Chapter 402: Battle of the Riches

The webpage for the match had already been created a week before the two parties had agreed to the match.

On the page, there was a huge slogan—”Shanghai VS Beijing. The battle between professional LOL players! Which city is the best?”

On the left side, there was the Noxus Cafe’s Team Beijing and its 5 members’ brief biography. They had put up every piece of information that they could, including the members’ pictures and Noxus Cafe’s marketing video.

On the right was Demacia Cafe’s Team Skycrown. Similarly, there was a brief biography of all the 5 members. They only had the pictures of the members and didn’t have any marketing video, but nonetheless, they had included Team Skycrown’s interview and a few pictures to introduce the club.

The very middle of the webpage was the live stream column with two bars on each side to show support rate, visualized in flower symbols.

This was a QT live streaming page and as such, anyone who was a QQ member could head in and vote with their “flowers”. Every QQ member by default had been given a free flower to vote with, so if they wanted to cast even more votes, they would need to buy more flowers with their Q Coins.

Before the match even started, there were already at least tens of thousands of flowers on each team—Shanghai had about 56% flowers while Beijing had 43%. It was quite apparent that no matter how much Team Beijing tried, Team Skycrown—a team that had participated in the LPL before was much more popular.

There were 3 days more before the match started and yet, the “flowers” kept coming in. Despite that, the support rate still somehow remained the same, therefore, the Shanghai faction had started to mock the other side on the internet to show their “superiority”.

“Heh, you’re the one who picked a fight with us and yet, you Beijing buffoons don’t even support your own team. What a joke. If you don’t have any fans in Beijing then let us know. We could throw some flowers to you from our side to balance out the support rate if you want. Otherwise, people would be laughing at you, o’ my dear Capital City.”

After this thread was started, a flame war broke out. Thousands and thousands of replies and comments were added on the thread in just half a day. Beijing flamed the thread with points about qualifications, history, and politics, while Shanghai bickered with their economic growth, international standings, and living standards.

Nonetheless, this had undoubtedly provoked the Beijing side quite a bit. On the “Filthy Rich” ranking board, a fairly rich user had thrown in 10,000 flowers to support Beijing, shocking everyone from Shanghai as well as the Demacia Cafe supporters.

And so, the original 43% had now shot up to 56%!

“F*ck! Just who is this guy? 10,000 flowers in one go, what a filthy rich bastard! He’s spending money like water!” Da Luo looked at the “flower” bar in shock.

The “Filthy Rich” ranking board had been prepared for the hardcore fans. When they voted with a tremendous amount of flowers, their name would show up in the top ten, thus, there were quite a number of fans who had forked up a lot of cash to vote as they were eager for their name to show up on the ranking board.

Yet, this guy now stood on top with his 10,000 flowers as he smirked down at the lowlives below from up above!

“This guy must be from the Noxus Cafe. Remember. Their members are mostly rich people. Every time they walk in to play LOL, they would be charged by head counts. One player would need to pay yuan 1,000 whereas a Support pays yuan 200. It’s quite easy for an internet café to acquire a few dozens of thousands yuan in just one night, and if that person spends all that money on booking a private room in their neighbourhood’s internet café, that’s like a few thousand yuan income in one go.” Duo Duo deduced.

Da Luo and Wu Sen could hardly believe what they had just heard.

The hell!? Dozens of thousands yuan in just one night!?

Rich people… it was so difficult to understand them. Perhaps to them, money was indeed nothing but a number for them to spend in entertainment!

***

And it was just like what Xiao Duo Duo had said.

If it was the usual match, the number of “flowers” was equal to the number of supports on each side.

However, the organizers were quite smart in creating the ranking board system and they announced that the support rate would be shown on the web page throughout the match. This, in turn, made the “Filthy Rich” ranking board super popular.

QQ users usually had a few QQ Coins accumulated in their account, and so, if they spent some in the voting system, their favourite team would then have an additional supporter. Therefore, this allowed for the richer ones to vote more and climb up to the top ten!

There were a lot of rich kids in the Noxus Cafe. Right now, Team Beijing had about 30,000 flowers—10,000 from the normal supporters, 10,000 from that super rich kid, and the rest were from the members of Noxus.

It was almost the same with Demacia Cafe. About 10,000—20,000 flowers had been voted by the usual supporters while the rest were from the rich kids. Heck, even Feng Da had voted over 1,000 flowers in one go!

“Show-off! You think we Demacians can’t do better!?” Feng Da pointed his finger at the screen as he screamed at the top of his lungs.

Meanwhile, a crowd was kicking up a storm in the Beijing comment section to sing praises to the kid who had voted 10,000 flowers.

“Geez, it’s getting more and more out of control! This is much crazier than the LPL!” Lin Dong’s jaw was rolling on the ground as he looked at the comments pouring in like a tsunami.

Luocheng himself hadn’t thought that this match would become so important. If they lost this match, it would not only be a disgrace, but also a hit to their morale in their next LPL.

On Friday, another rich kid appeared on Noxus’ side yet again, throwing in another 10,000 flowers and resulting in Beijing’s “flowers” skyrocketing to 60,000 while Shanghai’s side had only 40,000.

