Pre-season

At night, on the edge of the city, the lights are on.

In the bright neon colors of the city, there is a peculiar building that has no light, from the top to the bottom of the building is pitch black, no light at all, stands across the biggest shopping mall in the city center, as if it is a huge monster that can suck out the light around it.

As you enter the building bit by bit, you realize that the 36-story building looking out over the booming city is actually a half-finished building that has not yet been completed.

The concrete walls have steel bars sticking out of them, and most of the walls are not yet sealed, so the edges of the room are directly exposed to the night sky, and you can see directly into the room from the outside.

Strangely enough, in such a half-finished building, the rooms were not empty, and by means of the obscure and colorful lights, one could vaguely see the furnishings of the rooms in the night.

Some of the rooms have a simple mattress, sleeping bag and desk, a kettle, two or three rolls of toilet paper on the floor, so it seems to be inhabited.

In other rooms, there is only an altar with a black-and-white photo of a stack of apples, an incense burner and an urn in a shrine.

There were still four sticks of unfired incense burning in the incense burner, indicating that someone else had just come to offer incense.

As the incense rose, the phone rang in the night in the rotten building, and a man carrying a heavy bag of apples in his left hand and a bag of paper money and smoke in his right hand struggled to hold the phone between his chin and shoulder, and asked softly, "Hello? I just burned it for Simone Li's side, what about your side?"

It was a clean, young male voice.

"Finished burning the seventeenth floor." A female voice came on the phone, sounding equally young, "Then why don't we rendezvous at Wang's house on the eighteenth floor?"

When the man finished, he was about to lift his hand with difficulty to hang up the phone.

The female voice on the other side was silent for a moment, then spoke again in a low voice, "Yuan Guang, the two players who died in the preseason this year, we haven't offered them incense yet."

The man hung up the phone with a movement, the apple carried in his hand seemed to be too heavy, little by little his hand hanged down, his shoulders slowly closed, his head lowered to let out a long breath, "...... When we win the last game, all of us go together to give them incense. "

The female voice hmmm'd and hung up.

Eighteenth floor, room 1803.

Inside the house there is an offering table, on which a black and white photo shows an older man with a big smile and a full beard, with his name written next to it - [Wang Juqi, aged 42].

The man carrying the apples was silent, as if he had obsessive-compulsive disorder, one by one, placed the apples in the tribute plate in front of the uncle, and took out four sticks of incense, which he lit and worshipped three times in a regular manner, and then folded his hands together and closed his eyes without moving them, muttering to himself:

"Uncle Wang, we've made it to the playoffs again this year, so I hope that in heaven's name you'll bless us all with peace and safety, and that we'll all survive."

"...... last year ...... last year's game ......"

The man took a deep breath as if he was stuck here, and his eyelids fluttered twice, a little wet, "Tough luck!"

When he finished speaking, he stepped forward to solemnly incense into the stove.

A woman walked in the doorway next to her.

This woman is wearing flat shoes, wearing t and jeans, hair in the back of the head coiled into a bun, look at the age of only 27, 28, obviously vibrant, beautiful and wanton age but hard to hide the fatigue, she looked at the man's skillful incense action, a complex sigh, passed over a handful of candles: "Yuan Guang, I bought candles, to Uncle Wang point a pair of wax? ?"

"No more orders." Yuan Guang shook his head and turned it in the darkness, the moonlight from outside the house shining on the layers surging across the side of his face.

Single eyelid, thin lips, just look at the five facial features, it is a little bit of young talent, but the overall look, the feeling of young talent is instantly destroyed.

Hair that hadn't been trimmed in a long time was tied clumsily into a bundle, but it was tied crookedly, askew over his right shoulder, with hair sticking out on either side as well, a rich ring of blue-black around his eyes, and he looked as if he hadn't slept in three days, and his body hunched over in exhaustion.

He had a Band-Aid tilted to the left corner of his forehead and a red mark on his cheek from a marker, but he himself didn't seem to notice the marker on his face.

The woman was stunned by this look, she remembered that two or three days ago Yuan Guang's condition was okay, but now it was simply ......

Overly haggard.

Yuan Guang shook his head as he lowered his head to pack up his things, "It's better not to light the candles, Sister Qian and the girls are still living here, and there aren't any fire protection measures here, so it's a bit unsafe to light the candles."

"Let's keep watch and leave when the incense is burned."

The two men just stood quietly at 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 incense burner.

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

Yuan Guang's head hit hard on the confessional table, and he hissed as he covered his head, shook his head sleepily, and dizzily began to fall backward again.

