Chapter 604: Hoist the sails, set sail!

A busload of drunk people drove along the road beside the Huangpu River, the interior reeking of alcohol, the air conditioner gently blowing cool air with a faint hiss.

The city had entered the late-night hours, and the second half of this team's journey was about to begin.

After returning to the base, most people went straight to their dorms, but Liang Yan sneaked to the training room, sat down, powered on, and opened the League official website he hadn't checked in about a month.

First to catch the eye was a huge advertisement congratulating VG on winning the Mid-Season Invitational, showing VG members holding the trophy, bright and shining, occupying most of the website's homepage; at the bottom of the poster were two lines of small text announcing that the S6 champion skin would go live early next month, with pre‑orders already open, and the real‑time counter showed that hundreds of thousands of players had already pre‑ordered—this was only the situation in the Chinese server.

To Liang Yan, money was just a boring number that could no longer stir any emotion, but he was still curious about how many people would approve of this champion skin that he himself had chosen and given some design input on.

So he opened the pre‑order page and, as hoped, saw that the pre‑order count for his Mang Seng champion skin far outpaced the others, whereupon he exited satisfied.

After closing the pop‑up advertisement, the webpage's true content finally appeared.

Liang Yan clicked straight into the news center and opened the first version‑update announcement.

Version 7.10, the first patch released after the Mid‑Season Invitational, though it had already been live on the EU‑NA servers for a while and contained only minor adjustments.

For players, the most important change in this patch was probably the official launch of the 15‑minute surrender mechanism in ranked matches.

The only other thing worth mentioning was the tweak to Big Head, which could be called an epic‑level buff, but it was essentially useless because the new passive didn't synergize with the hero's traits at all, leaving the role a muddled mess—an ambiguously positioned hero could never win favor on the stage and would never take off.

Liang Yan merely glanced at the 7.10 announcement for a moment, closed it, then scrolled down, took a light deep breath, and opened the 7.9 version update notice.

The Chinese server's 7.9 patch went live on May 8, right before the MSI main event began.

This, then, was a proper major mid‑season patch.

The changes covered a great deal of content, but Liang Yan only wanted to confirm one thing.

He glanced at the update navigation on the right side of the page, indeed saw the "Xia Gu Xian Feng" entry, clicked it, and the page automatically scrolled to the details.

Liang Yan instantly saw the first line of the update details, highlighted in red and bold.

【Xia Gu Xian Feng now has new visual effects, a new combat style, and can be summoned to destroy enemy turrets.】

All set.

Liang Yan hadn't looked at the detailed changes yet, but that one sentence was enough for him.

Compared to the timeline Liang Yan knew, the evolution of changes on this Summoner's Rift in League of Legends had not diverged dramatically just because he'd brought G2 to a championship; for him that was sufficient, and everything else were mere minutiae.

The turret‑ramming Xia Gu Xian Feng had finally arrived.

This would be an epic‑level change that reshapes the whole game environment; from certain angles, its impact could even exceed that of the little dragon turning into an elemental dragon.

Compared to the overhaul of Xia Gu Xian Feng, the reworks of heroes such as Big Tree, Pig Sis, and Zac, as well as the price cuts on crit‑focused marksman gear, all seemed trivial.

After finishing reading the 7.9 update, Liang Yan finally returned to his dorm to shower and sleep.

Lying in bed, his mind turned to the summer season, wondering how the developers would adjust things for VG, and before he knew it he had drifted off to sleep.

The night passed in silence.

……

Because everyone had drunk a little the night before, the next day the crew got up relatively late; after lunch and a brief rest, their spirits only slightly improved.

Zhu Xiaolong and Liang Yan chatted for a while about the broad directions of the new season, then gathered everyone in the training room to start a meeting.

The meeting lasted over two hours; finally Zhu Xiaolong looked at his notebook and laid out the schedule for the next half year.

"The group draw for the summer regular season will be at the end of this month, with play starting on June 8; since the schedule isn't set until the draw results come out, we don't know when our first match will be."

"Before the summer season begins, there's also the Demacia Cup; the qualifiers have already started, but we don't need to take part—we just wait for the main event to begin, and the first round of the main event is……"

This year's Demacia Cup is being held in Changsha, Hunan, hence also called the Demacia Cup Changsha stop; the entire tournament lasts thirteen days, divided into two stages.

The first stage is the qualifiers, also called the entry tournament; teams come from three tiers—LPL, LSPL, and even semi‑professional squads that fought their way up from the Urban Hero Championship—although these semi‑professional teams have backers, before they earn a spot in the secondary league they can only be called semi‑professional teams.

The qualifiers are online matches—no offline venue—all games are played via networked connection, but on a dedicated server, using a best‑of‑three single‑elimination format.

Currently, the qualifiers have reached their final stage; from the results we can only say that the competition is strictly tiered, with non‑LPL teams finding it hard to win even a single game.

The second stage is the main event, where seeded teams will clash; the opening match is on June 1, lasting four days total, using a best‑of‑five single‑elimination format—lose one match and you're out; to win the trophy you must keep winning.

Even setting aside the team's unspoken desire for a grand slam, VG still had to fight for this championship.

As the country's second‑most‑watched professional tournament, the Demacia Cup's prize pool is not small—last year's total was 2 million, with the champion taking the full 1 million; this year the format was reformed into summer and winter editions, each with a total purse of 2 million, exclusively supplied by Tengjing, which can be called quite generous.

Given the generous purse, every LPL team is expected to field its starting lineup, aiming for the cup while also training for the upcoming summer season.

As for the transfer window that has already begun, compared to last winter's it's only minor skirmishes; as long as the super‑war‑ship VG stays put, other teams' rumblings can't stir up too big a wave. That said, Liang Yan did find a few items of news from this window interesting, and after returning he read through many posts, relishing the gossip.

For example, the genius top‑laner poached by IG from WE, and the genius AD carry from EDG—rumor has it both will appear in this Demacia Cup, and Liang Yan is quite looking forward to it.

However, what Liang Yan didn't expect was that something rather subtle would happen soon.