Rise

It was only the other day that Su Xue had walked in on Lin Feng playing on the Korean server. She didn’t think much of it initially. Then she saw his rank. He was playing in Challenger! Every fiber in her body had screamed in shock! She wasn’t an especially talented League of Legends player herself. The intricacies of high level plays were completely lost on her. But she knew from the many online discussions she’d read that Korean Challenger was far more competitive and hardcore than Ionia Challenger! And to the best of her knowledge, Lin Feng was only an Ionia Challenger. So when she found out that he had been given a Korean Challenger account, her brain short-circuited.

The next couple of minutes were a blur for Su Xue. All she remembered was that she’d sat down in a chair next to him to recover from the shock. Then, when she started feeling a little better again, she’d grabbed her phone and looked up the CN•HOOK2 account. The statistics she found were another massive blow to her already fragile mind. Whoever had carried the account to Challenger had done so in basically the minimum number of games required with an exceedingly high KDA! And while she was still recovering from this new information, Lin Feng calmly told her that his goal wasn’t to just sit at the bottom of Challenger, but to fight his way to the top of the ladder! Top 5 at the minimum!

Chinese players, even professional ones, weren’t good enough to reach the top of the Korean ranked ladder. There were only a few who could make their way into the Top 100! But Lin Feng explained to Su Xue in his usual excited tone that he was going to reach the Top 5 and then push for the Top 3 and maybe even higher! She didn’t know how to respond to that, sitting in her chair and mindlessly nodding along to whatever he said.

After a short discussion, Lin Feng convinced Su Xue to let him play one more game that night. She’d ordered some food and watched him play. That was when she slowly overcame her shock. She witnessed a level of skill that she didn’t know how to explain. Lin Feng was beating Korean Challengers, and it didn’t look like he was having any trouble in doing so! He was getting kills and pushing for objectives, which was enough to convince her that just maybe he was good enough to climb the Korean Ladder. She stopped worrying about how impossible it was for Lin Feng to reach the Top 5, and instead started thinking about how amazing it was going to be when he hit it! She was convinced that he’d become the most famous Chinese player and that every League of Legends fan in the world was going to be talking about him!

Su Xue planned to have a first row seat for Lin Feng’s rise to fame. She wanted to watch every second of his ascension on the Korean Challenger ladder! He told her when he was going to play again and she’d looked at her schedule. It was normal stream time for her. But she could make up for time lost streaming, while she would only get one chance to see Lin Feng rise to the top of the rankings. So she told him that she’d end the stream early and that he could come to her room with his laptop to play.

The time had arrived. Su Xue had turned her stream off and Lin Feng was sitting next to her. But he wasn’t ingame yet. He was taking his sweet time setting up his laptop. She couldn’t take it any longer, already jumping in her chair from excitement. There were a few more seconds of silence before she erupted, “GoGoGo! I want you to climb at least another 10 spots tonight!” She slapped him on his back and added, “I’ll make sure we have some food here after you win the first game! Then you can recharge and go again!”

Lin Feng queued up for a ranked game, then turned to look at Su Xue and said, “Food? Sweet! I’m hungry!”

Su Xue sat on the edge of her seat, intensely staring at the queue. But when the queue still hadn’t popped two minutes later, she slumped back in her chair a bit. She said, “Ah, if I could stream your games… Just imagine how many viewers I would get. A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand…?” She shook her head in regret. He only has a month to climb to the top of Challenger. And he also has to play his tournament and do his homework and go to school. And. And. He needs to focus on his games. Streaming will just distract him. And I want to sit here and watch him play! She clenched her fist under the table and nodded. I’ll make sure no one can distract him!

“You can stream it if you want to,” Lin Feng replied. “I’ve played with so many people watching, what’s a few viewers on a stream? I won’t get distracted by something like that.”