The Pretty Boy Dragging Everyone Down (1) : Traverse the World
When Si Qi woke up, he felt a suffocating sensation..
He instinctively tried to open his mouth to breathe, only to realize his face was completely submerged in flowing water. Suppressing the urge to gasp, he forced himself to stay calm and opened his eyes to observe his surroundings.
Through the wavering blur of water light, he saw himself standing inside a bright, spacious room that resembled a training hall.
Several people stood in the distance, openly grinning as they watched him struggle for breath. They pointed at him without restraint, mockery written all over their faces. Amid the muffled distortion of water, he could vaguely make out words like “pathetic” and “serves him right.”
Magic fluctuations rippled continuously through the air around them.
His brain was already beginning to haze from lack of oxygen. Si Qi immediately guided the magic inside his body and shattered the water sphere wrapped around his head. Water exploded outward, drenching his clothes causing him to bend over violently, coughing several times before taking in huge gulps of fresh air.
The people across from him stared in stunned disbelief, clearly not expecting him to fight back. Their shock quickly twisted into anger as they began shouting at him.
One of them immediately recited a spell. A crackling sphere of lightning burst and shot straight toward Si Qi’s head.
His entire body was soaked. If that attack landed, even just burning his hair would be considered lucky.
Without hesitation, Si Qi activated a defensive spell to block the attack while swiftly sorting through the original owner’s memories.
This was a world where magic had replaced technology with magic-powered hovercars, floating livestream orbs, interstellar magecraft vessels. Without relying on science, humanity built a civilization no less as advanced and prosperous as modern technological society.
The original owner had grown up in an orphanage. At the age of five, he awakened an impressive affinity for magic. He is gentle and relentlessly hardworking, he was the kind of child adults used as an example when lecturing others.
A year ago, after completing his graduation assessment, he happened to encounter an interview crew outside the Magic Academy, because his appearance was absurdly beautiful he unexpectedly exploded across the internet overnight.
Netizens spread screenshots from the interview wildly online and countless people were stunned by his delicate, almost elf-like features. Some have uncovered his tragic upbringing and uploaded records of his outstanding academic achievements over the years.
The internet was practically drowned in discussions about him. Netizens adored him, pitied him, and showered him with overwhelming attention, turning him into an overnight sensation.
An entertainment company soon approached him carrying a magical contract, hoping to recruit him as a celebrity under their agency.
Life at the orphanage had always been painfully poor. Ever since he was young, the original owner had dreamed of earning money as soon as he became an adult so he could help the children there and improve the orphanage’s living conditions.
Now he suddenly became a hit overnight, attracting the attention of entertainment companies, who even offered him generous pay while enthusiastically describing the wealth and glamour of celebrity life…
He was momentarily lost.
His academic results had always been exceptional and during his years at the Magic Academy, he had consistently ranked first. In his original plans, after graduation he would enter a Mage Tower, study under a mentor for four more years, and only then seek employment. With his abilities, finding an excellent position would have been effortless.
But if he entered the entertainment industry instead and started learning singing and dancing from scratch, he might not even compare to professionally trained arts students. In the end, perhaps audiences would only care about his face.
After careful consideration, the original owner decided to refuse.
Unexpectedly, the entertainment company changed tactics. They assured him they would make full use of his magical talent and train him toward becoming a professional competitive player.
In this world, professional competitors occupied an extraordinarily prestigious position, representing national honor and symbolising the level of magical advancement of the nation. The status of magical competitions are comparable to the Olympics and World Cup combined, and even greater.
Many royal families and major conglomerates deliberately seek out promising young players to build elite teams. They spent astronomical sums recruiting famous coaches and maintaining every team member with lavish salaries. Any competitor capable of winning a world championship would become at minimum a millionaire, often worth hundreds of millions, and hold a very high social status.
The moment the original owner heard this, he felt the contract was worth signing.
He could never accept relying solely on his appearance to survive, but if it meant fighting his way upward with his own magical ability on the competitive stage, he had complete confidence in himself.
Thus, he gave up the opportunity to pursue advanced studies in a Mage Tower and signed a contract with the company known as Blood Moon, officially becoming a professional esports mage.
Everyone at the orphanage was very proud of him.
The original owner himself had never been happier.
What he never realized, however, was that there had always been another layer to the story.
The entertainment company truly did intend to establish a competitive team, but the reason behind it was far less noble. The entire project existed to indulge the company’s young master, a man who dreamed of becoming a professional competitor while simultaneously being too arrogant to obey anyone else’s command.
That young master was named Sun Xu.
The moment he declared that the company would form its own professional team, the employees beneath him had no choice but to comply with the chairman’s orders.
Those with genuine magical talents and serious aspirations to become competitive players would never look up to a team formed by a small entertainment company. Even if they joined, they wouldn’t be able to fully follow the prince’s arrangements. So they could only recruit some fresh, talented individuals with magical aptitude who were trapped by restrictive contracts and could never afford the astronomical termination fees.
That was how the original owner ended up joining this godforsaken team.
Most teams debuted through competition, earning recognition through victories and performance.
This team debuted through celebrity promotion.
Countless stars reposted the announcement celebrating the formation of the group. They even held dedicated fan meetings to secure their first wave of supporters.
Thanks to the original owner’s breathtakingly beautiful face, the team gained attention almost immediately after debuting. Netizens flooded him with blessings and encouragement, eagerly hoping he would achieve strong results in competition and secure a brilliant future for himself.
