Chapter 333: Bronze Medal?

Ye Bo took out his phone and started scrolling.

Just as Ye Bo had guessed, the diary was triggered precisely because the Asian Games roster had been officially announced.

The lock screen was flooded with headline notifications from various apps; the news, suppressed for so long, was like a thunderclap over the coast, sparking incredibly heated discussions.

However, the netizens' comments were leaning in different directions.

【What the hell! Where are my Uzi and JackeyLove?】

【Who picked these people? There's definitely something shady going on! Never mind the obvious nepotism with Pichang and Xun, but what on earth is Jiechu doing here?】

【Heh, WBG must have greased the palms well; all I can say is that the hand of capital is at work!】

【Screw your mother!! Let me ask you this: if it were really rigged, would Meiko be a substitute? Why would Yingkesong be better than Meiko! Are you looking down on my Grand Slam support?】

【Rationally analyzing this lineup, it's actually not bad, right? It feels like a low-spec version of V5 with a swapped bot lane; just protect the mid lane and that's it!】

【What I'm curious about is why there was no "cake-slicing" this time? I thought every high-traffic team would have to shove one person in!】

【No cake-slicing yet? They changed it to 6+1 to force in a little sister; my suggestion is to change it to 6+10, bring 10 substitutes directly, and everyone gets a share~】

【I have a friend who cleans toilets in the Asian Games Village, absolute first-hand inside info: I heard everyone this time was chosen by Ye himself, and the leader is actually his fan! This is the real shady business, damn it!】

Ye Bo couldn't help but laugh when he saw the last comment.

It looks like when he goes to the Asian Games Village in two days, he'll have to be careful when using the restroom... who knows, there might be "ears in the stalls"!

But come to think of it, looking at the earliest version of the roster, it wasn't hard to tell.

At the start, there really was an intention to "slice the cake."

JDG's top, EDG and V5's junglers, V5's mid, TES and WBG's bot lane, BLG's support.

It was a roster that happened to reach the perfect "cake-slicing" ratio!

Due to the grand success of the MSI in the first half of the year, everyone at the time believed the strength gap between the two major regions was massive, feeling that the gold medal was a sure thing, already in the bag.

————If that were truly the case, the person making the final call naturally wouldn't have been too resistant to the traditional custom of "cake-slicing."

It wasn't until V5 won the Summer Finals with the momentum of a king again, and JDG remained the second seed.

That someone suddenly realized, something seemed wrong!

After all, if it were just JDG's jungle-ADC duo, the other four would still be the "defeated opponents" from MSI; the LPL only needed to make a casual move for it to still look like they had the upper hand on "paper strength."

But if you look closer?

At this moment, among the 6 players on the KR representative team, a full 4 of them were former champions and runners-up from the LPL————in terms of the number of champions and runners-up, there was actually one more person than on the CN representative team!

Even for those who couldn't read the situation, just looking at the numbers, one could tell something was very wrong!

The prerequisite for cake-slicing.

Must be the certainty of being able to eat the cake first.

Absolutely no one would be willing to be the sinner who caused the loss of the match!

So the person in charge of the final decision didn't even give other teams time to "maneuver," passing it directly and arranging the publicity on the spot.

It wasn't that no one wanted to play dirty, like creating some news to manufacture an incident, to see if they could squeeze out a spot through "public opinion pressure" and get their own team's people in.

But when they actually tried to implement it, they found it was impossible.

On one hand, time was too tight.

On the other hand, it was because these few people on the current roster really didn't have any major "black marks"!

The most discussed issue was their skill level————but as for public opinion black marks that could affect the roster spots, there really weren't any!

Never mind issues like gambling, playing with Dudu, or bullying.

These few people basically didn't even have girlfriends!!

Ye Bo continued to scroll down and saw the real-time trends from the Korean forums that had been reposted.

Clearly, the announcement of this roster had also caused a massive stir on the Korean web.

【The LPL has no sportsmanship! Why did they almost directly let the entire V5 team play? Don't they know that team honor is something everyone should share together!? Even if they win like this, it's a victory without sportsmanship!!】

【Don't boost their morale! This time we must let them know that without the players who left our KR region, they are nothing!】

【So noisy (#^. #), even if they win, it's 8 LPL > 2 LCK, what's there to brag about?】

【Indeed, an industry heavily supported by our country, with youth training leagues cultivated since the age of ten, and in the end, we still have to rely on a few old-timers who went to outside regions to come back and save face; is this really something to be proud of?】

【I don't care about that, I just want to see a win————this year's Asian Games are on their home turf, and the World Championship is on ours; we can't be captured by others in both places, right!?】

【The top priority now should be to hurry up and find dirt on Ye, and jointly report him to the Olympic Committee to disqualify him.】

【Hey? I have a plan! Just publicly admit that KR is a vassal state of CN, then Ye will be Korean!】

The public opinion on the Korean forums was clearly not optimistic either.

Of course, this didn't exclude the possibility that it was caused by the poor performance of the region in recent years, leading to strong hostility and emotions among the audience, who held the attitude of being pessimistic about everything before it even started, with trolls dominating the environment.

However, to people in outside regions, these remarks were pure entertainment.

No one dislikes watching infighting!

Ye Bo, who was surfing the web, was also quite satisfied.

After all, being favored by everyone before the match, apart from the secret pleasure inside, definitely gave the players a significant innate advantage in terms of mentality and pressure control.

He closed his phone with satisfaction.

Ye Bo closed his eyes and looked at the content of the old man's diary that had just popped up——————

【September 26, 2023, Sunny】

"The Asian Games finally started today! I'm so envious, when will I have the chance to represent the national team?"

"No matter what, Team China, go for it!"

"I just checked Baidu, the next Asian Games seem to be in the S16 season; I should be a pro by then! Hehe."

"What a pity, though a bronze medal is better than no medal."

"The guys on the forum are so mean 23333, saying others are easily taking gold, while we can't even defend silver; they are all mocking us as 'difficult bronze'."

"Looking at it this way, they are actually just my region, I feel they are really so gentle!!"

"Training! Training! The future of the LPL is waiting for me to save it!"

"Let's set a small goal first: next season, I must become the only starter for RNG!"

"Bronze... bronze medal!?"

All along, besides allowing Ye Bo to "chat across space" with the old man as if crossing the barriers of time.

The main function of the old man's diary was to predict some future developments in advance!

It's just that Ye Bo never expected————in the Asian Games of that old man's timeline, Team China would end up only winning a bronze medal!

They didn't even manage to defend the runner-up spot!?

"Bronze medal, doesn't that mean they didn't even make it to the finals."

"Is this for real?"

The diary didn't mention the specific lineups of both sides, and Ye Bo didn't know if the people who went to battle in reality were the same as in the diary.

But this still made Ye Bo suddenly feel a sense of urgency.

Fortunately, he never had any intention of looking down on his opponents, and he had never underestimated any opponent.

Regardless of who the opponent was, their goal was only the final victory!

He ruthlessly canceled his swimming lesson plan and immediately threw himself into a new round of special training.

The trip from Shenzhen to Hangzhou only takes a little over an hour, so the V5 group didn't need to go through the trouble of meeting up early, staying at the base until the assembly day to officially set off.

And by the time the three from V5 landed in Hangzhou with their boarding passes, it was only 10: 0 in the morning.

"Over here!"

Ming Kai, who came to pick them up, waved at the group from afar, and behind him, Jiejie and Meiko, who should have also just landed not long ago, were also greeting them enthusiastically.

Old friends meeting was especially heartwarming; everyone hugged and chatted familiarly, and Ming Kai very naturally took Ye Bo's suitcase.