After Li Fan finished eating, he returned to that comfortable basement… and began moving the computer equipment.
To be honest, if one didn’t truly like it, who would willingly stay in this dark, slightly damp basement?
While moving the monitor, Li Fan took one last look at the basement.
It felt like coming back here to stream would become very difficult.
And if he didn’t perform well in scrims, there really was a high chance he’d be swept out the door.
Then trying to ride topics and traffic wouldn’t be so simple anymore. He still had to put in a good showing during scrims…
As he thought this, he moved everything into the training room.
It had to be said, a substitute player was still a substitute player.
Even when Li Fan greeted everyone, they merely gave a simple nod, then ignored him.
But that was just how the League of Legends Pro League was.
When people weren’t familiar with you yet, strength came first. Once they were close, once they were veterans, they started playing the whole brotherhood game.
Some brotherhood leagues were genuinely very, very entertaining to watch, but others turned into alliances against palace intrigue, and a certain position would become a consumable.
It was perfectly normal to change two junglers before a season was even over. There might even be a third jungler already on the way.
So Li Fan didn’t care. He sat down in a corner… and immediately opened Infinite Borders.
After all, this was the first day of land-clearing. There could not be even the slightest bit of rest.
Koro had also just finished a ranked game.
Then his gaze shifted toward Li Fan, who was also sitting in a corner…
He couldn’t help but look at the monitor, and saw him fully immersed in a game Koro had never seen before, playing with great relish.
The corner of Koro’s mouth twitched.
His gaze toward Li Fan was extremely complicated, because he somewhat couldn’t understand it. Li Fan had never even been a starter before, and the moment he came to the club, he had been pressed directly onto the bench.
He had never played a single match. So why was he so cheerful every day?
Koro found it very hard to understand.
Back when he had been pressed onto the bench, he had truly felt as though the sky had collapsed.
Even now, he was still thinking about taking back the starting spot.
Especially since he had played at last year’s World Championship, and his performance had been fairly good.
Overall, his form was still acceptable.
But the club… They said they would give him a chance, let him rotate with Mouse.
Yet after that match against GT, when Gimgoon had created a lane gap against him and they lost to GT, he was pressed straight onto the bench. Even now, he had not gotten a single chance to play.
He understood very clearly why the club was doing this.
But to be fair, back then, he had never imagined that the price of that one act of willfulness would be so great.
If he could do it over again, he absolutely would not have acted that way.
Young and arrogant—truly a newborn calf unafraid of tigers.
After all, back then in the top lane, with an incredibly perfect performance, he had successfully stood against MaRin and helped the team defeat SKT at the first Mid-Season Invitational.
They had successfully won the League of Legends Pro League’s first world championship organized by Riot Games.
Seeing heaps of praise from fans online, especially the female fans, had made him float.
He had actually inflated to the point where he wanted to threaten the club into giving him a raise, or else he wouldn’t play matches.
To be honest, he truly hadn’t put himself in the right position.
Asking for a raise was indeed a reasonable request.
But the method was wrong.
Threatening them definitely wouldn’t work, and with the contract period not yet over, the possibility of getting a raise was not high to begin with.
That led EDG to press him directly onto the bench.
They truly did not give him even the slightest chance.
It wasn’t until the World Championship, because something happened in A Guang’s family, that he obtained a chance to play.
That performance—the honeymoon period lasted only one match.
Under such circumstances, regretting it now was already too late.
After all, no club would like a player who achieved results and then threatened them for a raise.
Because the contract was signed clearly in black and white.
They could directly freeze you out during your peak, and even if you wanted to reason with someone, you wouldn’t find anywhere to do it.
Now that his form had clearly declined, EDG currently had no intention of completely crushing him.
In truth, Koro had only two choices. Continue muddling along as a substitute in EDG, or transfer out and see if there were any opportunities.
But the feeling it gave him… was that if he transferred out, it would be equivalent to being swept out the door.
So Koro was holding onto this breath of resentment.
Even though his rank climbing had already gotten stuck, stuck at three hundred points, he was still training desperately.
It just felt like he was one step short. As long as he completed this final breakthrough, he could find the form he’d had two years ago.
If his mentality could be like Li Fan’s, he felt he would be much happier.
Li Fan opened the influence rankings. At this moment, he had directly climbed into the top three, only four hundred influence behind the two in front.
“Just tell me, am I strong or not? I’m taking first place in the twenty-four-hour influence rankings… I started two hours late, but with operation and technique, I can still catch up.”
There was no helping it. The current land-clearing techniques were indeed somewhat crude.
After all, only in the following years would people break through to 6,400 influence, and that was the true limit.
The current limit was 5,400…
That was how land-clearing techniques were. They would slowly, slowly be perfected.
[I watched for a while. The streamer really is impressive. Feels like he’s much stronger than the other Infinite Borders streamers. Streamer, does a Health Potion get you to build a lineup?]
“Build a lineup? I really can. I just don’t know which season you guys are in. No problem on my end.”
[Bro, don’t get tricked by the streamer. What does this guy know about building lineups? This is his first time playing Infinite Borders, and he just got dogshit lucky drawing Ma Chao, that’s why his land-clearing went so smoothly.]
“No, Daodao’s Dad, for such a powerful player like me, you actually think my land-clearing is purely based on luck? Clearly you haven’t grasped the essence of Infinite Borders. Land-clearing is three parts luck, seven parts technique!”
“As for the rest, things like understanding, I’m top-tier…”
[Daodao’s Dad, how many coppers did you even tip before barking here?]
[Exactly, how many coppers did you tip?]
“You can’t put it that way. Here in my stream, even if you haven’t sent gifts, you can still speak freely.”
And at that moment, Hongyun Dangtou 666 directly sent Li Fan twenty Health Potions.
“Thank you, boss, for the Health Potions. Boss, please scan the code so I can log in.”
As he spoke, he opened another client at the same time.
At this stage, this client could be dual-opened freely as long as the file was modified. It was also the most comfortable period.
After scanning in, he took a look.
This was a big spender. Conservatively, he had recharged three hundred thousand.
Almost everything was maxed.
The strongest team in 2017 was Cleaver. There was no question about that. But there was another team, Rogue… It was developed in 2018 and truly became popular in 2019.
However, that year also produced the Grandpa Huangfu Song team.
It directly overshadowed the Rogue team. There was no helping it. Back then, Grandpa was invincible. Whoever ran into them became grandsons.
Under those circumstances, the Infinite Borders planners finally changed counterattack, and only then did the Grandpa team fall from the altar. But overall, it was still a team that belonged between T2 and T1.
“Boss Hongyun, I have an invincible team here. It crushes Big Cleaver even harder. It’s no exaggeration to say it directly creates an entire system and dominates an era. Do you want to play it?”
[You’re bullshitting!]
[Like hell I’ll believe you. Streamer, aren’t you afraid of blowing your hype all the way through the sky?]
[Try it. It’s the end of the season anyway.]
Li Fan saw that the big spender had spoken.
He directly opened a spreadsheet…
At this time, building lineups still wasn’t as convenient as it would be later. He had to write it himself and then have the other person take a screenshot.
Ghost Lü, Zhang Ji, Sun Quan.
Seeing this, the Infinite Borders players in the stream all began spamming question marks.
Sun Quan…
Although he was called one of the Three Emperors.
Compared with the other two, he truly had no presence, nor did he have a dedicated team built around him.
One had Big Cleaver, one had Shu Infantry.
What did Sun Quan have to compare with them?
This team could create an era?
What absolute bullshit!