WeChat’s turnaround was decent enough. When Nan Zhiyi woke the next day, he found he could already log into his beloved account.
He had a lot of friends, and half a day out of touch had stuffed it full of all kinds of greetings, mostly asking whether he’d landed safely.
The last message Song Meng had sent him was: 【Actually I asked yux to go pick you up, you won’t mind, right? He’s the only person I know over there.】
As luck would have it, his phone had been snatched right before he could see this message. Otherwise, with some warning, he definitely wouldn’t have come off so flustered.
And among the crowd of messages, the dozens of greetings from Song Baiyu stood out.
【Pigeon: You okay, bro, I heard from my brother your wallet got stolen, rough luck】
A few hours later.
【Pigeon: Holy crap, yux rose from the grave!!!】
【Pigeon: ? You’re with him right now??】
【Pigeon: Mr. Angel Yi, how much more are you hiding from me? Are we still bros or not??】
On top of that, one person’s message was a bit of an eyesore.
【Qiu Cheng: Xiao Yi, did you go out of town? I see Daodao [1] the parrot, name means “Yapper/Chatterbox” jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670428_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670428_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); isn’t home either.】
【Qiu Cheng: I was offline these past few days, only just saw all that mess. Are you doing okay now?】
Nan Zhiyi blinked slowly. Ever since the screen-peeking incident, things between him and Qiu Cheng had inexplicably gone a little stiff.
Qiu Cheng had said he was going home to clear his head, but actually he’d come back soon after, yet to this day he hadn’t dared to stream again. Right after Worlds ended he’d tested the waters with one stream, his chat got so swarmed that setting nearly a hundred blocked keywords did nothing, his mods got carpal tunnel from banning accounts, and in the end he’d had no choice but to keep his head down and play dead.
Nan Zhiyi replied to each of their messages one by one.
While washing up in the master bedroom’s en-suite, he got a reply from Song Baiyu.
【Pigeon: Do you have any idea how excruciating these past ten-plus hours have been for me】
【Pigeon: What’s the situation with you two now? You’re staying at his place? Have you made up already? Does he know about the video yet? Why don’t you two figure out how to handle it together? Slap those trolls right in the face!】
Song Baiyu fired off questions like a string of firecrackers.
Nan Zhiyi thought about it and replied: 【I don’t think he knows yet, he definitely hasn’t looked at Weibo.】
【Pigeon: You can tell whether he’s even checked Weibo??】
Of course Nan Zhiyi could. You Xin had stopped looking at Weibo a long time ago. The content on his account of several million fans was all posted by his operations manager, often reeking of a heavy bot-vibe, jokingly dubbed “pseudo-human literature” by his fans.
As for the reason, that was rather little-known.
【Xiao Yi Xiao Yi: You know You Qing loves doing idol dramas, right? Those dramas buy a lot of marketing, hanging on the trending list every day. He really dislikes his brother, gets annoyed just seeing him, so he never looks at Weibo.】
Song Baiyu sent another long string of 【。。。。。。。】
Coming out of the room, Nan Zhiyi discovered You Xin had gotten up even earlier than him, having completely shed the schedule of an esports player.
Besides him, another young man sat on the living room sofa, head bent over his phone.
“Brother Meng!” Nan Zhiyi said in delighted surprise. “How are you here?”
Song Meng still had his coat and scarf on, clearly only just arrived.
“Came as soon as my car was fixed.” He set his phone down and waved Nan Zhiyi over to sit. “How are you? Not too spooked yesterday?”
Nan Zhiyi recounted yesterday’s bizarre ordeal start to finish. Song Meng laughed hard. “You’ll have plenty to talk about on your next stream. Shame you didn’t film it, you could’ve posted a vlog.”
While the two chatted, You Xin was off to the side wrestling Kenken, who was shredding a brand-new towel like a whirlwind.
Nan Zhiyi glanced over there, thinking to himself: this is nothing yet.
“AngelYi gets pickpocketed and then mugged on the street”, compared to “AngelYi gets picked up off the street and taken home by yux, who personally cooks him three dishes and a soup”, probably had about one percent of the impact on the fans.
When three gamers get together, there really aren’t many ways to have fun.
On top of that, given the special circumstances, even popping into an internet café for a game was a problem, so in the end everyone unanimously decided to go to the nearby Haidilao for lunch.
“It’s actually a real coincidence, I only just got back in touch with Xiao You a few days ago myself.” In the private room, while You Xin had stepped out to fetch dipping sauces, Song Meng said to Nan Zhiyi. “Last week I logged into my EU-server account, the one I trained on when I went abroad for tournaments, back when I was still at CG, and I’d added him as a friend. The moment I logged in I found he was online, and after chatting a bit we reconnected.”
Nan Zhiyi was a little surprised.
After all, according to Song Baiyu, Song Meng hadn’t logged into ROE for a very long time since announcing his retirement.
This game, which had once taken up his whole life, seemed to have left him with some kind of shadow, making it hard for him to so much as log into his own account.
“Brother Meng, you’ve been playing EU server lately?” Nan Zhiyi probed.
“Yeah. Haven’t played in ages, I’m rusty, still stuck in Platinum.” Song Meng’s tone was a little resigned.
Just then You Xin came back. In one hand he held a sauce dish, in the other his phone, declining an incoming call on the screen.
