(NT: 666: Chinese internet slang expressing admiration, like “awesome!” or “well played!”. MMP (妈卖批, mā mài pī): A vulgar Chinese curse, roughly equivalent to “fuck!” or “motherfucker!”)

 

“Is our team cursed or what??? Another team with three orange weapons! Have orange weapons become so common that you can find them lying around everywhere now??? Good grief!!”

Gaigai’s anguished and furious roar brought Zhu Huai’s attention back to the match. Immediately afterward, he heard Huarouya cry out in surprise, “It’s Meng Xingyu!! It’s Meng Xingyu’s account! Oh my god, I wonder if it’s really him playing! Aaaah, screenshot, screenshot! I’m going to faint!”

The opposing Shu Gate player’s ID was Xingyu.

When Meng Xingyu had first signed the endorsement deal, he had livestreamed frequently. Combined with the game’s official promotional campaigns, this meant that almost every mobile-game player knew his account. Although people on every server sometimes deliberately chose the same ID, the avatar of the opposing Shu Gate player had the official verification V symbol in its lower-right corner. There was no doubt that it was Meng Xingyu’s actual account.

Zhu Huai stared at that ID for quite a while, his expression calm and unreadable. No one knew what he was thinking.

This time, he had switched to the healer role. Calmly, he said, “We’ll enter the arena in ten seconds. Huahua, work with Gaigai to take down Shu Gate. When the enemy activates their burst damage, remember to stay out of his attack range.”

Huarouya let out a little cry, sounding reluctant. “Why do we have to fight Meng Xingyu? I still want to spend more time with him! Can’t we attack Changjian instead?” (NT: Changjian means Long Sword)

Girls were often a little starstruck, and Zhu Huai understood. “Sure.”

Before Huarouya could even cheer, the male voice in her headset continued, “If we attack Shu Gate, Shu Gate dies. If we attack Changjian, you die.”

Remembering the orange weapon effect Changjian had triggered last time, Huarouya fell silent.

As long as Changjian stayed alive for even one second, the healer could restore his health. Furthermore, after the orange weapon effect ended, Changjian would receive a damage-boosting buff that made his attacks extremely powerful. Killing a character with equipment as poor as hers in a single strike would be a piece of cake.

If she got killed in one hit, even if the game developers themselves logged in to play the healer, they would not be able to save her.

Huarouya’s tone turned resolute. “We can lose the game, but Shu Gate must die!”

Zhu Huai laughed. “It’s starting.”

When the battle began, Meng Xingyu, despite playing a melee class, did not rush toward them. Instead, he stayed pressed close to the healer, the two of them sticking together like conjoined twins. By contrast, Changjian charged forward with a gleaming silver sword in hand, heading straight for Zhu Huai.

Zhu Huai had been prepared. He dodged to the left, avoiding Changjian’s crowd-control skill, then applied a damage-reduction effect to himself and turned to run toward his teammates. However, halfway there, he suddenly stopped. Changjian seized that brief opportunity to close in and engage him, disrupting the rhythm of his healing. Zhu Huai had no choice but to stop and contend with Changjian.

Zhu Huai was not panicking, because this was precisely the plan he had just changed on the fly.

Originally, he had intended to support his teammates. The orange-weapon Shu Gate dealt considerable damage, and he had been worried they would not be able to hold out. But his teammates surprised him instead—

Huarouya was surprisingly good at playing Hundred Flowers Valley as a damage dealer, and she coordinated with Gaigai remarkably well. Clearly, during the time Zhu Huai had been offline, she and Gaigai had teamed up quite a lot. They kept Shu Gate’s health bar firmly suppressed.

Meanwhile, Meng Xingyu was even worse at playing Shu Gate than Zhu Huai had expected. He did not even know how to dodge skills and took a powerful ultimate move from the Beggar Sect head-on. However, he had the bonus from his orange weapon and the protection of an orange-weapon healer. For a while, the two of them still could not kill him. The moment Shu Gate’s health bar was pushed down, Hundred Flowers Valley immediately healed it back up.

