#yux AngelYi#
In the span of just three days, the hashtag had hit the trending list for the second time.
Click into it, and the most-liked post had only one caption and one image.
【This is terrifying. I never thought yux would use a sticker like this in his entire life………】
The attached image was a screenshot of the CG.Y.letter account sending that cutesy cat-emoji sticker.
Meanwhile, over on the game forums, the post from two days earlier, “A pro leaked that something’s up with CG”, had been bumped back to the top.
CP fans seized the chaos to ship like mad, while solo fans argued loudly that “yux just saw the Witch badge on the other guy’s profile and only acted friendly out of respect for a skilled player,” and so on.
After a thousand-plus replies of fierce debate, the thread finally reached a consensus, steered by the more numerous solo fans: it was pure coincidence, and the two of them had no idea who the other was.
—Forget the smurf, even earlier in the season, AngelYi’s main account had run into yux before. yux was streaming at the time, and got spammed with AngelYi’s name across his whole screen, he stayed silent start to finish, didn’t react at all.
Wasn’t that obviously proof they weren’t close?
That said, does nobody else find yux’s apology Weibo hilarious?
Reposting it:
【@CG.Yux: @Stars-QiuCityLord Sorry, I shouldn’t have typed to mock you. As a pro, beating a streamer is nothing to brag about.】
So weird.
…But you can’t quite put your finger on what’s off about it.
The whole stream uproar ended with yux and Qiu Cheng posting mutual apology statements on Weibo.
Whether yux himself was affected remained unknown, but on Qiu Cheng’s end, CG’s fans had already torn him to shreds, mocking that “he thought he’d picked a soft persimmon to squeeze [1] a soft, easy target jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670420_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670420_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, but kicked a steel plate instead”, until he had no choice but to cancel his trip to the finals-day watch party.
The people who’d originally stirred up trouble under the little trainee’s Weibo took one look, realized they’d charged at the wrong target, deleted their comments and bolted, leaving him alone to face the fans’ fury. For several days running, Nan Zhiyi watched Qiu Cheng pace around the house, face dark, not saying a word.
But since Qiu Cheng was in the wrong to begin with, Nan Zhiyi simply tried his best not to bring it up around him.
In the end, Qiu Cheng packed his bags and left, saying he’d stop streaming for a while and go back to his hometown to clear his head.
He called it clearing his head, but really it was to dodge the heat for now.
On October 26th, the ROE World Invitational Finals officially opened in N City.
Nan Zhiyi buckled down, finished off the month’s stream hours three days early, arranged a week of boarding for his bird at a pet shop, and, the day before the matches began, flew to N City together with Pigeon, his friend Song Baiyu.
The one who came to pick them up was Song Baiyu’s older brother, Song Meng.
Song Meng was tall and broad, standing out conspicuously in the crowd of greeters. He wore a black knit beanie, the lower half of his face tightly hidden behind a mask, leaving only a pair of crisply defined brows and eyes, at first glance, he looked rather stern.
Song Baiyu spotted him instantly. In a thick down jacket and a foil-perm of crinkly curls, he charged over two steps at a time like a tumbling ball of fluff. “Bro!!”
Nan Zhiyi trailed behind, muffled in three layers inside and out, and let out a stifled, “Hi, Brother Meng.”
The moment Song Meng saw them, his brows and eyes softened. “You made it?”
When he smiled, he didn’t look the least bit stern. Instead, a faint weariness spread across his features.
“How are you two dressed like this, with one, two, three layers of armor on your faces?” The second they got in the car after leaving the airport, Song Baiyu started yapping. “You look like Middle Eastern bandits.”
Song Meng was peeling the gear off his face, and laughed at that. “I don’t want to be recognized, but Xiao Yi, why are you dressed like this too?”
Before Nan Zhiyi could speak, Song Baiyu jumped in first. “He’s scared of being spotted by yux’s fans.”
Song Meng paused. “yux? The yux I’m thinking of?”
“Yeah, the same yux who was on your team before,” Song Baiyu said. “Their fans are insane, they’ll start a brawl just seeing the two names in the same frame! If anyone saw Nan Zhiyi going to watch yux’s match… heh! Straight to tomorrow’s trending list!”
Song Meng went quiet for a good while before speaking. “Am I getting old, mixing up my memories?”
“Xiao Yi,” he said, turning his head toward Nan Zhiyi, “I seem to remember you and yux being pretty close before?”
“No, you remember right.” Quick-mouthed as ever, Song Baiyu blurted it out. “Bro, you remember? Me, Xiao Yi, and yux, the three of us were in the same youth-training class. I still remember to this day: for a while there was a quota, right, where you couldn’t log off until you’d climbed so many points? Main carries climb fast, but us supports depend on teammates and climb slow, so they always finished a whole hour before us.”