“Hey.” Song Meng noticed. “Xiao You, you’re not taking the call?”
You Xin switched the phone to silent and tucked it back in his pocket.
“Yang Lei.” He explained.
Song Meng immediately wore a knowing look.
“Yang Lei?” Nan Zhiyi repeated curiously. “That CG manager? stone?”
“Mm, that’s him.” You Xin said.
The topic naturally arrived here. Nan Zhiyi’s question was on the tip of his tongue, but in the end Song Meng asked it for him: “Xiao You, what’s the situation between you and CG right now?”
You Xin sat down, washing his bowl and chopsticks with tea. He put it concisely: “CG’s holding my contract hostage.”
“What?!” The other two in the room said in unison.
“At the end of 2022 I signed three years with CG, child-labor wages. This is the last year.” You Xin said. “I told them I’m fine playing one more year and keeping the original roster. But Yang Lei wants to loan me out to MTT.”
His tone was flat, as if discussing something that wasn’t happening to him at all.
Nan Zhiyi, meanwhile, had nearly leaped out of his seat. “But MTT finished dead last in the standings last split?! Has the man lost his mind?”
“He hasn’t lost anything.” You Xin said coldly. “The loan price he negotiated with MTT is 13 million. When I wouldn’t agree, he benched me.”
“I figured, since they don’t want me to play, I’m idle anyway, so I just came out here to go to school.”
For a moment Nan Zhiyi was both furious and on the verge of laughing, genuinely at a loss for what to say.
He could hear the CG manager’s scheme all the way from M City, he’d signed yux at child-labor wages, 4.5 million for three years, and now wanted to flip him for 13 million. Not one cent of that 13-million loan fee would go to You Xin, it would all flow straight into the CG bosses’ pockets.
And of all the teams CG could loan him to, it had to be MTT, the league’s dead-last bottom-feeder, for whom even making the playoffs would count as blue smoke rising from the ancestral graves [2] a stroke of incredible, heaven-sent luck jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670428_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670428_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Wasn’t this just blatantly sending yux off to be a one-man army hauling three deadweights, headmaster of an orphanage?
Freezing a player out [3] 雪藏, deliberately benching a star to bury their value jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670428_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670428_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); was common enough in esports, but to take it this far, Nan Zhiyi was seeing it for the first time.
Of course, You Xin was no pushover either. Across the whole scene, he was probably the first person to dare stand up to a powerhouse team like CG this way.
Song Meng didn’t look as shocked as Nan Zhiyi. “You didn’t try to negotiate a contract termination with them?”
“I did, no use.” You Xin said. “They won’t let me go.”
“Figures, at a price of one or two hundred grand, how could they bear to let you walk.” Song Meng sighed. “CG builds a title-contending roster every year. If you went to a top-ranked team, the threat you’d pose wouldn’t be something one or two hundred grand could fix.”
—So they’d thought of dumping him onto the bottom team: making money with one hand, spiting people with the other, and on top of that, preventing yux from leading a team to snatch away the championship trophy CG had all but in the bag.
Nan Zhiyi sat there feeling a vein on his forehead throb.
“So what do you do now? Just stubbornly drag it out like this?” Song Meng went on. “They probably won’t let you off so easily.”
“They just called to threaten me, said if I don’t return to the team they’ll sue.” You Xin said, the picture of indifference. “Let them sue if they want, it’s not like I can’t afford a lawyer.”
“You’re really… hah.” Song Meng couldn’t think of a solution either, and in the end could only offer token comfort. “If it really comes to that, public opinion will definitely be on your side. Those CG people won’t want to openly fall out with you in front of everyone.”
“Who knows. They tossed their faces away ages ago anyway.”
At that, the two former core CG players fell silent in unison.
Until a “plop” broke the mood. Nan Zhiyi had dropped a shrimp into the pot.
Only then did Song Meng notice that this little streamer, usually the chattiest, the only one who could keep pace at a table with his motormouth brother, had been oddly quiet just now.
Somehow Nan Zhiyi’s hand was a little shaky, he failed to fish the shrimp out three times.
You Xin glanced at him. “I’ll do it.”
He pinned the slippery shrimp steadily with his chopsticks, but instead of passing it over, he placed it on his own plate.
Then he put on a glove, peeled it in a few deft moves, and dropped it, by the tail, into Nan Zhiyi’s bowl.
Nan Zhiyi was caught off guard by a single shrimp. He blanked for an instant, then said reflexively, “Aiya, you didn’t have to, just fishing it out for me would’ve been fine…”
You Xin ignored his politeness. “Just eat.”
“…Okay.”
Nan Zhiyi obediently stuffed the shrimp into his mouth. You Xin, meanwhile, fished a second shrimp from the pot.
“There’s really no need to worry too much.” He pulled off the shrimp’s head and tossed it aside. “CG thinks holding the contract means they’ve got me pinned. But a contract is dead, and a person is alive. I have plenty of ways to deal with them.”
Then, as if saying it deliberately for someone to hear, he paused. “It’s just not the right time yet. We have to wait a little longer.”
Watching this scene from the side, Song Meng’s eyebrows rose in a subtle arc.
If Nan Zhiyi remembered right… since a long time ago, yux seemed to have had a pretty serious germophobia, hadn’t he?
Author’s note:
The old club, so evil!
References[+]