But anyone who had actually interacted with the team knew the truth.
Aside from the original owner, who genuinely trained every single day, tirelessly studied footage from previous tournaments, and desperately wanted to earn prize money to improve the orphanage’s living conditions, the rest of the members were only there to curry favor with the young master and ride the popularity generated by the original owner’s fame. As for competitive gaming itself, they barely understood anything.
After all, they were already adults, people in their early twenties competing against players who had been sent into specialized training programs at three or four years old by their families? Of course they were going to lose.
And yet, during the first few municipal tournaments, they still managed to win several matches. Partly because Sun Xu had received elite education since childhood, and partly because the original owner had once been the academy’s top student. The two of them effectively carried the entire team while the others shamelessly coasted through matches doing little more than spectating from within the arena.
But as the competitions progressed, the opponents naturally became stronger.
And the stronger the opponents grew, the harder the matches became.
Sun Xu had spent his entire life surrounded by smooth success and constant praise. The more difficult the games became, the worse his temper grew. He had no understanding of teamwork whatsoever, nor any idea how to maximize the strength of the team as a whole. On the battlefield he charged around recklessly, convinced his own power was overwhelming enough.
So if the matches felt exhausting and difficult, then obviously it had to be his teammates’ fault.
Those teammates who constantly flattered him, catered to him online, and enthusiastically performed their fake “brotherhood” for fans were people he could not bring himself to scold.
However the original owner was different, he was terrible at flattery, buried himself in practice all day long, and possessed a gentle temperament that responded to insults with patient explanations instead of retaliation, making him a perfect outlet for venting his frustration.
The other teammates saw someone willingly taking the blame and immediately joined Sun Xu in mocking him, eagerly shoving every mistake onto his shoulders.
Afterward, they continued kicking him while he was down online, coordinating their narratives and publicly criticizing him. They sighed dramatically about how the captain had already tried his best during the competition, but unfortunately certain people never trained properly, refused to cooperate during matches, and relied entirely on their handsome face and public popularity to act arrogant within the team.
The original owner was fundamentally different from them who defined himself as an athlete first and foremost who solely focused on genuine strength. No real competitor spent all day online interacting with fans and cultivating public favor; all his time was spent training inside the arena.
And yet his teammates viewed themselves as celebrities before competitors.
They cared obsessively about popularity, reputation, and fan engagement and were experts at forming cliques and manipulating public opinion. Therefore, over time, most of the active users on the group’s official website were their fans.
So when all of them unanimously declared that the original owner was the problem, their followers naturally believed them. After all, the fans had no idea what actually happened inside the training room. The internet was their only source of “truth,” and idol fandom always came packaged with a natural filter capable of turning black into white.
Through deliberate manipulation, public opinion tilted entirely toward the teammates. The true culprit remained perfectly protected, while the original owner, the only one sincerely training and trying his hardest, became the team’s designated scapegoat.
The company understood the reality perfectly well.
Of course they knew the original owner was innocent.
Of course they knew the real problem was their precious young master.
But so what if he was wrong?
He was the young master.
Even if their crown prince has a thousand bad qualities, this team was specially established for him. It’s impossible to blame anyone else!
Entertainment companies understood better than anyone that infamy was still fame. Having a controversial figure at the center of discussion only attracted more attention to the team.
Besides, Si Qi was an adult. Getting cursed at online a little was hardly a serious matter, was it?
So not only did the company refuse to stop the increasingly vicious harassment, they actively fueled it behind the scenes. Staff members infiltrated fan communities, subtly guiding public opinion and shifting all blame onto the original owner. Every so often, the company would conveniently “leak” pieces of supposed evidence proving how lazy and arrogant he was within the organization. Eventually, even many ordinary bystanders began believing the accusations that the boy with an angelic face truly must have been rotten on the inside.
The smear campaign had continued nonstop from the end of the previous competition to the present day.
And as Sun Xu watched everyone around him unanimously condemn the original owner, he became more and more convinced that he had never wronged him in the slightest.
What began as verbal abuse and physical shoving rapidly escalated into psychological torment and outright violence in less than two months.
Trapped in that environment, enduring both online harassment and real-world bullying while carrying the burden of supporting the orphanage and chained down by impossibly expensive contract penalties, the original owner became like a small beast locked inside a cage with no escape.
His mental state deteriorated further and further.
He started going entire nights without sleep. His mood sank constantly into despair. He wanted to cry for no reason at all. Eventually, after visiting the hospital, he was diagnosed with severe depression.
Every day he had to rely on psychiatric medication that damaged his body just to barely maintain emotional stability.
And this time, while he had simply been training normally inside the practice room, the other team members gathered nearby chatting and laughing among themselves. For some unknown reason, Sun Xu suddenly condensed a sphere of water around the original owner’s head, cutting off his ability to breathe.
The surrounding teammates merely laughed and warned him not to resist.
They casually claimed the young master was practicing the precision of his offensive magic while also testing whether he could break his latest record for sustained spell duration.
They had long since grown accustomed to watching the original owner suffer.
No one found it strange.
As they watched him slowly suffocate, they even enthusiastically praised Sun Xu’s water magic, complimenting how perfect the shape of the sphere was.
“That curve is truly a work of art.”
Just as everyone assumed Si Qi had silently accepted his humiliation like always, he suddenly snapped.
Without warning, he forcibly dispersed the young master’s magic.
Did Si Qi not want to survive in this company anymore?!