ever weekend. Naturally, VPG club couldn’t miss an opportunity to promote themselves like this. They readily agreed.

For this, Ji Xiangkong didn’t even have a day off to rest.

Qiu Ying suddenly felt wronged, but she could also understand it well enough. The current esports circle was getting more and more commercialized, and clubs needed to consider every single aspect of taking care of fans, pleasing the wishes of the sponsors, expanding their influence. So, competitions were very important, yet in the same vein they couldn’t be careless with their commercial actions.

When they called in the evening, Qiu Ying pretended to be unhappy, but when she heard Ji Xiangkong’s low coughs on his side of the phone her heart immediately went soft. Restlessly, he asked whether or not he was sick, and only until he laughingly said that he was fine did she relax. And then she couldn’t help but censure herself, how could she still bother him with her petty emotions with such a stressful schedule?

The evening the All-Stars Competition finished, Qiu Ying watched the livestream at home. In the camera, as the special guests were walking off the stage and down the stairs, as she saw Fu Miya wearing high heels and supporting herself with Ji Xiangkong’s arm, an intense anxiety surged up within her heart.

Half an hour later, Qiu Ying began to call Ji Xiangkong. She restlessly waited, but the other end always had a busy tone.

On her third call, the phone was finally picked up. But no one responded. It was as if the answer key had accidentally been hit. Qiu Ying was about to hang up when a moment later came the faint sound of Fu Miya speaking on the other side. She seemed to be some distance away but getting nearer and nearer.

“I already asked, that Qiu Ying… you’re only interested in her because she copies me, aren’t you?”

Instantaneously, as if something blunt had struck her heart, Qiu Ying covered her mouth hard.

“You took her to see me to make me angry, right? You blame me, blame me for leaving you that year, so you’re deliberately doing this, isn’t that right? Believe me, the captain of RXG and me, there’s nothing between him and me, it’s all the company’s arrangements…”

Qiu Ying’s head went completely blank. An oppressive pain nearly stripped the breath away from her body. She heard Fu Miya’s voice and it choked and tore her apart. “All these years, the thing I regret the most is breaking up with you. Your friends told me, my picture is in your wallet, you often watch my MVs and variety shows, you carry my autographed out-of-print collector’s album with you in your bag…”

Like the long-repressed emotions had finally reached their breaking point, Fu Miya finally couldn’t keep herself from wailing, as if a child who’d lost her beloved toy. “Xiangkong, you still like me, don’t you? I was wrong, I was truly wrong, I don’t need anything, anything at all. Let’s start over, alright? Alright?”

She was the sun who gave countless people hope and courage. But now, as she was crying so miserably, it was like she had been handed an overdraft for a lifetime of sadness.

“Miya—” On that end of the phone, Ji Xiangkong’s voice was exhausted and helpless— “It’s all the past.”

Qiu Ying’s hand trembled and she dropped her phone, as if she was hearing the sound of her heart breaking apart into bits and pieces. She bit her lower lip, hard, tears catching her unawares and falling from her eyes. All of her curly insides hurt with a throbbing pain.

After a very long time, Qiu Ying tremblingly picked up her phone and discovered it’d already been hung up. She looked at the pitch-black screen, not daring to call back, yet not daring to imagine what had happened in the end after that, on the other side. Was it the reunion of a couple after their forced separation for many years, or was it that they’d never broken up from the beginning…

Very, very slowly, she sat on the floor, curling her body up into a ball. Her head was buried in the crook of her arm. She felt her tears slide, one by one, down her cheeks. She didn’t know whether to just wait in deathly silence for him, wait for him to break up with her first.

Ji Xiangkong’s phone call came faster than she imagined. But this time, he didn’t turn on the video.

“I just came back to the base, my phone was on silent before. You were looking for me?”

He seemed not to realize that he’d accidentally picked up her call and let her hear something that should not have been heard. Qiu Ying pulled on the hem of her clothes, so tense she nearly couldn’t open her mouth.

“What’s wrong? Angry?”

His voice was as warm as rich wine. Every time he said, “What’s wrong?” his voice would be lengthened, as if it carried infinite patience and tenderness so great she couldn’t escape.

There were clearly a whole mess of questions running rampant in her mind, clamoring wantonly, but when they reached her lips only silence remained. Qiu Ying was afraid that if she asked it aloud, she would no longer be able to grab onto this hard-won tenderness. She couldn’t bear to part with it.

