Chapter 642: Not bad, though the handwriting is a little ugly

Two days later, the Mercedes-Benz representative came to Shanghai again; this time he didn't have a meal, but went straight to the VG base and signed a contract.

After they left, Lu Wenjun put up a whiteboard, hung it in the most conspicuous spot on the first-floor lobby of the base, and wrote the three big characters "Bonus pool" with an ink pen, then directly wrote the specific amount of the bonus pool below.

Currently, that number is:

【3,500,000】

Xiao Duan would stop to look at the whiteboard every time he passed it, then take a deep breath, his face instantly flushing as if he were high.

"What's with that expression? Gross."

Fu Lan Duo kicked Xiao Duan as she walked by.

"Qiang Ge, you can't smell it?"

Xiao Duan narrowed his eyes, tilted his face up, looking blissed out.

Fu Lan Duo: "???"

Xiao Duan: "Ah, the taste of financial freedom!"

Fu Lan Duo: "Idiot."

While calling him an idiot, Fu Lan Duo couldn't help but glance at it two more times.

That number hung there, visible to everyone, and starting from the day it was put up, it would increase a bit each time a sponsor's payment failed to arrive.

That number, together with Liang Yan's promise at the dinner table that day, truly bound every member of VG together like a rope.

For the next period, the whole VG team was pumped up as if injected with chicken blood.

Besides, after VG's opening match crushed EDG, the LPL's anti-VG alliance collapsed on its own; that very day someone proactively called Lu Wenjun to apologize and expressed interest in scrimmaging with VG. Lu Wenjun felt secretly pleased, didn't put on airs, and just explained the situation—VG's scrimmage slots for this season had already been mostly taken by several LCK teams, leaving little for LPL.

Invisible showing off is the most deadly.

The other side remained silent for a long time.

Of course, VG ultimately operates in the LPL jungle, so it wouldn't do to go to extremes; in the end Lu Wenjun still had Gao Jun handle it carefully, organizing the remaining scrimmage slots and distributing them to a few LPL teams.

At first those teams weren't happy, thinking VG was stingy, but soon they felt grateful for it.

Now when VG plays scrims, it's like playing Worlds—each player is insanely strong.

Playing OMG, Xiyang was solo-killed twice by Fu Lan Duo in six minutes, and he couldn't help typing on the public chat: "{Brother go easy, it's just a scrim}"

Fu Lan Duo replied: "{If you don't take scrims seriously, you'll cry two lines in the official match—keep it up, bro! }"

Playing JDG, Doinb picked Kled and early-game coordinated with the jungler to kill Marquis once, then proudly typed in the public chat:

{^^renzhendabuyaofangshui}

As a result, in the next five minutes Liang Yan caught him three times—he died twice.

Doinb then typed another line:

{TTqiufangguocuole}

Playing RNG, Sima Laozei and Xiao Duan took a Vayne + Karma combo, riding on Y4 and Ming's heads to deal damage, and in ten minutes of lane they destroyed RNG's outer turret.

(Ps: Uzi had been recovering from a wrist injury for several weeks before the S7 Summer Split.)

Even VG's own members were frightened by this vigor.

After finishing the scrim against RNG, Xiao Duan took off his headset, turned to Zhu Xiaolong and said, "Marquis, how come I feel we're insanely strong?"

Zhu Xiaolong lowered his head to flip through his notebook, densely filled with BP data and scrim match records, thought for a moment, then said seriously:

"Maybe it's because everyone now wants to win more."

Xiao Duan stared for a second: "Back then I also really wanted to win!"

"Before, it was just about winning the match."

Zhu Xiaolong closed his notebook, smiled slightly, and said,

"Now it's about winning the championship—two different things."

……

The words Liang Yan spoke at the dinner table weren't just for the Mercedes-Benz representative; they set the tone for the whole team, and now that the tone is set, of course the next step is to train like crazy.

Marquis's hero pool was further expanded.

Fu Lan Duo took from Zhu Xiaolong a new version of the top lane matchup sheet, clicked her tongue after reading it, and said to Liang Yan, "You damn well act like a person."

But the one who suffered the most from the training was the thief-like attitude.

Liang Yan set a rule for the thief-like attitude:

Every day, whether in ranked or scrims, regardless of win or loss, after playing he must write in his notebook the cause of each of his deaths; each "post-mortem reflection" must be at least a hundred characters; if he doesn't understand how he died, he should replay the video, and if still unclear after watching, he must think it through until he figures it out, otherwise he's not allowed to start the next ranked or scrim game.

At first the thief-like attitude was pretty happy, thinking this wasn't too tough.

But after the first day passed, he had died over fifty times.

The notebook was filled with four pages of dense writing, his fingers aching from writing.

By evening, when training finally ended, the thief-like attitude's whole right hand was numb, he lay slumped in the gaming chair with a look of utter hopelessness, simultaneously devastated and shocked that he could die so many times in a day—something he had never noticed before!

"Done writing?"

Liang Yan, who had somehow appeared behind him at some point, startled the thief-like attitude, who hastily stood up, holding out his notebook with both hands: "Done writing!"

Liang Yan flipped through it: "Not bad, though the handwriting is a little ugly."

Thief-like attitude: "……"

Liang Yan flipped back to the first page, picked up a pen and drew circles and marks, after a while put the pen down, laid the notebook open on the table, pointed at the thief-like attitude's screen and said, "Come on, dear, open the replay and review everything I circled."

The thief-like attitude instantly looked bewildered: "Still… still need to review?"

Liang Yan looked at him puzzled: "Why make you write if not to review?"

Thinking that writing it down counted as reviewing, the thief-like attitude's whole mind went blank, dazedly feeling as if he'd been thrown back to middle school, and Liang Yan's face before him gradually overlapped with the memory of a certain already fuzzy teacher……

Having undergone similar hellish special training, Fu Lan Duo watched from the side, felt a tacit understanding with the thief-like attitude, and whispered to Ma Ge's ear: "Hey Ma Ge, don't you think this guy's a bit like a high school homeroom teacher?"

Ma Ge gave him a cold glance:

"I haven't attended high school."

The training was hard, but nobody thought Liang Yan was going too far.

Because he was stricter with himself than with anyone else.

Every day after training ended, while others went to rest, Liang Yan remained in the training room, bringing Zhu Xiaolong to watch LCK match recordings. On days when there were no matches the next day, Gao Jun would get up in the middle of the night to urinate, and he often could see the lights still on in the training room; upon entering, he would find Liang Yan and Zhu Xiaolong sitting together in front of a screen, murmuring softly to each other.

Whenever this happened, Gao Jun would silently make them a cup of coffee or bring over two cans of Red Bull, his feelings extremely complicated.

As an administrative manager with only average professional ability, Gao Jun couldn't help Liang Yan much; the only thing he could do was promptly replenish the Red Bull in Ji Di's fridge and apply for a coffee machine that tasted better but was also damn expensive.