Compared to winter in other provinces, Shanghai’s winter was still rather special.
When Yang Yu had first gotten off the high-speed train that morning, he’d been wearing a padded coat. But after taking the subway, not only had he taken the coat off, he was sweating even in just a long-sleeved shirt.
He had once heard Mo Han joke that “Shanghai only has winter and summer.”
But you never said winter and summer could show up on the same day!
This temperature that kept jumping back and forth really made Yang Yu feel awful.
After getting off the subway, Yang Yu took out his phone and sent Danking a message: “Where are you?”
A few seconds later, Danking’s reply came in: “Next stop. Don’t rush me.”
Yang Yu felt that Danking was really quite an interesting person.
Although it was somewhat unexpected that Yang Yu hadn’t managed to get a trial with Tianlu, Danking had recommended him to RA instead.
After learning that RA was interested in giving him a trial, Danking had even come over himself, saying he wanted to meet him offline, and that as the host, he would treat him to a meal.
Yang Yu was a little speechless. Bro, what kind of host are you supposed to be? You’re from Shijiazhuang. Cosplaying as a Beijing lord is one thing, but now you’re cosplaying as a Shanghai young master too?
He didn’t quite understand it, but he didn’t really mind Danking’s idea of meeting up offline either.
Yang Yu sent Danking a rough location, then stood at the station exit and waited patiently.
A few minutes later, another WeChat message popped up.
Yang Yu looked around and, with some difficulty, found Danking in the crowd.
He raised his hand and greeted Danking.
Danking walked over to him and, with an extremely familiar attitude, sized him up. “Are young people these days all this tall? What did you guys eat growing up?”
“Haha, good genes from my parents.” Yang Yu smiled. He was 185 centimeters tall, which was above average, and with his good proportions, he looked almost close to 190.
So overall, he was quite a bit taller than Danking.
“But Tiedan, what are you worried about? With how handsome you are, plenty of female streamers must be chasing you,” Yang Yu joked.
“Hey, hey~” Danking waved his hand. “Women will only affect the speed of my aim. I’m not getting into any of that before I retire.”
He was quite pleased by Yang Yu’s compliment. He had always felt that he was pretty good-looking. If he could just be a little taller, he would be the perfect esports star.
What a pity.
“Actually, you didn’t need to come with me to the trial. It’s too much trouble for you.” Yang Yu was still somewhat flattered by Danking’s gesture.
Danking waved his hand. “Let’s not talk about that. Let’s go get something to eat first. I’m about to starve to death. Perfect chance for me to see exactly why the food Shanghai people eat is so expensive.”
He had promised Yang Yu he would get him a trial qualification, only for his own team to reject it. Now, even though RA had agreed, he was still worried something might go wrong.
He had been the one to take this matter on, so he wanted to see it through properly. It just so happened that there were no matches recently, so Danking had simply come out to play for a couple of days.
The two of them walked out onto the street and casually found a breakfast shop nearby to make do.
“Twenty yuan for four shengjian.” Danking gave a thumbs-up. “As expected of the Magic City!”
“It’s actually acceptable, just a bit on the expensive side.”
Twenty yuan could buy seven shengjian in Nanda’s cafeteria.
“Question. Tudou, have you really only been playing CS for that little time? Did you play some other FPS game before?” Danking was extremely curious about this.
He quite acknowledged Yang Yu’s CS ability, and he didn’t think Yang Yu was cheating.
But Yang Yu’s playtime and current level still amazed him.
Yang Yu shook his head. “I played PUBG for a while in high school, I think, but most of my time was spent studying.”
Just then, a foreign couple walked over from the side. The man held up his phone and asked in English, “Excuse me, may I ask what this is?”
On the man’s phone was the result after translating the shop’s menu items, but the other party’s translator wasn’t very good, and the translation was a complete mess.
Seeing this, Danking immediately began searching through the scattered English in his mind, wanting to help out their international friend.
Yang Yu looked at the translated image, pointed at the food on another customer’s table, and answered in English, “That’s what you want to buy. You can think of it as bread stuffed with pork.”
“Thank you, thank you.” After getting the answer, the man happily went to order with his girlfriend.
Danking, however, said in great surprise, “Tudou, your English is pretty good. Is that your major in university?”
“I studied economics in university,” Yang Yu explained. “But back in high school, my family originally planned to send me abroad to study, so I studied IELTS at New Oriental for a year. In the end, just after I got the certificate and was preparing to go, my family went bankrupt, so I could only turn back and continue with the gaokao route…”
“Your life’s been pretty winding too. If you hadn’t gone bankrupt back then, wouldn’t you be an international student now?” Danking sucked in a breath. “Tell me, do people who play CSGO get some kind of buff from being overseas students? Wanjiqi studied abroad and played CSGO, and you almost studied abroad and ended up playing CSGO too.”
Yang Yu shrugged. How would he know about things that hadn’t happened?
“But we still went bankrupt, so I studied economics in university.”
“Then your learning ability is pretty strong. You went back to repeat a year and directly got into Nanda.” Danking was somewhat envious. “Not like me, just some lousy vocational school guy.”
“My learning ability is all right,” Yang Yu said modestly. “But my English level has dropped a lot. It just so happened that I was taking CET-4 and CET-6 a few months ago and reviewed some vocabulary. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to react just now.”
“Being able to communicate with foreigners is a pretty impressive skill.” Danking took a bite of food. “Don’t give it up. It’s really useful.”
“Even if you don’t plan to play domestically in the future, you’ll still have a chance to go abroad.” Danking teased, “Maybe you’ll be the first Chinese player to compete for a foreign team.”
Danking suffered in this aspect. Because his English was poor, every time he went abroad, he would run into all sorts of problems big and small.
There were always places where things became inconvenient.
The simplest example was that even if he wanted to exchange experience with those top foreign pros, not sharing a language made it painful to talk.
He himself had a social butterfly personality. If his English were a bit better, maybe he’d already be calling S1mple and ZywOo his sworn brothers by now.
Yang Yu thought about it and felt that it did indeed seem possible.
At present, there were truly too few domestic CSGO teams that could hold their own on the big stage, and there were only so many positions. Among the three teams, it was always the same group of people being swapped around.
Moreover, the strength here had fallen out of touch with Europe’s first tier. If they wanted CNCS to ignite once again, they would have to go to first-tier teams and obtain the true scriptures.
“Then have any foreign teams come looking for you to play professionally over the years?” Yang Yu indulged in a little gossip.
“Definitely have.” Danking replied, “But I wanted even more to bring CNCS to make a name for itself, so I didn’t agree back then.”
“And now?”
Danking chuckled. “Now I just want to finish these buns!”
After the two of them finished breakfast, they set off toward RA’s current base.
They took a taxi to the entrance of the RA base. From far away, Danking saw 259 waiting there.
Danking waved at 259. “Lao Jiu, I brought you the genius youngster!”
……