Rise

Ouyang had a very specific selective attention. Girls. League of Legends. Friends. In that order. Anything else he didn’t really pay attention to. Like the big and bold letters the teacher wrote down on the chalkboard. They went in one eye and out the other. But when the words ‘pretty’ and ‘girl’ were mentioned in a hushed conversation on the other side of the classroom, his ears would perk up and his eyes would lock onto the students talking. That kind of conversation got his undivided attention. Right now, Lin Feng’s pencil case had his full focus. There, buried under pencils, erasers and other stationary, he spotted it.

The English teacher hadn’t walked into the classroom yet. There were still a few more minutes until the lesson started. So Ouyang grabbed Lin Feng’s shoulder and looked at his friend. “Yo! Lin Feng, buddy! Best bro! You’ve been holding out on me? Were you hiding that picture from me? That’s not what bros do, my man! Come, gimme! Lemme have a look at that!” He held out his free hand and added, “Hurry up! Give it!”

“Oh, this? It’s nothing,” Lin Feng said, ruffling his messy hair. He emptied his pencil case on his desk and took out the picture. An old memory. He looked at it for a moment and then showed it to Ouyang. “It’s just an old picture I have from a few years ago.”

Ouyang leaned forward, just about pressing his eyes onto the paper, and started scanning it. Something had drawn him to this picture, he was now looking for what that something was. Lin Feng stood in the middle of the frame. It looked like someone had called his name half a second before snapping the picture as only his head was turned towards the camera. He looked the same, with the same messy hair and the same simple clothing. The only real difference was that the Lin Feng in the picture looked a few years younger. But it was just Lin Feng. Ouyang had hoped for something else. He shook his head, disappointed. “I thought it was something better. Not just a picture of you...”

Ouyang squinted his eyes. His special Ouyang senses, as he liked to call them, didn’t lie to him, they never did! There was something more to this photo. But what… He turned to Lin Feng, the man with the answers, and asked, “Yo, you look pretty young in this. So where was this taken? It looks like some kind of auditorium? Was this at your old school or something?”

Lin Feng looked at the picture. It was more than a quick glance this time. “No. That was at the Season 1 Chinese Finals for League of Legends!” He’d almost forgotten about this picture. It’d been at the bottom of his pencil case for the longest time now. But it was a snapshot of a good memory. One he treasured deeply. He smiled. Those were some fun games.

“You forreal? We actually had finals back then?” Ouyang looked up at Lin Feng, his eyes wide and round, then looked back at the picture. “Bro. That’s crazy. Yikes though. Looks like they had no real budget. That all looks really cheap.”

Lin Feng scratched the back of his head and said, “Yeah, it really was low budget. It was also really small. I think there were maybe a few hundred people there?”

League of Legends wasn’t big in Asia in Season 1. It didn’t really gain traction until a year later. That also meant that there were no big sponsors and no big money going around. The Chinese Esports Organization had to work with what they had, renting small venues on the outskirts of Shanghai and trying to make it look better than it was. All that hard work wasn’t even rewarded. There were 500 seats for the Season 1 Chinese Finals, but there weren’t 500 fans willing to come and watch. A good portion of the auditorium had stayed empty. This was something unthinkable with the current stage of the game, where the biggest venues were rented and even those weren’t enough to hold the fans looking to watch their favourite team play.