At last, she heard her own dry voice: “Was the exhibition game fun?”

Ji Xiangkong yawned and said lazily, “It was basically sacrificing my life to protect those stars, fairly useless.”

Qiu Ying pressed her lips together slightly and asked very carefully, “Did you guys go to the celebration banquet?”

“Yes, but I left early or else they would’ve caught me and made me drink and I wouldn’t have been able to put you to sleep tonight.”

While Ji Xiangkong’s voice was light, she could still hear a trace of a forced smile within it. Qiu Ying felt that his mood was similarly low.

Ji Xiangkong’s voice hesitated slightly. “Right, after the game ended today…”

Qiu Ying’s heart beat wildly like drums; the aching in her chest came like waves.

Ji Xiangkong meditated for quite a while before softly sighing. “It’s nothing.”

After they said goodnight to each other, he called out her name: “Qiu Ying.”

“Yeah?” She couldn’t keep herself from panicking again.

“Qiu Ying.”

“I’m here.”

“Qiu Ying.”

The tears in her eyes were about to spill over. “…You…what do you want to say?”

But Ji Xiangkong lowly laughed. “Nothing. It’s just, all of a sudden I wanted to say your name.”

After they hung up the phone, Qiu Ying fell onto her bed in a melancholic daze, feeling as if she was watching a heart-abusing movie that she’d been spoiled for. She knew clearly a sorrowful scene was about to begin, but the plot that should’ve happened had not yet happened. And so she was thankful yet anxious.

What she didn’t know was that Ji Xiangkong’s plight was much, much worse than she imagined. He’d long been overwhelmed with fending for himself.

**

Halfway through the Spring Season, the alarm bells rung in the domestic Conquer circle.

After the bitter loss of the championship title in the Seattle Global Finals last August, half a year had passed and again, there wasn’t a single Chinese team who’d won the championship in a global-level Conquer competition!

Unlike how the three pillars of Legend, Dragon, and VPG had dominated the world in previous years, now there were tyrants vying with each other in rising up. After the world entry of the American champion team Titan and Jeffery Chen’s ascension to the top of the world rankings, their morale was unstoppable. The strength of European and Korean teams was still strong and Southeast Asian esports was swiftly developing, while in contrast, Chinese Conquer teams were displaying an overall decline.

The three titans were experiencing a downturn, the first-string teams were spinning their wheels. Compared to the young geniuses coming out in droves abroad, the professional players inside the country had no current successors. The oldsters’ conditions were deteriorating and the newcomers found it difficult to step forward. In domestic competitions, these three teams could still come out on top, but once they went to foreign competitions the issues in the esports circle generated from the large amounts of capital investments thrown in finally surfaced themselves in the battle records.

Dragon was renowned for its stable defense and even moreso bemoaned by foreign teams as the “Great Wall of China.” But in the currently unceasingly-accelerating pace of the game updates, they still hadn’t formed new tactics. This extremely passionless “turtle-type” play style that dragged the game onto an hour at every turn was flamed by the audience as a “Bladder Game” (games were often long and they couldn’t go to the bathroom, which tested the endurance of the bladder) and “no recognition for the audience”.

And Legend hadn’t gone anywhere either. Pei Xi, as China’s top mid of the new generation, was able to eat up all of his entire team’s resources when he first debuted and kill the entire field in the late stage. But as his popularity continued to rise with it, Pei Xi became the focal object of research by every single team. Countless people did their utmost to figure out how to crack his every move and action. In foreign competitions, he was targeted starting from BP where every single one of the good heroes was banned; in mid lane three people roamed around indefinitely to kill him. He was a development-type mid to begin with, so after he was defeated his equipment and level lagged behind and it was impossible for him to face more than one enemy. He didn’t know how he should continue, his teammates couldn’t step up, and so he could only be defeated over and over again.

And in the championships of this CPL Fall Competition, the VPG team encountered the greatest trial of all. The online news portals were constantly—

[VPG CEO Shu Wen hospitalized, severely ill! Esports Wu Zetian falls from power!]

