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It all started innocently enough, as Fang Rui was wont to tell anyone who would listen, and also those who wouldn’t. If saying the word “innocent” as an adjective describing the actions of Fang Rui, the widely acknowledged, and self-aggrandizing Master of Playing Dirty caused Chen Guo to pucker her face up like she’d accidentally bitten into a lemon of rather extreme acidity and sourness, that was only to be expected. Yet, loathe though anybody, save the seniors of Happy, was to label Fang Rui with this epithet, it was quite unquestionably a correct descriptor for how things had come about.
If one were to ask Fang Rui what he had been doing, he would’ve said, bristling with righteousness and relish, that he had been doing in-depth technical research on Qi Master gameplay and technique. What possible research could’ve lead him down the path into the darkest recesses of the worst parts of the Glory forums, one could only guess. As Su Mucheng would often sagely tell the younger folk, accompanied with the solemn nodding of Glory Pro Alliance veteran, Qiao Yifan, that way lay madness. Considering that this was Fang Rui, perhaps it was the perfect kind of madness that fit him like an ill-fitting glove.
After Happy’s championship win, and the declaration of Fang Rui’s return to godhood during the season ten finals, the trickle of Qi Master players mimicking his dirty Qi Master style had turned into a veritable flood, with many players new and old wanting to try their hand at this unique new playstyle. This, of course, was not without controversy, with the old school traditionalists decrying the new Qi Master style as foul and denigrating to a class of purity and refinement. The counter to that, was naturally a discussion of innovation and excitement. If a player had the skill to play dirty, what did it matter what class he was playing?
In general, the pro players themselves didn’t care one whit about this fight amongst the normal players. After all, what did they care whether or not a Qi Master was supposed to represent purity and decency or whatever. Would he be a strong opponent? How would they handle this fighting style when faced with it? That was all that mattered to them. However, Fang Rui liked to keep up with the controversy, randomly spouting out obscure slogans from the supporters of the dirty Qi Master style in the middle of practice. Naturally, this meant that he spent his evenings trolling the Qi Master Glory forums, reading up on player commentary of his matches, and chortling over their utterly inadequate analyses of his decision-making.
(“He said I purposely ducked there to avoid the sharpshooter bullets. Those were just normal attacks, like I cared about that! Look! By ducking, I obstructed Chu Yunxiu’s line of sight so she couldn’t cast her spells at me, and at the same time, was able to foil Li Hua’s ambush on Yifan!”
“Yes, yes, that was a brilliant play…”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“I would never…”)
Nonetheless, Fang Rui’s nightly ritual of trolling the forums was par for the course, and Su Mucheng did not mind having her nightly dramas punctuated with occasional hoots of laughter or yells of outrage. It was merely another element to the cacophony of Happy’s comfortably chaotic evenings.
On one such evening, Fang Rui’s shouts of outraged indignation eventually turned into hoots of laughter, and then that hoot of laughter devolved into sustained cackles. The fact that he had continued doing this for over an hour was cause for the more curious of the team to head over and see what was up. Before long, almost everybody was clustered around Fang Rui and his laptop, avidly watching what he was watching, and cracking up with laughter at the high points.
After a while, the noise they were making was so loud that Su Mucheng finally gave up any hope of catching up on her drama for the night. Instead, she walked over to see what the cause of all the commotion was.
It was a video of a player playing a Qi Master in the dirty Qi Master style, or more accurately, failing at playing a Qi Master in the dirty Qi Master style. It wasn’t that the player was bad at it, he wasn’t the first or the last of such players. It was the degree of utter fail that was interspersed with moments of sheer comedic brilliance. And on top of that, this guy had spammed the forums with a veritable flood of such videos, each one captioned with eye-catching phrases like “HIDDEN QI BULLET FIGURED OUT!!!” and “DIVINE MASTERY QI FLOWING CLOUD”.
“Did you see that?” cried Fang Rui, as the Qi Master on screen somehow rolled off a ledge onto his opponent, his Qi Bullet flying wide off the mark. He was laughing so hard, he was crying.