Watching Shu Gate’s health bar repeatedly teeter on the brink of death, only to recover again, nearly drove him to the verge of a breakdown.

By contrast, Huarouya and Gaigai’s health bars were still in a very safe range. So Zhu Huai changed his plan on the spot: he would keep Changjian occupied and prevent him from going to support his teammate.

But after harassing Zhu Huai for a while, Changjian seemed to have seen through his plan. He stopped trying to engage him, threw out a skill to force Zhu Huai back, then turned and headed for the Beggar Sect player.

“Gaigai, dodge!”

The Beggar Sect player reacted immediately, but he was still half a step too slow. Changjian instantly slashed away more than half his health. Zhu Huai rushed over and immediately unleashed a powerful healing skill, barely managing to restore the health bar to full.

“Shu Gate doesn’t know how to play! Keep pressuring him; he’s about to break!”

Sure enough, not long after Zhu Huai finished speaking, Shu Gate became a corpse, lying motionless on the cold floor. Even when Changjian hurried back at the last moment, he could not save him.

“Attack Changjian! Attack Changjian!”

Zhu Huai’s team now had a 3v2 advantage. However, Lijiang’s Changjian was far more skilled than either the Beggar Sect or Hundred Flowers Valley players. He could predict attacks, maneuver around the battlefield, maintain the right distance to deal damage, and also benefited from his orange weapon. Although Zhu Huai was giving it everything he had—literally working himself to the bone (an idiom meaning to make an enormous effort)—he still could not heal the Beggar Sect player’s tiny, fragile health bar back up in time. The Beggar Sect player soon fell beneath the sword.

“I’m so scared!” Huarouya’s voice sounded as though she were about to cry. “Little gege, what do we do?”

The two sides were now evenly matched—if one ignored their equipment.

Zhu Huai had the skill to keep Changjian from killing him. Now everything depended on whether Huarouya could take down the opposing healer.

While maneuvering around the battlefield, Zhu Huai said, “Focus on attacking Hundred Flowers Valley. Changjian can’t kill me.”

Huarouya answered softly and chased the enemy healer all over the arena. However, the opposing healer was about as skilled as Huarouya. With three Hundred Flowers Valley characters among the four players on the field, the arena was covered in pink, delicate-looking skill effects.

At one point, Changjian tried switching targets and attacking Huarouya instead. But Zhu Huai had no trouble keeping her healed on his own. This was the downside of a two-on-two fight when one player was a healer and the other a damage dealer.

Damage dealer: No one can kill anyone.

Healer: No one can kill anyone.

Zhu Huai had been trying to find an opportunity to exchange a few words with Lijiang, but both his hands were occupied, and Lijiang’s damage output was too high. The slightest mistake would put Huarouya in danger.

【Huarouya has killed Baixiaomeng.】 (NT: litt. Little White Dream)

The sudden system announcement made Zhu Huai freeze. The enemy healer had actually died?

How?

[Map] Huarouya: “? Sis, did you lag out?”

Zhu Huai asked over voice chat, “What happened?”

Huarouya replied, “I don’t know! She suddenly stopped moving, stopped healing, and just stood there letting me hit her.”

Gaigai asked, “Was it lag?”

“That can’t be it, can it? Her character didn’t do Lingbo Weibu. It shouldn’t be a network problem, right?”

In Sword Shadow Jianghu Mobile, when a character suddenly disconnected or suffered severe lag, the character would keep sliding straight forward until it hit an obstacle and stopped. Players called this Lingbo Weibu.

(NT: literally “light steps over rippling waves,” a martial-arts term for an elegant, agile movement technique. It comes from the wuxia novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong. Here, it’s gaming slang for the strange sliding movement caused by lag).

