The King's Avatar

Without an aggro-establishing skill like the Knight’s Provoke, it was impossible to suddenly switch the target of the aggro. Even OT required that certain conditions be met. Otherwise, if it were as simple as your damage surpassed mine so the aggro immediately transferred, then two characters could simply take turns attacking and ping-pong the boss back and forth until it died.

The aggro system wasn’t designed so foolishly. To cause OT, the aggro had to surpass a certain percentage. Because of this, the fact that Dancing Rain had managed to suddenly pull away the aggro meant that they had prepared for this long in advance.

Dancing Rain was leading the boss away just like this, closely followed by Steamed Bun Invasion and Deception. Yet Lin Jingyan couldn’t do a thing to stop them, because Ye Xiu was right in front him.

In Ye Xiu’s hands, Battle Mage Soft Mist definitely wasn’t an opponent that Lin Jingyan could just easily blow past. In the blink of an eye, Ghost King and Happy’s three players vanished into one of the tunnels, while Lin Jingyan’s Dark Thunder continued to be beaten down by Soft Mist’s chained attacks.

For him, the important thing was to track where the Ghost King was being taken, but now, in order to accomplish that, he first had to defeat Ye Xiu.

For Lin Jingyan, this wasn’t an entirely impossible task. After so many years in the professional scene, the two had met on the battlefield multiple times, and Lin Jingyan did have some victories. But every battle was extremely difficult. Although it was possible that he could defeat Ye Xiu, he definitely couldn’t just quickly kill him with a chaotic flurry of slashes.

What’s worse was that Ye Xiu had the initiative right now, and Lin Jingyan was on the defensive. Lin Jingyan didn’t think he had the ability to defeat Ye Xiu in this current situation - just continuing to defend would be difficult enough.

No good would come from continuing this fight.

Lin Jingyan understood this clearly. So the only thing he could do was to recklessly charge through Ye Xiu’s blockade, to see where Ghost King went.

Just as he thought this, Ye Xiu suddenly stopped attacking.

Soft Mist jumped back several times, retreating away.

Lin Jingyan was surprised. As he watched, Ye Xiu controlled Soft Mist to stop right in the tunnel.

The area where they had been fighting the Ghost King was a relatively wide and open space, like an underground tomb chamber. But this tunnel at the end of the chamber wasn’t so wide. Seeing Soft Mist stand right at the entrance of the tunnel and completely blocking the way forward, one proverb flashed to the front of Lin Jingyan’s mind: One man can hold the pass against a thousand enemies.

”Hehehe. What now? Guess you can’t pass.” Ye Xiu said gleefully.

”Ye Xiu you shameless bastard!!” From Dark Thunder’s side came a somewhat distant shout. Ye Xiu, with all his experience, immediately knew that this was the sound of someone sitting next to the player yelling into the player’s headset.

”Which pro player is such a sore loser?” Ye Xiu asked.

He could even distinguish the owner of the voice. It was Zhang Jiale!

Zhang Jiale was already eliminated from this dungeon, but he still watched closely from Lin Jingyan’s screen. Seeing this situation, he immediately knew that things were bad. Even if they waited for Han Wenqing and the others to arrive and they were able to kill Ye Xiu with the advantage of numbers, after that, they had no idea where the Ghost King went and they’d have to start their search all over again. Happy would probably have enough time to kill the Ghost King before they found them again.

Zhang Jiale this time really became the screenwriter.

Lin Jingyan tried to rush Ye Xiu a few times. Ye Xiu didn’t try to compete with him, he just parked himself right in the tunnel and prevented him from passing. Every time, the effort was fruitless, and Lin Jingyan’s own health was almost depleted.

Then, Han Wenqing, Zhang Xinjie, and Qin Muyun arrived. In a 4v1, the outcome was as expected. This time, Ye Xiu didn’t continue to run. He blocked the tunnel with all of his life, but was eventually pushed over.

But now, where was the Ghost King?

The four continued to run forward, but they very quickly arrived at another fork in the road, shattering their hearts.

”Give up!” Ye Xiu sent a message to them in the global channel.

As long as it wasn’t over, Tyranny would never give up. They split up to search, but in the end, all they found was a system announcement.

Team Deception successfully killed the Ghost King.

The announcement was broadcast to the whole world. The players who were still online, after seeing this announcement, were in an uproar.

Although they didn’t earn the ability to participate in this bonus event, they at least knew that all of the participants were professional teams and players, including the Four Heavenly Kings of Tyranny.

They also didn’t know what had happened in Ghost Lair. But in the end, the team that successfully killed the Ghost King was Deception’s? Team Deception, wasn’t that just Team Happy?

Was Happy really this strong?

Everyone was discussing this outcome.