Seeing that their support rate was now breaching 60%, everyone at the Noxus Cafe was celebrating as more and more visitors visited their clubs. At the same time, there was an interview going on in Noxus Cafe’s headquarters.

The interview’s main focus was on “Number One”.

Number One was young—perhaps even younger than 20. In other words, he was in the golden age as a professional player. With young age, he would have faster reaction and agile controls, and if he possessed a sturdy mind that could withstand pressure and had years of experience under his belt, he would be a great threat to the other senior players.

“I respect Fighting Hawk. He is essentially the king of E-sports after all. Yet, as you all know, E-sports isn’t like the medical, Fengshui field, that values seniority. As the years go by, new E-sports players will eventually replace the older ones, and in doing so, we’ll have progress. Thus, to answer your question earlier about whether I’d feel pressured when facing Fighting Hawk… my answer is yes. Of course I’ll feel very pressured. However, it’s only a matter of time before I beat him.” Number One answered the beautiful GTV interviewer with a smile.

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Number One’s smile was charming. There was a dimple in his smile—a dimple that was telling the world that he was young and confident!

“Sh*t! Boss, this brat just said that you’re old!” Da Luo was pissed.

It was true though, Luocheng was indeed much older than this kid. He was a senior amongst seniors. However, he had only reached 20 years of age this year, thus, he still had the skills and reactions that were younger than a 24-year-old’s!

“So, the person that you want to beat the most is Hades?” the GTV interviewer asked.

“Not just Hades. The entire Team Daemons.”

“Oh, the strongest team in the country. They are unbeatable so far. Your determination and courage to challenge them is remarkable.”

Da Luo’s nerves snapped after hearing this.

“This little brat! Team Daemons are our rivals! Not his! D*mn it! I’m so going to beat the crap out of this brat! If I can’t beat him, I’ll forfeit my name!”

“This kid… he’s so shameless.” Lin Dong muttered coldly.

Luocheng wasn’t affected by these kinds of taunts. There were plenty of people wanting to challenge him, in fact, these challengers could line up and enclose the land of Valoran by the layers.

The only thing that he was unhappy about was this:

Why the h*ll did the likes of you get the chance to participate in the Asian Indoor Games?

***

Finally, the day of the match had arrived!

It didn’t matter how fiery it was before the match. The real deal was today!

The true battle! To the death!

At just 7pm, there were already hundreds of thousands of viewers clogging up the webpage’s traffic. This webpage supported mobile viewing as well, increasing the number of viewers seeing as everyone in China owned a cell phone.

300,000 viewers in the first hour!

This number almost rivalled that of the LPL viewership!

Well, it was also quite difficult to differentiate between the real LOL fans that wanted to watch the match and the normies who just wanted to see what was going on.

It was understandable too. These two teams were the top tier LOL teams in the country, it was normal for anyone to be curious.

“O’ my master, I’m here” Xu Ben called out with a smile.

It was the weekend so he had taken a ride to Demacia Cafe all the way from Hangzhou to support Team Skycrown.

“Xu Ben, you’re here. Come. Toss some cash into this, will ya? The flower ratio is so pitiful over here!” K threw a glance at Xu Ben and said.

K came from a family that held wealth and power. However, he didn’t receive a lot of spending money from his family and it was only enough to handle his monthly expenses. This month, he had decided to spend less on himself and had thrown in 2000 flowers earlier. Even though he was now on the “Filthy Rich” ranking board, it wasn’t enough for the Shanghai supporters to catch up to Beijing’s 30,000 flowers gap.

There were 300,000 viewers at the time, and each account had at least 1 flower. The ratio of the flowers was about 170,000 to 130,000. Rich kids from Beijing had spent about 40,000 to 50,000 flowers while the ones from Shanghai only could afford 20,000.

This had resulted in the Beijing rich kids belittling the Shanghai ones.

“Didn’t you say Shanghai has loads of crazy rich people? The hell is wrong with the number of flowers on your side there, huh?”

“D*mn it, this is so pitiful. I’ll drop all of my spending money this month into it right away!” Xu Ben quickly logged on to his QQ account and started topping up.

Feng Da looked at Xu Ben and shook his head, “What can a mere student do? If you’re spending just 1,000 or 2,000 flowers, then forget… what the f*ck!?”

Feng Da, Mao, and the others couldn’t believe their eyes! Shanghai’s flowers suddenly soared up from 130,000 to 160,000!

That was 30,000 flowers in one go!

A storm was kicked up in the comment section!

This guy was like a fighter jet amongst the other filthy rich kids!

Feng Da and Mao’s jaws dropped all the way to their feet.

The hell!? You were just a university student and you had at least yuan 30,000 as spending money for a month!? Holy mother of God! Did your parents know that you were such a hardcore spender!?

Da Luo, Lin Dong, Luocheng, Wu Sen and Zhou Yan were speechless after seeing what Xu Ben had done.

They knew Xu Ben was rich, but they hadn’t known he was THAT rich!

After seeing K tapping on Xu Ben’s shoulder in amazement, Team Skycrown had to shove the dark desire of kidnapping Xu Ben for ransom money down their throats really, really hard!