Such incidents were not unusual during a game, but deliberately feeding kills in an arena match was extremely rare.

The unexpected turn of events made everyone on the battlefield stop moving. Lijiang did not raise his sword and resume fighting either. He stood there motionless, looking as elegant and handsome as a jade tree facing the wind.

Huarouya asked uncertainly, “Should I go kill Changjian?”

Zhu Huai stopped her. “Wait.”

[Map] Zhihuai: “Lijiang, are you there?”

After waiting for a while without receiving a reply, Zhu Huai wondered whether Lijiang had stepped away and gone AFK (NT: “Away From Keyboard.”). He was just about to type another message when the map chat refreshed.

[Map] Baixiaomeng: “When there’s a problem, you tell the healer to love me one more time. When there’s no problem, you blame the healer for how badly you play and expect them to take the fall? Hah!”

[Map] Baixiaomeng: “I can accept that I’m bad at the game, but can you, you fucking idiot, at least follow the instructions?”

[Map] Baixiaomeng: “Celebrities really are something else. A whole bunch of brain-dead idiots grovel at their feet! We can lose the game, but we’d better keep our mouths filthy~”

After Baixiaomeng finished sending those messages, her character disappeared as she logged out.

Gaigai was dumbfounded. “Fuck, has this turned into an internal team fight?”

Zhu Huai frowned as he looked at the messages. “The healer gets blamed as usual. When they win, the damage dealers spam ‘666’; when they die, they spam ‘MMP’ at the healer.”

Gaigai muttered, “How could they possibly blame the healer for this? It was obvious even to the naked eye that Meng Xingyu was terrible at the game.”

There was little suspense left in the match. Unless Changjian managed to kill one of the two of them in a single blow, he would gradually be worn down by their team.

But both Huarouya and Lijiang had stopped moving.

Zhu Huai and Gaigai called out to Huarouya several times, but she did not respond, even though the team interface showed that her voice chat was still on.

[Map] Lijiang: “I’m here.”

A new message suddenly appeared in the map chat. Zhu Huai took a second to realize that it was a reply to him.

[Map] Zhihuai: “Which server are you on, great God?” (NT: dàshén 大神, a respectful gaming term for a highly skilled player.)

[Map] Lijiang: “Server Six.”

Zhu Huai was on Server Eight.

[Map] Zhihuai: “Have you registered for the Heroes’ Cup, great God?”

[Map] Lijiang: “No.”

Suppressing his excitement, Zhu Huai suddenly came up with a bold idea. He called out over voice chat, “Gaigai.”

“What?”

“Would you move to Server Six?”

“Huh?”

“To team up with Lijiang.”

“Wait.” Gaigai sounded puzzled. “I don’t mind changing servers. I can afford the transfer fee of a few dozen yuan. But what if the great God has no intention of participating in the competition at all?”

Zhu Huai took a deep breath and typed: “Would you like to register for the competition together?”

But before he could send the message, the character “Victory” suddenly flashed across his phone screen.

Lijiang had already left the game, and the system had declared Zhu Huai’s team the winner.

Zhu Huai was regretfully sent out of the arena.

The team voice-chat indicator lit up, and Huarouya’s excited voice came through. “I just went to Meng Xingyu’s livestream! It really was him playing!”

Gaigai chimed in, “And he got into a flame war with the healer.”

Huarouya corrected him. “Meng Xingyu wasn’t the one arguing! His fans were the ones who went too far. When they saw their gege lying on the ground, unable to get back up, they got a little worked up and said some pretty nasty things.”

“Who would’ve thought the healer was watching the livestream too? Hahahaha!”

“That healer was probably angry about being insulted. She actually asked in the team chat how Meng Xingyu played, and whether he had hired a professional player to boost his rank since it was so high. The team voice chat was on, so everyone in the livestream heard her.”

