Chapter 378: Pre-season

The edge of the city, lit up at night.

In the midst of the glittering neon colours, there is a peculiar building that is not lit up, from the top floor to the bottom, standing in total darkness opposite the largest shopping centre in the city centre, like a giant monster that can suck the light out of its surroundings.

When you step inside the building, you will see that the 36-storey building, which looks out over the booming city, is a half-finished building.

The concrete walls have reinforcing bars coming out of them, most of which have not yet been sealed, and the edges of the rooms are exposed directly to the night sky, so that you can see directly into the rooms from the outside.

Strangely enough, in such a half-finished building, the rooms are not empty, and their furnishings can be seen faintly in the darkness of the night through the obscure Buming, multi-coloured lights.

Some of the rooms have simple mattresses, sleeping bags and desks, a kettle and two or three rolls of toilet paper on the floor, and are clearly occupied.

Other rooms have only a table with a black and white photograph of a stack of apples, an incense burner and an urn in a shrine.

The incense burner still had four sticks of unburned incense in it, indicating that someone else had just come to offer incense.

As the incense rose, the phone rang in the rotting building at night, and a man carrying a heavy bag of apples in his left hand and a bag of paper money and incense in his right struggled to hold the phone between his chin and shoulder, asking softly, "Hello? I've just burnt it for Simone Li, where are you guys?"

It was a clear, clean, young male voice.

"Finished burning the seventeenth floor." A female voice on the phone, also sounding young, "Shall we meet up at Brother Wang's house on the eighteenth floor then?"

The man finished and was about to raise his hand with difficulty to hang up the phone.

The female voice there was silent for a moment before speaking again in a low voice, " Yuan Guang, the two players who died in the pre-season this year, we haven't put incense on them yet."

The man hung up the phone with a start, the apple he was carrying in his hand seemed too heavy, little by little it hoisted his hand down, his shoulders slowly closed, his head lowered with a long exhale, "...... When we win the last game, we will all go together to offer incense to them. "

The female voice hmmed and hung up the phone.

Eighteenth floor, room 1803.

A black and white photograph of a smiling, bearded man with his name [Wang Shuqi, aged 42] is on a table inside the house.

The man carrying the apples silently, as if compulsively, placed them one by one on the tribute plate in front of the uncle, took out four incense sticks, lit them and worshipped them three times before closing his eyes with folded hands and muttering to himself.

" Uncle Wang, we have made it to the playoffs again this year, I hope you are in heaven and keep everyone safe and all alive."

"...... last year ...... last year's race ......"

The man took a deep breath as if stuck here, and his eyelids fluttered twice, a little damp: "It's been hard work for you guys!"

Having said that, he went forward and solemnly inserted the incense into the cooker.

A woman walked in through the doorway next to her.

The woman was wearing flat shoes, t and jeans, her hair was in a bun at the back of her head, looking only 27 or 28 years old, obviously vigorous, beautiful and reckless age but could not hide her fatigue, she looked at the man's skilful incense action, sighed with mixed feelings and handed over a candle: " Yuan Guang, I bought candles, give Uncle Will you light a pair of waxes for Uncle Wang?"

"Don't order it." Yuan Guang shook his head and turned it in the darkness, the moonlight from outside the house cascading over the side of his face.

With single eyelids and thin lips, just by looking at the facial features, there is a very slight taste of young talent, but on the whole, that feeling of young talent is instantly ruined.

The hair, which had not been trimmed for a long time, was tied clumsily into a bundle but was tied crookedly, askew on the right shoulder, with hair sticking out on either side as well, a thick circle of greenish black around the eyes, looking as if he had not slept for three days, and a body hunched over with exhaustion.

He had a band-aid diagonally across the corner of his left forehead and a red mark on his cheek from a marker, but he didn't seem to notice himself that his face had been smeared with marker.

The look struck the woman, she remembered Yuan Guang was in okay shape two or three days ago, but now it was simply ......

It's haggard to the point of being overdone.

Yuan Guang shook his head as he looked down to gather his things, "Don't light the candles, Sister Qian and the girls are still living here, and there are no fire-fighting measures here, so it's a bit unsafe to light candles."

"Let's keep the incense burning and go."

The two men then stood quietly in front of the offering table, not saying a word.

Yuan Guang's eyelids drooped twice and his body suddenly stumbled forward and fell straight down, almost carrying his head into the ashtray.

This startled the woman next to her and she quickly reached out to hold on, " Yuan Guang!!!"

Yuan Guang's head hit the offering table so hard that he covered his head and hissed, shaking his head sleepily as he began to fall backwards again in a daze.

The woman cried and laughed as she helped him to sit down, "How many days have you not slept?"

Yuan Guang leaned his head against the wall, only out of breath without incoming air, choking on a trembling voice to complain: "...... recently our company has a project to go on, the main beauty has been taking us crazy overtime, because I want to take tomorrow off to play the game, the leader said that only the work vacated in the first two days to do in order to take to ......"

The woman huffed backwards, "You haven't been up for two days, have you?!"

Yuan Guang was dying and nodded tearfully, "I just finished it this afternoon."