“And every time he finished, yux would wait outside for Nan Zhiyi so they could walk back to the dorms together. I watched him do it plenty of times, the guy wouldn’t touch his phone, wouldn’t do anything else, just stand there and wait, dead silent, staring inside at— mmf! Mmf!!!”
Nan Zhiyi couldn’t take it anymore and clamped a hand over Song Baiyu’s mouth.
“Brother Meng, don’t listen to his nonsense.” He smiled at Song Meng. “To be honest, it was just a little falling-out later on. You Xin… after he got promoted to the first team, we kind of lost touch.”
Saying that name, Nan Zhiyi even stumbled over it a little. They were characters he saw in his daily life every single day, yet spoken aloud, they felt almost foreign.
“I see.” Song Meng glanced at him in the rearview mirror, thoughtful.
“I still have yux’s contact info. Want me to help you two… clear up the misunderstanding?”
“No, no, no, no, no need!!” Nan Zhiyi said in a rush.
Song Meng raised an eyebrow.
“…It’s really fine, Brother Meng.” Nan Zhiyi conceded defeat. “I actually have his contact info too… but he, ugh, probably isn’t all that keen on making up with me.”
Beside him, Song Baiyu suddenly let out a loud “Tch.”
“Look how spineless you are.” He shoved Nan Zhiyi. “Relax. From what I know of yux, he absolutely, one-thousand-percent does not dislike you.”
Nan Zhiyi: “?”
“You know what it looks like when yux genuinely hates someone? You don’t, do you.” Song Baiyu said darkly. “Well, I do.”
“I once threw a ranked game on him, and he DM’d me right after to say he’d blocked me, so we wouldn’t get queued together again.”
Nan Zhiyi laughed for a while before saying, “That’s not the same as my situation.”
Song Meng took the two of them out to eat, then drove them back to their hotel.
Before leaving, he told them, “Tomorrow you two cab it to the venue yourselves, I won’t see you off.”
Nan Zhiyi was curious. “Brother Meng, you’re not coming to watch the matches?”
“I’m not.” Song Meng waved a hand. “Stay safe. Call me if anything comes up.”
His figure vanished down the hotel corridor. Song Baiyu shut the door, let out a long sigh, and flopped backward onto his own bed.
“To this day I still don’t get what happened to him,” he said suddenly. “Out of nowhere he says he’s done, just announces his retirement, then runs off abroad by himself saying he wants privacy, doesn’t want anyone to know how he’s doing now??”
“He said it was because his form had dropped too hard. But a year before he retired, wasn’t he still playing perfectly fine? How’d he suddenly end up like that at the very end?”
Nan Zhiyi walked to his own bed and sat down. “Your brother still isn’t planning to make a comeback?”
“Comeback, my ass, look at the state of him. There’s not an ounce of fight left in him.”
Song Meng had debuted at 17 and joined CG at 21, having already won three league titles by then, the undisputed best secondary carry among active players at the time.
He’d joined CG to chase the one thing he didn’t yet have: a Worlds title.
But over his two years competing for CG, Song Meng’s form took a cliff-edge plunge. In his final year, partnered with yux, the team had already started fielding a substitute in place of Meng as a starter.
That transfer window, Meng’s fans never got the news of a transfer or a contract renewal.
What finally came was only a farewell letter announcing his retirement on Weibo.
From bursting onto the scene as a prodigy to bowing out in such a bleak finish, sometimes Nan Zhiyi felt the period at the end of Song Meng’s career had been drawn far too carelessly.
“I just think it’s a real shame,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of chemistry. On a different team, his form might’ve come right back…”
“That last year he played, sometimes when we chatted, honestly he seemed pretty worn out. Hard to describe.” Song Baiyu rolled over and started playing on his phone. “Whatever. Just let him rest. Call it letting himself off the hook.”
The next day, the two of them arrived at the venue a little early.
By now it was bustling outside, crowds and prying eyes everywhere, so Song Baiyu had no choice but to join the ranks of the Middle Eastern bandits and bundle himself up tight.
Before going in, Nan Zhiyi ducked into a café next door and, to his surprise, found yux fans inside handing out support merch. As he wandered through, he took a liking to one of the hand banners and blended into the crowd of fans to claim one.
But whether because his face-hiding getup made him look too much like a shady character, or for some other reason, the girl handing out the merch looked him over and said, “To get one of these, you need to be Super Topic level 8.”
Song Baiyu hesitated, wondering whether to pull down his mask and flash his face, when he saw Nan Zhiyi take out his phone and show the girl some page.