“How did he even do that?” Qiao Yifan was puzzled. “What was he trying to do?”
The Qi Master, unsurprisingly, was quickly dispatched by his opponent in short order, but not before he purposefully (accidentally?) took off a good chunk of his opponent’s health with a shockingly well-timed Flash Burst. They moved on to the next video.
The video opened to the Qi Master skulking around a bunch of ancient ruins, if one could call the somewhat shaky drunken movements he was doing skulking. He then attempted to jump up onto a broken ledge halfway up the side of a building to ambush his opponent. Instead of jumping onto the ledge and crouching low, he rolled off it almost immediately, barely missing his opponent, who had been rounding the corner of the building. Naturally, his ambush failed, and his fall shaved off some of his health while also giving the Brawler sufficient time to begin attacking him. Thus began the most bizarre Glory match that Su Mucheng had watched in all her professional career.
It wasn’t that the Qi Master was bad per se, but he wasn’t exactly good either. It was, in fact, rather difficult to pinpoint what this Qi Master player was. His movements were oddly stiff and mistimed, and he definitely needed to rethink his skill choices. That was not to say that he didn’t have occasional moments of brilliance, because he did, and when they happened, they were instances of utter genius. For instance, the Sky Piercing Strike into Flash Burst was expertly placed, but that was followed almost immediately by the activation of the movement skill Qi Flowing Cloud that had him almost drunkenly cartwheeling face-first into a wall. It was quite evident to all watching that the Qi Master’s movement control wasn’t just lacking, but was so dismal that there weren't enough superlatives in the world to describe just how terrible it was.
“What are you guys watching?” Ye Xiu had just returned from his usual post-dinner planning sessions. As Team Happy’s coach, he often liked to spend an hour or two each night planning out the next day’s activities.
“Look at this guy trying to emulate the Master!” crowed Fang Rui smugly. “Nobody is good enough to beat the Master of Playing Dirty, the Golden Right Hand, and the Golden Left Hand.”
Ye Xiu walked over behind Fang Rui, and the others moved aside to give him space. He squeezed in next to Su Mucheng and casually draped an arm around her as the Qi Master rolled face first into a ditch for no apparent reason. Tang Rou was doubled over in silent laughter, and Mo Fan even let out a single-syllable chuckle.
It was a trainwreck of the highest order, a mix of physical comedy and technical ineptitude. Things might have ended there, everybody appreciating the hilarity in the inept brilliance of a player of questionable skill, if Ye Xiu had not said casually at the end of the video, “Why is Wu Xuefeng trying to copy your style?”
“WHAT?!?!” cried Fang Rui, just barely catching his laptop from flying off his lap. He had spun around so quickly to face Ye Xiu. “How are you so sure?!”
Who was Wu Xuefeng? How could somebody like Fang Rui, who had been a Qi Master trainee in Blue Rain’s training camp, not know who Wu Xuefeng was? In Fang Rui’s utterly biased opinion, Wu Xuefeng was the pinnacle of what it meant to be a true Qi Master. Experience. Awareness. Judgement. Technique. Precision. And above all, the commitment to being a team player. All this encapsulated who Wu Xuefeng was to Fang Rui. Ye Xiu might’ve outshone all the other members of the original Excellent Era, but Fang Rui would never forget the first player he had idolized when he chose to play Glory.
“Didn’t you see the Qi Master’s character name? Flowing Qi is Wu Xuefeng’s alt. He’s had it for years.”
Fang Rui paused for a second to digest it all, then, shamelessly, “Hey, does he want tips on how to play in the dirty style?”
When Wu Xuefeng and Fang Rui started dating seriously a few months later, Fang Rui would swear up and down to all and sundry that he would never have found his One True Love without Ye Xiu’s matchmaking prowess. Wu Xuefeng, for his part, would insist that his posting his dirty Qi Master videos on the Glory forums was clearly a subconscious cry for help. While it was true that everything had started innocently enough, somehow ending up with two dirty Qi Masters might perhaps not be what anybody had intended in the first place. Except, perhaps, the two Qi Masters in question.