[Another VPG infighting video explodes, Qi Yue and Ji Xiangkong intensely quarrel in the training room!]Ji Xiangkong wasn’t very fond of mentioning VPG’s team issues. From his few words added on with Lin Yixuan’s little reports he passed on from time to time, Qiu Ying just knew that the other members of VPG had signed contracts with streaming platforms at a high price and didn’t diligently train. Ji Xiangkong liked developing new lineups, yet his other teammates only wanted to play the heroes they themselves were experts in and didn’t want to train. Afterward, when CEO Shu Wen, whom Ji Xiangkong had a close relationship with, lost her power, along with Qi Yue fanning the flames in the middle, the team members isolated Ji Xiangkong and didn’t listen to his commands when on the spot. Their results plummeted. Ji Xiangkong kept quiet about the issues with the team mood, and so fans always attributed the mistakes to him.

Lin Yixuan even used “Mr. Dongguo and the Wolf”2 to describe Ji Xiangkong’s teammates.

When Ji Xiangkong had just joined VPG, the four of them were experiencing a professional all-time low, and they’d also been Pei Xi’s backdrop for a year. Their fighting spirits were wholly frustrated. Under Shu Wen’s strong pressure and following Ji Xiangkong’s tactical arrangements, a song of triumph played throughout the entire way. But after winning the Fall Championships, they began puffing themselves up again.

People were always like this. When they were being stifled, they could move forward wholeheartedly regardless of anything else and unlimited potential would burst forth. Yet once they achieved their goals, after tasting success, it was easier for their hearts to lose their balance once more.

Among the members, some forever held onto Ji Xiangkong’s mistakes in competitions, some were dissatisfied with Ji Xiangkong’s ever-rising position, some took their fans’ adulations as truth and thought that victory was attained solely through they themselves turning back the tide, but Ji Xiangkong was just hugging thighs like usual…

In the video that exploded, Ji Xiangkong was playing the competition video, from time to time stopping it to point out the missteps in Qi Yue’s operating particulars. Seeing that the other person’s face was impatient, he said evenly, “I’m not blaming you. The game has updated so many times but you only know these three broad-axes, so people have long thought of countless ways to crack through them.”

Qi Yue got up and kicked the trash can into the air, foul-mouthed with his neck stalked up. “I’ve had enough! What do you think you are? Who are you to keep gesturing at me the whole day?”

Ji Xiangkong was impartial. “I’m the captain, post-match analysis is something that I should do.”

“How come Shu Wen had an interloper like you become our captain? Because your skills are good?” This sentence seemed to touch upon Qi Yue’s anger point. He snorted contemptuously, then moved his shoulders up and down. “I can tell that it’s skills in other areas… that can satisfy her.”

Ji Xiangkong’s face dropped and his jawline tightened. “That’s bullshxt!”

Qi Yue’s finger jabbed toward Ji Xiangkong’s nose. “I just can’t stand it, can’t stand watching garbage with as bad of operating as you but can keep on playing professionally by relying on women!”

From beginning to end, the other three people of VPG coldly watched on the side.

Yet the comments online were mostly on Qi Yue’s side. One was the former World Champion, one was the controversial esports social flower. In the eyes of those who stood with Qi Yue, wasn’t Ji Xiangkong a stray dog who’d relied on his connections to enter VPG after being kicked out by Legend? He’d just chanced upon the recovery of his teammates who took him lying down with them to win the championship. Not being honest, upright, and grateful, was enough, but he even dared criticize them back!

Pointing his finger at the former World Champions? Who was handicapped Ji Xiangkong to do that?

Qiu Ying didn’t keep her emotions under control and supported Ji Xiangkong while streaming in the evening. It resulted in her receiving a great bombardment of private messages, among which a permanent resident of her streaming room wrote—

Qiu Ying, I’m Qi Yue’s fan. In my heart, he’s the very best player! He doesn’t have a good temper to be true, but we like him and our hearts hurt when he meets unfairness. I can’t see anyone who says that he isn’t good!

I really like watching you stream, but hearing you speak for Ji Xiangkong today, I decided to unfollow you. I also hate the person my idol hates! I’m sorry!

Qiu Ying sighed. The most indispensable thing in this era was that no matter what an idol said or did, there would be fans who unconditionally supported them without judging them. Perhaps they didn’t know at all the harm that this type of behavior would bring someone else; they didn’t know at all that this type of behavior would also cause their beloved idols to lose their own selves.

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1 Maybe referring to Golden Horse Best Actor Ethan Juan, Chinese name Ruan Jingtian. Zhou Cheng made his first appearance in 8.2

2 A fable that for the sake of conciseness can be boiled down to, a man (Mr. Dongguo) shows kindness to a wolf and the wolf subsequently tries to eat him.

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