The girl nodded in approval and handed him a piece of the support merch.
Song Baiyu: “?”
When Nan Zhiyi came back, the two headed out, one behind the other.
Once the crowd thinned a bit, Song Baiyu couldn’t help catching up. “What did you show her just now?”
“Just my Super Topic level.” Wrapped entirely in his scarf, Nan Zhiyi’s voice came out muffled. [2] Super Topic = Weibo’s official fan-community forums, where dedication earns you levels. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670420_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670420_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });
“Hold on, you actually have that thing? Level 8?”
“I have a yux Super Topic level-12 badge.” There was a trace of pride in Nan Zhiyi’s tone.
Song Baiyu: “…”
Song Baiyu: “I just thought of something, and now I really want to gossip about it immediately.”
Nan Zhiyi: “?”
“That voting thing a while back, you know your fanbases fight and stir drama, so why on earth did you give him an All-Star vote?”
Nan Zhiyi remembered what he was talking about.
Not long ago, he’d used his main account to vote CG.Yux for “Player of the Year,” never expecting his main to auto-post a notice Weibo about it.
He’d scrambled to delete it, only for some scheming person to screenshot it first and claim he’d posted-then-deleted on purpose to drum up hype.
He looked thoroughly innocent. “I forgot that vote auto-posts to Weibo after you cast it.”
“Then why not just vote with your smurf?! Don’t you have a Weibo alt?!”
“Of course I do!” Nan Zhiyi was a little indignant. Song Baiyu’s tone made it sound like can’t you find your own water when you’re thirsty?, as if he were severely mentally impaired.
He explained, perfectly logically, “That vote, one account can only vote once. I’d already voted with my smurf, so I wanted to cast another vote with my main.”
“…………” Song Baiyu felt himself on the verge of losing it. “I am genuinely at a loss for words with you.”
He utterly gave up trying to understand how Nan Zhiyi managed to treat a friend he’d fallen out with years ago with this “publicly running for the hills, secretly stanning like a madman” attitude.
This man’s brain was wired differently from normal people’s. Incomprehensible.
Talking as they walked, the two soon reached Gate 1 of the venue, which was packed with fans queuing. Their tickets were front-row VIP, but the organizer was such an amateur-hour operation that they hadn’t even set up a VIP lane.
“Come on, I’ll get you in from the back.” Song Baiyu tugged at him. “Way too many people here.”
Clutching the hand banner, Nan Zhiyi felt a bit worried. “Will they let us in?”
“A Round-of-16 player pass is a pass too.” Song Baiyu winked at him. “It’s still way before doors open, they won’t turn us away.”
The two slipped backstage through a small staff door. For some reason Nan Zhiyi felt a little guilty, and followed quiet as a chicken [3] meme slang: keeping dead still and silent to avoid being noticed jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670420_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670420_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); behind Song Baiyu, listening as the man greeted acquaintances Nan Zhiyi didn’t know along the way.
He kept his head down the whole time, eyes fixed on the tips of his shoes, thinking that surely no one here would recognize him.
So by the time another pair of shoes appeared in his field of vision, it was already too late to react—
Bam.
Nan Zhiyi collided full-on with the oncoming person, instinctively loosened his grip, and the support merch dropped to the floor along with it.
At the same moment.
“—Hey, Pigeon?”
A faintly familiar voice rang out from the side.
Nan Zhiyi tilted his head slightly.
Through his dark sunglasses, he first saw CG’s support player, wind, and then met the somewhat alarmed face of Song Baiyu.
Nan Zhiyi slowly raised his head.
That instant felt as long as a hundred years. He felt every joint in his body had frozen solid.
A long-haired figure in a black-and-white team jersey, knocked off balance by the collision, swayed and finally steadied a few centimeters from him, lowered his eyes, and gave him a cool, faint glance.
This person had very long lashes, and irises of a deep, profound black that, when fixed on you, seemed able to see through every disguise you wore.
The ends of his hair and his face still glistened with water droplets, as if he’d just come from splashing cold water on his face in the restroom.
Nan Zhiyi stood rooted in place, mind a total blank.
The very first thought that surfaced was, of all things: He looks so much better in person than in photos.
Compared to before, he seemed to have grown into his features a little more. A bit less boyishness, a bit more handsomeness.
“Sorry.” After a moment, You Xin spoke.
He stepped back, bent down, and picked up the fallen hand banner.
Nan Zhiyi’s gaze instinctively followed the motion, landing on those well-defined, strong fingers, the index finger wearing a black, frosted-texture ring, the wrist a matching bracelet. As You Xin straightened, his eyes were caught next by the silver-black cross pendant at the man’s chest.