Of course, in the eyes of the ordinary players, a grassroots team like Happy was relatively weak. The fact that they had managed to vanquish Excellent Era was, after all, deemed a miracle.

But after defeating Excellent Era, Happy was able to get another victory in this competition, beating even Tyranny… A miracle was called a miracle because it was extraordinary. Something that happened often couldn’t be called a miracle.

Happy defeated Excellent Era, and now defeated Tyranny in this competition?

And not just Tyranny, but also Wind Howl, and Misty Rain, and Royal Style… These teams couldn’t be dismissed either.

Everyone was mulling over the implications of this; even the media reported on it.

Over the summer break, there were no battles to be written about, so there were much fewer topics of interest. Weekly esports newspapers that relied primarily on news about the Glory professional scene would shrink their publications during this time. But even now, everyone was still looking for stories to report on.

The biggest news during the summer was news of transfers - reporters would jump on this treasured news, reporting on completed transfers as well as the barest hints of rumors. But this sort of news wasn’t enough to support the paper. After all, unlike the ten-per-week regularity of professional matches, news of transfers was spontaneous and sporadic.

So the media looked to other places for news, and the in-game world of Glory was a natural choice. The weekly esports newspapers would often have a section about the in-game gossip, and during a time where there weren’t matches to report on, nor other interesting news, the in-game section expanded.

The eleventh server, and the Heavenly Domain. With a few million players, there were countless topics of gossip springing up every day. As long as you had the patience, there was enough to report on - even if the weekly newspaper was changed to daily, there was enough material.

However, as a professional esports media outlet, Esports Home still hoped to find some high-end material.

Pro players spending the summer break working or training in-game certainly counted as high-end material. In past summers, there were plenty of pro players who had been discovered in game, and the papers were as diligent in their reports as ever.

And this year was even more exciting, especially with this summer’s event. The pro players of the various teams all picked up their accounts and entered the game, which was a rare sight to be seen.

Thus, this week’s esports weekly papers of course focused on the performance of the pro players during the Ghost Parade event. The reporters swiped their account cards and entered Glory, contacting the guilds, or directly contacting the pro players, and tracking their progress.

And tonight, there was even an easter egg unlocked. Suddenly five teams were thrust into direct competition, and the reporters anxiously waited outside for the outcome and to ask what happened.

The one who finally killed Ghost King was Happy? The reporters’ professional intuition told them that there was a story behind this full of twists and turns, and they all grew excited.

They paid attention to the five teams in the dungeon, and those that had the pro players added as friends could track the progress of the teams by seeing when these players went offline.

Because the pro players immediately logged off upon exiting Ghost Lair, the reporters had no way of interviewing them in-game. Outside of the game, the most convenient was to use a chat method like QQ. All of these teams had dedicated reporters that followed them, and these reporters all had the QQ’s of the various players on the team. However, it was one thing to send a message on QQ, and it was another to see if the player was actually available and would reply.

In the end, this was just an in-game event, not some explosive news, and there was still plenty of time before publication, so the reporters weren’t anxious in waiting. If they could contact the player directly then great, if not, they would find other avenues to get news.

So very quickly, reporters discovered that Fang Rui had just made a new post on Weibo.

This Weibo was sent from his phone, timestamped after he had logged off from the Ghost Lair.

Just four words in the post: The weather has changed. And then, a sighing emoji.

Below the post, a whole crowd of fans had gathered in the replies, but they weren’t able to find too much to discuss, just some comments like ”Fang Rui make sure not to leave your clothes out in the rain” and such.

But reporters were perceptive, and would certainly ponder over what they saw. Especially the reporters following Wind Howl, they lived in the same city as Fang Rui. Seeing this Weibo, those reporters quickly pulled up weather reports, only to find that the weather was stable, with clear skies and bright sunshine forecasted for the next several days.

Even if it was some prediction made from analyzing the night sky… The reporters looked out their windows into the darkness, but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary!

Then, looking at the sighing emoji, the reporters began to have a faint feeling of the meaning behind this post.

The reporters patiently flipped through the comments on the post. There was a lot to look through; after all, Fang Rui was a star of a pro player and had many fans. Not long after it was posted, the comments and replies were already in the hundreds. This actually wasn’t even as many as it could have been - given the obscurity of this post, many people didn’t know what to say and just didn’t reply.

The reporters patiently flipped through. Since Fang Rui was a god of playing dirty, his fans were naturally fans of dirty playing as well. In the numerous strange replies, there were more than a few dirty and vulgar comments, which wasn’t unexpected.

But after flipping through several pages of comments, the reporters soon found another clue.

One fan also seemed to have perceived that Fang Rui’s mood was different from normal, and posted an ordinary, ”Fang Rui, what’s wrong?”

In the end, it was this comment that earned Fang Rui’s reply.

Five words: My love has been exhausted.