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

Yuan Guang head tilted against the wall, only out of breath without air, trembling choking accusation: "...... recently our company has a project to be on, the main beauty has been taking us crazy overtime, because I want to take tomorrow off to play the game, the leadership said that you can only vacate the work in the two days ahead of doing in order to please to ......"

The woman huffed backward, "You haven't been sleeping for the past two days, have you?!"

Yuan Guang, dying, 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 heartbroken and speechless, "You're playing tomorrow, you might die, can't you look away from work?"

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

[The borrowing of your Debit Note tail number XXXX will be debited $6,437.96 from 18:00 on September 29th, please ensure that the repayment account is sufficient. Your credit record will be truthfully ......]

The two men glanced down at their cell phones as the women went quiet.

Yuan Guang looked at the woman with a sly look: "Isn't it because if she doesn't die, she'll still have to work to pay the mortgage?"

Woman: "......"

Grass, can't argue with that.

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

"Aren't other people's battle team's ace players also a call to arms, with millions of fans, and tens of millions of dollars in their pockets at a single live broadcast?" Yuan Guang hugged his knees, his head resting on his knees to aim at the woman, and pressed in a small voice, "Shi Qian, look at you, our guild's ace Mist Skill player, and now the audience can't even remember your face."

Shi Qian : "...... I'm a fog skill, I put fog to cover my vision when I go on the field, it's a hell of a thing if the audience can remember my face, okay?"

The two men spoke again in silence, and sighed in unison in frustration.

"I'm so envious, rich big guilds and all."

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

Shi Qian recalled, "I took out an equal principal loan for twenty years, did you?"

"It's the same, I chose this one because it said it would get smaller as I paid it off." Yuan Guang looked down to find the text message and check his card balance, and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that it was greater than 6,437, "It turned out that after three years of paying it off, I was losing more than two hundred dollars a month."

"How many years have they ...... lent for Uncle Wang?" Shi Qian asked very softly with her head lowered.

Yuan Guang was silent for a while: "Thirty years, Uncle Wang and their family income is not high, is the whole family together to pay off the loan, the down payment is also cobbled together, borrowed more than 100,000, the open house ran away when the accident just paid off the down payment."

"Uncle Wang couldn't hold out when he entered the game, he stayed up for a while in the game, but still couldn't do it, and finally knelt down in front of me and begged me to let him play in the league, counting on me to do a good deed, so that he wouldn't die in such a shameful way."

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

"Good thing Uncle Wang lives in a rotten building, the room can not install the door, what happened next to the neighbors can soon see, send the hospital to send in time."

Yuan Guang was quiet for a long while, his head hanging down as he fiddled with the apples in the bag one at a time:

"I had Uncle Wang on last year."

"Last year's mid-season tournament, hundreds of people approached me to sign up to try to get on the field, some of them were owners of this crappy building, some of them joined the guild later, in short, there were all sorts of reasons why they couldn't hold up in reality and in the game, pretty much the same situation as Uncle Wang."

"Forty-seven of the players who died last year were owners of this crappy building, all got into the game with me, lasted for years, couldn't hold out, and begged me to put them on the field."

"I ...... agree."

Yuan Guang poked the apple and exhaled, then tugged at the corner of her mouth, "I know they're at their limit, because I'm about to lose it too."

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 weak in the darkness of the night, tiny, flickering as if it was going to go out at any moment, but it was the only light in the building, which was situated next to ten thousand lights.

Yuan Guang lifted his head and looked out at the colorful night scene outside the house, the lights were so dazzling that they reflected in his eyes and shook, like a chaotic mix of oils that melted into a tear that was about to drip out of his eye.

Yuan Guang inhaled and suddenly laughed a little, "It's funny to think about, before so many big dukes would come to analyze our tactics, saying that they were cruel, cold, willing to sacrifice, and that the members were brain-dead, with a peculiar mental make-up, before they were willing to rotate on the field to sacrifice."

"But in the beginning, there was no way to fix the reasons for the lower war party members, which none of these people must have thought of."

Yuan Guang let out a breath, his eyes reddened, and said with a trembling smile, "It's because everyone in reality has to go to work every day to save up money to pay off the mortgage, it's inconvenient to take time off, and there's no way to stay in the game all the time for the tournament, so they can only, can only take turns coming to participate in the tournament."

"I didn't expect that it would actually end up being a tactic that we as a guild can't do anything about."

His fists hanging at his side clenched:

"Shi Qian, I sometimes feel very strange ah, in fact, everyone in the guild has a job, friends, relatives, someone like, support each other, live so hard and so seriously, even more bitter are swallowed down by themselves, die refused to trouble others, even more difficult want to help others to live."

"We are all good people, so why is it so hard to live, so hard to survive even three years?"

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

"Do you think a year from now will be the anniversary of our death?"