So by the time the hand banner was held out in front of him, Nan Zhiyi snapped back to himself only to realize he’d been staring at the man like an absolute creep this whole time.
You Xin held up the banner, his gaze landing on it, and suddenly paused for a second.
He looked at the banner, then looked up at the person in front of him.
Whether it was his imagination or not, Nan Zhiyi seemed to hear him… let out a small laugh?
He instinctively followed the man’s gaze to the banner’s contents, and then abruptly realized that, besides “CG.Yux,” “Wherever Xin sets his sights, nothing stands in his way” [4] a pun, 辛, his name “Xin,” swapped for 心, “heart”: where his heart is set, ever onward jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2670420_1_4').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2670420_1_4', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, and a large, crisp headshot of the player, the banner he’d grabbed also bore a line of gold handwriting—
【My husband’s face, this wife’s glory!!!】
Followed by a string of little hearts in every shape.
Nan Zhiyi: “…”
Nan Zhiyi: “.”
“…It’s about to start. We’re heading out to use the restroom.” On the other side, wind, who’d been chatting with Song Baiyu, had also noticed something was off over here.
He paused, then looked at Nan Zhiyi and asked, “Is this your friend?”
Song Baiyu looked even tenser than Nan Zhiyi. “Yeah, yeah, my friend. You don’t, you don’t know him, haha.”
“?” wind gave the two of them a strange look. “What’s with him—”
Nan Zhiyi woodenly took back the banner, his brain spinning at top speed until it spat out a crooked little idea.
He reached out and pointed at his own throat.
Then made a couple of gestures in the air.
Song Baiyu caught his drift and blurted out, “Oh oh, he’s mute!”
You Xin: “…?”
Nan Zhiyi: “…………”
I wanted you to say I have a cold!!!
“Oh, no, I mean…” Song Baiyu took a deep breath. “He’s actually a hardcore yux fan, hahaha, probably a little nervous meeting the real you, kind of lost his words, hahahaha.”
wind: “…Looks more like you’re the one who’s lost his words. What in the world is going on?”
From behind his sunglasses, Nan Zhiyi shot Song Baiyu a resentful look.
Song Baiyu caught the signal. “Oh, he wants to say… good luck in your matches! May you win right out of the gate!!”
“??” wind almost wanted to laugh. “Baiyu, we’re the ones competing, how are you more nervous than us?”
Song Baiyu was about to lose control of his expression. “Because I also really need the restroom right now… You two hurry back to the lounge, I’ll head to the stands first, byebyebyebye!!”
With that, he grabbed Nan Zhiyi by the arm, ready to flee for their lives.
But just then.
You Xin, who’d been quiet the entire time, suddenly stirred.
His gaze fell to the hand Song Baiyu had clamped around Nan Zhiyi’s arm. After a long moment, he spoke, light as a feather:
“Thank you for coming to watch my match.”
wind stood there watching the two figures flee into the distance, utterly baffled.
Then he turned around to find his teammate likewise staring in that direction.
“So you do know him.” Recalling the strange scene just now, wind couldn’t help asking, “Is he your friend?”
You Xin withdrew his gaze, expression unchanged.
“Not sure,” he said.
wind: “…I asked you yes or no, and you picked ‘or.'”
You Xin stuffed his hands in his pockets and started walking back, tossing out a single line: “Then I guess not.”
wind felt like every single one of these people had taken the wrong medicine today.
CG’s lounge was at the end of the corridor.
You Xin pushed open the door. Sprawled on the sofa, secondary carry beer heard the noise, glanced up at him, then lowered his head back to his phone.
Everyone else was minding their own business too. No one in the room was talking.
Only the coach, seeing him come in, called out to stop him. “Have you thought it over?”
You Xin walked to his spot and sat down.
“My position hasn’t changed.” He said it bluntly. “The old pick philosophy is too rigid. It can’t handle a team like OTG.”
At that, the coach gave a cold laugh. “And have you considered what happens when your teammates can’t sync with your picks?”
You Xin’s tone was just as icy. “A class that’s been out for how many years now, and some people still can’t master it. Is that my problem?”
The coach was momentarily stunned by that.
After a while, he said, “Isn’t everything you’re saying right now just empty talk anyway?”
“yux, I’ll put it plainly.” The coach crossed his arms over his chest. “The rotation power is in my hands. Whether you get to play, and exactly how we ban and pick, that’s not for you to decide.”
Author’s note:
This is a longer chapter!
The reason little You Xin wears a pile of jangly jewelry:
A. Essential for a trendy guy
B. Worn for a certain someone to see
C. To jinx his boss and coworkers
References[+]