"That's how you bumped the right side of your forehead, isn't it?" The woman was distressed and speechless, "You're playing tomorrow, you might die, can't you just look away from work?"

Before Yuan Guang could say anything, his and the woman's mobile phones rang at the same time.

[The borrowing of your debit note tail number XXXX will be debited with $6437.96 from 18:00 on 29th September, please ensure that the repayment account has sufficient amount. Your credit history will be accurate ......]

The two men glanced down at their phones and the women went silent for a moment.

Yuan Guang looked at the woman with a sly look, "I thought if I didn't die, I'd have to keep working to pay the mortgage?"

Woman: "......"

Grass, can't argue with that.

The woman sighed and sat down next to Yuan Guang, amused and saddened: "Other people's guild presidents are calling the shots, but look at you, Yuan Guang, you can't even afford to pay your mortgage."

"Don't other people's battle team ace players also have a hundred responses, millions of fans, and tens of millions of dollars coming in at a time from live streaming?" Yuan Guang hugged her knees, head on her knees to aim at the woman, whispering and forcing, " Shi Qian, look at you, our guild's ace mist skill player, now the audience can't even remember your face."

Shi Qian: "...... I'm a fog skill, I put fog on the field to obscure my vision, the audience will remember my face for the hell of it, okay?"

There was another silence as the two men spoke, sighing in unison in frustration.

"I'm so jealous, a big rich guild or something."

Yuan Guang spoke first: "How many years did you take out the loan?"

Shi Qian recalls, "I took out a loan with equal principal for twenty years, what about you?"

"It's the same, I chose this one because it said it would get smaller and smaller." Yuan Guang looks down at the text message and checks the balance on her bank card, breathing a sigh of relief when she sees that it is greater than 6,437. "It's been three years since I paid it off, and it's over two hundred dollars less every month."

" Uncle Wang How many years have they ...... loaned?" Shi Qian asked very softly with her head down.

Yuan Guang was silent for a while: "Thirty years, Uncle Wang and his family's income was not high, it was the Quan family who paid the mortgage together, the down payment was also scraped together, borrowing more than 100,000, and the down payment was just paid off when the developer ran away."

"Going into the game Uncle Wang just couldn't hold it together, stayed in the game for a while, still couldn't, and finally got down on his knees in front of me and begged me to let him play in the league, so count me in as doing a good deed and making his death less of a shame."

"I didn't agree at the time and Uncle Wang just ...... slit his wrists."

"The good thing is that Uncle Wang lives in a badly built building, the room can't even be fitted with a door, so the neighbours next to him can quickly see what's going on and get him to the hospital in time."

Yuan Guang was quiet for a long time, then he dropped his head and fiddled with the apples in the bag one by one.

"I had Uncle Wang on last year."

"Last year at mid-season, hundreds of people approached me to sign up to play, some were owners of this crappy building, some joined the guild later, in short, for all sorts of reasons, and couldn't last in reality or in the game, much the same way Uncle Wang did."

"Of the players who died last year, 47 of them were owners of this crappy building, all of them came into the game with me in the same batch, lasted years, couldn't last any longer and begged me to let them on the field."

"I ...... all agreed."

Yuan Guang poked at the apple and exhaled, then tugged at the corner of her mouth, "I know they're at their limit because I'm not going to last much longer either."

Shi Qian didn't say anything, she patted Yuan Guang's shoulder hard, and the two of them just huddled back to back in the room where the rotten building couldn't be capped and made public.

The red light of the four points of incense on the altar behind them was faint and tiny in the darkness, flickering as if it were about to go out at any moment, but it was the only light in the building that sat next to the lights of all the houses.

Yuan Guang lifted his head and looked out at the colourful night scene outside the house, the lights so dazzling that they shifted in his eyes, like confused oil colours mixing together and melting into a tear that was about to drip out of his eyes.

Yuan Guang sucked in his nose and suddenly laughed: "It's funny to think that so many big guilds came to analyze our tactics before, saying things like cruelty, coldness, willingness to sacrifice, members with questionable brains and strange mental makeup before they were willing to rotate on and sacrifice."

"But in the beginning, there was no way to fix down the warriors for reasons that none of these people must have thought of."

Yuan Guang let out a breath, his eyes flushed, and said with a trembling smile, "It's because everyone in reality has to go to work every day to save up for the mortgage, so it's not convenient to take time off work and there's no way to stay in the game all the time, so we can only, only take turns to participate in the tournament."

"I didn't expect it to end up being a tactic that we as a guild have no problem with."

His fist, hanging at his side, clenched.

" Shi Qian, I sometimes think it is very strange ah, in fact, everyone in the guild has a job, friends, relatives, some people like, support each other, live so hard so seriously, no matter how hard it is, they all swallow it down by themselves, refuse to trouble others in death, no matter how hard it is, they all want to help others to live."

"Everyone is a good person, so why is it so hard to live, so hard to last even three years?"

"Today is the anniversary of Uncle Wang's death." The night breeze ruffled Shi Qian's hair as she asked softly, "Yuan Guang, we're going on the field tomorrow."

"Do you think it will be the anniversary of our death in a year's time?"