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“In the end I didn’t even end up seeing my bed before I was kicked out,” Ye Xiu finished cheerily, waving a piece of speared potato around. Wu Xuefeng tried to imagine it, and found the image sliding easily into his head: fuzzy, with an indistinct background, but the expression was vivid enough. He thought he’d forgotten, left it to dull with the years, but Ye Xiu seemed to have shaken the dust off some things after all.
Did that mean he was getting old, or the years were getting old? “You spent the first few nights playing solitaire on the floor?”
“No she put me into Ye Qiu’s room and he got kicked out onto the sofa,” Ye Xiu replied immediately, words slipping over each other as the corners of a familiar grin crept onto his face. “I don’t think he minded, it was closer to the door.”
What the Internet hadn’t managed to fill Wu Xuefeng in on, the enormously gossipy circle of Glory pros had; what they hadn’t managed to discover, Ye Xiu was gladly spilling. Wu Xuefeng thanked his lucky stars that his family background was nowhere near as impressive. The parental reaction hadn’t differed by much, admittedly – he could still summon up the lively shrieking if he tried, and he tried very hard not to – but there was his situation, and there was the convoluted mess that had been Ye Xiu’s situation, and he knew exactly which one he preferred.
“But anyway,” Ye Xiu said, eyes gleaming. “That’s all on Baidu. They even put up analysis of every match, though I wouldn’t recommend it. What about you?”
Wu Xuefeng lifted some tofu into his bowl. What about him, indeed. “Are you sure you want to listen about six years in business?” he asked dubiously. “They aren’t even six very impressive years.”
Ye Xiu shrugged. “They can’t be that bad – they weren’t six very impressive years for me either,” he said, careless. Its status as a partial lie stung more instead of less; business might be lonely, of sorts, but at least his boss hadn’t thrown him under the bus.
He could ask. The offer was there. He just wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Under the burial of Excellent Era was a grim monster, two people straining in different directions on a rope that had strained with time, and unearthing it felt cruel to Ye Xiu, who had neatly omitted the details in his previous chatter, and cruel to himself, who had no place to decide and no time to reason and who could only grieve.
Not for what it had become, but for what he had dreamed it could become, and for what others had dreamed it could become, their shared monumental dream that had crumbled into fragments as fragile as soap bubbles. It was kinder to himself not to revisit.
“When I was starting,” he said instead, “there was a guy who ate McDonalds every day.”
Ye Xiu raised an eyebrow at that, possibly from disbelief, possibly from relief. Possibly there was something on his mind, too, with the performed intensity of his look, but Wu Xuefeng couldn’t tell what it was yet. Maybe hearing about McDonalds guy was making him rethink his eating habits.
Sometime during his recount of that one incident with the self-made champagne fire extinguisher, which worked about exactly as well as one would expect it to work, he was struck by a sudden thought. “Wait, are you asking because you’re preparing to enter the business world?”
Ye Xiu appeared unsurprised that Wu Xuefeng had reached that conclusion. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Ye Qiu is perfectly capable right now. I’d have to do a decade’s worth of catching up, and the old man at home might finally have decided that it’s not actually vital to have the eldest son running the business. Took you long enough, though.”
“Haven’t practiced in a while,” Wu Xuefeng agreed.
Being able to read intent was a necessity the longer in the pro circle you stayed. Being able to read Ye Xiu’s intent – well. He supposed that wasn’t a necessity anymore, although it had almost certainly haunted several seasons of pro players. But he wasn’t one of them anymore, and the skill had turned rusty.
“I guess it depends if Ye Qiu tries to run away,” continued Ye Xiu. “Until then, I’m happy to leech.”
The memory of one of the low-level dungeons suddenly rose to the forefront of his mind. He couldn’t place it anymore – it had fire and snow and that could describe far too many dungeons in Glory – but the image of the strongest player in Glory in the guise of an elementalist trudging listlessly was as bright as ever. “Did you ever do that again?”
“Of course! Who wouldn’t take the leech position if it’s freely offered?” His captain was sharp with remembered mischief, and Wu Xuefeng found a grin on his face, too. Walking next to that dispirited elementalist had been an equally dejected qi master, after all; he didn't have Ye Xiu's mastery with all classes, but who back then had expected that the qi master plodding next to them was the qi master?
“Do you still play?” Ye Xiu asked.
“Make an educated guess.”
Ye Xiu gave him a frown. “Well, you don’t have Old Wei’s reasons to keep going,” he said dryly. Wu Xuefeng nearly snorted out his rice, and managed, “No, definitely not.”
“It’s hard to tell. You left too cleanly,” mused Ye Xiu. “But I’m going to say you still play. Or you still want to play.”
Wu Xuefeng toasted him with a teacup. “Sometimes I pass Heavenly Domain challenges.”
“Is it hard to stop?”
That, he had to think about.
It was hard to stop. It was the strangest thing in the world, waking up and not having an account card, no wild bosses to chase after or videos to rewatch. He still had a fifth-server account, a little qi master not quite past level 60 who had never actually entered the Heavenly Domain despite passing the challenges. He’d stared at the landscape of Glory for countless hours after retirement, assignments left haphazardly over his table, lost as to what was going on.
It was easy to stop. It was the simplest thing in the world, gifting his card reader to a baby cousin and uninstalling the game. He’d filled his days with financial analysis and his nights with networking engagements, and buried his card under a mess of notebooks and blocked the eSport news sites in his browser. His qi master’s last activity was the Christmas event, and his brain had to pause for the sequence of the simplest air bullet.
He’d stared at the ceiling for a full day after uninstalling, and borrowed a friend’s card reader, and it felt like his heart had been scraped over with a dull, dull knife, or like breaking up in the worst possible way.
Now he didn’t think of Glory unless he wanted to, and rewatched matches only when he wanted to. The raw scrapes had healed with time, and when he thought of it now, it was with wistfulness for what he had experienced and not the adrenaline rush of its mechanics. The pattern of Ye Xiu’s thoughts was revealing itself to him, slowly, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Are you going to stop?” he asked back.
“Yes,” said Ye Xiu, and added, “Never.”
“Then I hope you’ll never find out.”
Ye Xiu’s face indicated he understood. “Thanks,” he said simply.
“It’s…” Wu Xuefeng started and stopped and floundered for the words. “It’s an experience,” he said, carefully, the words burning on his tongue. “It’s up to you, though, what you get out of it. If you want to get anything out of it.”
“I do and I don’t.” Ye Xiu drummed his fingers on the table. “It stays forever, doesn’t it?”
Wu Xuefeng caught his hand, and gained a startled look in response. “Ye Qiu, Ye Xiu, captain of Excellent Era, captain of Happy – listen to me. Your life does not end when your time with Glory does.” He said the words fiercely, willing them to get across, to be understood. “You and Glory will be a story for the ages. But that story will define the history of Glory, not your own. You still have so much more waiting for you. And you are allowed to chase them.”
He felt the fine tremble in Ye Xiu’s hands. “It’s just,” he heard him say, “I thought it would be simple. And now that I’m on the verge of it happening, I don’t feel ready at all.”
“You’ll always love Glory,” Wu Xuefeng said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t love anything else. And when you do love something else, that doesn’t mean you’ve given up on Glory, either. Trust me.” There was a fountain of words he wanted to say, all struggling to form coherent sentences, and in the end he gave up on them. “Trust me,” he repeated.
Ye Xiu’s hands stopped trembling. He opened his mouth and closed it again, and closed his eyes and opened them again. “Alright,” he whispered.
“Alright.”