Chapter 6

Ren Jian vomited twice in the morning, now there was only stomach acid inside, nothing else to vomit. Once he finally recovered, his whole being felt weak. In Gu Zhixiao’s words, a state after a wild night.

Taking a few mouthfuls of hot water, Ren Jian took out his mask and put it on, and forced himself to follow his teammates and coach to the competition.

The commercialized atmosphere in this friendly league was very heavy, with many media present, whose favorite pastime was to blockade their favorite target, Ren Jian. As soon as TKOW got off from their transportation, they were surrounded by reporters from various major media. The team members were very tacitly blocking the media reporters with their bodies to avoid Ran Jian being in contact with strangers. Thus, a group of people rushed to the lounge to find a moment of peace.

The coach looked at Ren Jian with some concern. “How are you feeling? Why don’t you sit this game out and let a substitute play?”

Before the ace could answer, the assistant immediately cried out in dismay, “Your Highness, please reconsider! Did the patron of this event not spend big bucks to get us in the league just so Ren Jian can draw more attention?! If he does not show, I will surely be stuffed in a sack and beaten to death by the patron!”

TKOW’s coach frowned. He usually did not like these fancy etiquettes. In his opinion, playing competitively is just playing competitively, there should not be other trivial things.

Fortunately, Ren Jian spoke up with a wave of his hand, “It is fine, I will go, but I will not play seriously.”

The assistant breathed a sigh of relief.

The coach signed, “Fine, play however you want. Let Zhixiao support the ADC, we can go with protect the ADC. This will make your life easier. Zhixiao, you hear that?”

Gu Zhixiao was super excited. “Oh yes! Fatten the ADC up! Does that mean I can finally get MVP?”

Ren Jian slumped on the lounge’s sofa and cheered unenthusiastically, “Good luck to you.”

The competition soon began.

The caster, probably also a fan of Ren Jian, was quite thrilled and pointed Ren Jian’s name out, “Everyone, look, Wilful is on the stage. Hmm, it is no surprise that he is playing the jungler. Eh, looks like Clever is going bot. The support is not going to roam around with Wilful, TKOW might be thinking of babying ADC? The opposite side will for sure target Wilful with Clever not with him, the early game will definitely be rough for TKOW’s jungler.”

But five minutes later, Wilful was on a killing spree!

Eight minutes later, Wilful was godlike!

Sixteen minutes later, the game was over with Wilful being the MVP!

Gu Zhixiao took off his earphones, threw them on the table, and shouted to Ren Jian, being very tilted, “What do you mean by not playing seriously?!”

Ren Jian rubbed his hungry stomach from not eating in the morning, and slumped back on the gaming chair. “I did.”

Another team member gasped, “A-Xiao, calm down. Do not take your rage out on the mouse, no smashing the keyboard either! Ren Jian too, the cameraman is still shooting! Sit up straight! You are about to slide off the gaming chair!!!”

Ren Jian did not pay mind to what his teammate was shouting. He was in a daze, thinking about Yu Qinghuan.

He wondered if Yu Qinghuan checked out smoothly.

They probably would never meet again.

Shame, that was one interesting person.

–

Actually, the checkout process did not go very smoothly for Yu Qinghuan, because he did not expect the room fees to be so expensive.

“How much? One thousand and eighty-eight yuan a night?” Yu Qinghuan nearly bit off his tongue.

The lady at the front desk nodded with a smile.

Yu Qinghuan took out his credit card with a trembling hand and handed it to the receptionist. His heart was bleeding, crying, and raging against the corruption and oppression of capitalism.

If he knew this stay would cost that much a night, then he would have…

Washed his hair twice and used the shampoo provided by the hotel twice last night!

When Yu Qinghuan handed over his credit card, the lady first froze then smiled, “Sir, the room has been paid for already.”

“What?” Yu Qinghuan was stunned. “By who?”

“The gentleman whom you stayed with, of course!”

Yu Qinghuan was shocked for three whole seconds. He suddenly began to recall Ren Jian’s every move last night, but found that he did not have a deep impression of the other man’s temperament. He only remembered that the man was handsome with a hard to describe pride and unrestrained look in his eyes.

He really met a good man.

When he sees him next time, he must treat the good person to dinner!

Yu Qinghuan thought to himself as he put away his credit card, checked out the room, and headed to the subway to meet the client.

Unbeknownst to him, when he arrived at the subway station, he saw Ren Jian.

Teo: Oh boy, I think support roaming with the jungler was a thing in League of Legend, like forever ago, and never the whole early game. Now the author threw out a term used in Honor of Kings. Author, please make up your mind what game is being played here orz.

Also, typically, a player plays in a set role and very rarely plays in another position. I do not think I ever saw a role switch when I watched professional esport matches. I am just guessing because it is not a serious league, they expect the team will switch it up for fun?

For the ‘raise the pig’ teams, a kind person at CG actually informed me that there is a borrowed term called ‘raise the puppy’. Where instead of pig, they used puppy because Uzi’s nickname is puppy. As well as a similar strategy for CLG which is ‘protect the Doublelift’. This only works with hypercarries, or champions that scale so hard that once they are fed/ able to snowball, they can 1 v 9 purely by themselves. I like the latter one more so I changed it to protect the carry.

Btw, if I have to choose between fitting a Chinese direct translation of gaming term vs gaming term used in English, I will use the latter, unless the word is popular enough that everyone in the community knows it. My reason is readers are already having a hard time remembering all the terms in gaming novels, having unfamiliar terms on top of it might ruin the experience. Instead of trying to force a direct translation in the text, use what is already available to me! I mean what would you rather see? Crispy skin or glass cannon, paddler or leecher, cloud player or non-gamer (examples from Mutated Pheromones)?

Also, when you are using US English and your doc be like, WILLFIL RIGHT?