Huarouya still felt shaken just thinking about what had happened. “Then things really blew up. Meng Xingyu’s mother fans and girlfriend fans—do they even have a shred of reason? They immediately fired back. They flooded the livestream chat so badly that the comments became impossible to read, and they nearly crashed the stream.”

Gaigai laughed. “Baixiaomeng’s got guts. She dares to provoke a traffic star! Just think about how Zhu Huai’s fans and Film Emperor Jiang’s fans once fought each other to a standstill. These traffic stars and their fans are no pushovers.”

Huarouya’s voice suddenly shot up by eight octaves. “Don’t you dare mention that little slut Zhu Huai! He harmed my sons Liu Qi and Wei Feng! He’s already washed up, yet he still wants to cling to my husband to generate publicity! Whoever mentions him to me, I’ll kill them!”

Zhu Huai: “……???”

Gaigai was startled. “All right, all right, we won’t mention him. Women really become unreasonable when they start chasing stars. They’ve got a whole bunch of sons and husbands. But did Meng Xingyu just let his fans insult the healer?”

“No.” Huarouya replied, “Actually, I don’t think you can blame Meng Xingyu for this, can you? The idol pays for the behaviour of his fans. He was also trying to talk them down in the livestream.”

Zhu Huai—also known as “Slut Zhu”—who had not spoken until then, asked, “How did he try to calm them down?”

Huarouya did not understand why he was asking, but she answered honestly anyway. “Well, he explained that the healer hadn’t done it on purpose, that no one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes, and told them to stop insulting her and things like that.”

Zhu Huai scoffed inwardly.

Gaigai had fought at close range against Meng Xingyu throughout the match, so he had the clearest idea of what had actually happened. He was utterly shocked. “Fuck, Baixiaomeng practically flung her bra off trying to keep him alive, while he just stood there dealing damage and took several of my ultimate moves head-on! Is it really that hard to admit you’re bad at the game??”

He concluded with one last remark: “What a hypocrite!”

Huarouya gave a derisive snort, then suddenly brought Zhu Huai into the conversation. “Compared with Zhu Huai, what does that kind of hypocrisy even count as? He posted an ambiguous picture of ginger soup on Weibo, then got my husband to comment on it. He acted like, ‘Oh, I never said Jiang Sheli was the one who sent it. He admitted it himself!’ He put on this pure, innocent white-lotus act and milked that publicity for all it was worth!”

?

So this was how the gossip-loving onlookers saw him?

Remembering the looks people on set had given him that day, Zhu Huai finally understood what that extra meaning in their eyes had been.

Gaigai, an innocent gaming nerd, was stunned by the unrestrained way this fangirl expressed her likes and dislikes. After a long while, he finally muttered, “You hate Zhu Huai that much? I’ve watched videos of that kid performing. He seemed like a pretty genuine young man to me.”

“What would you know!” Huarouya wanted nothing more than to pour Zhu Huai’s entire history of scandals into Gaigai’s brain. “It’s all a carefully crafted public image! Deep down, he’s a scheming boy! He’d better not show up in front of me, or I’m afraid I won’t be able to control the primordial fury inside me and tear him apart to his face!”

All right, then.

Today, he was Zhu “Slut” “White Lotus” “Scheming” Huai.

Gaigai was thoroughly convinced. Noticing that their other teammate had been silent for a long time, he called out, “God Huai?”

Huarouya realized she had overreacted and said apologetically, “Sorry, I scared you two, didn’t I? Now you know just how much I hate Zhu Huai. Please don’t mention him in front of me again!”

“Fine, fine, got it,” Gaigai replied. Remembering their original business, he said to Huarouya, “Aren’t we still one player short on our team? God Huai is planning to go to Server Six and ask Lijiang. Are you coming?”

Then he added uncertainly, “Right, God Huai?”

Zhu Huai stammered, “……We’ll see.”

Huarouya said, “Why not? I don’t mind moving to Server Six either!”

Because I’m afraid you’ll tear me apart to my face.

Translator : DarNan