Chapter 49: Complete Victory and the Exposure of Training Volume!

Pre-match, they make grand declarations; during the match, they spout nonsense; afterward, they fall silent.

The five young men on PE’s roster, all red-faced and utterly incapable of communicating with one another, perfectly embodied that saying.

In mid lane, Van’s eyes darted uneasily. Despite controlling Zed, one of the easiest champions with which to farm, he missed last hit after last hit.

He felt as though he had forgotten how to play the game.

He had been solo-killed by Ahri in lane, then polymorphed by Lulu during team fights and killed instantly. As for split-pushing…

Even the one tactic that might have salvaged his pride ended with him being forced to “surrender” after losing to his own fully tanked Big Brother.

“Conquered by you just like this…”

And it was not only the mid laner. The other four were in no better shape. Top laner Aruka’s Renekton had been treated like an oversized toy by NXG in every team fight. He would activate his ultimate and drag himself from side to side, yet could not even brush against the opposing Caitlyn’s clothes.

The supposedly strongest duo in the bottom lane was in an even worse state. Whenever Nami and Xika were not accompanied by a teammate, encountering Ahri and Jarvan meant certain death.

Xika, who was responsible for warding, would tremble at the slightest hiss of Deathfire Grasp in his headset. Being caught in ambushes had practically given him a stress disorder.

Of course, the bottom lane duo were not the most miserable of them all.

Ziv, the jungler, had found that after the ten-minute mark, the monsters in his jungle seemed to have stopped respawning altogether. At that moment, he desperately wanted to go outside the team’s base and check whether the wheels were still on the bicycle he had just bought—or perhaps sleep with the lights on.

He was terrified that a golden-armored Demacian Jarvan might burst out from beneath his blankets.

At twenty-one minutes and ten seconds, PE were ambushed by NXG in the Baron pit and wiped out.

With both Jarvan and Caitlyn still alive, Jiang Ming judged that they had more than enough time. The purple side did not bother taking Baron Nashor and instead pushed straight down mid, destroying PE’s base in a single wave.

As the dazzling explosion of the Nexus unfolded, the five members of PE let out a heavy sigh of relief and collapsed into their gaming chairs. They had nearly been beaten into total despair.

…

Inside Penguin’s trial-broadcast room for the LPL, the moment NXG defeated PE and the Nexus exploded, the stream switched to another match scheduled for that day.

Even so, nothing could extinguish the shock felt by League players over the game that had just ended.

“Holy crap, are we sure NXG wasn’t playing against bots?”

“Gulp… A twenty-one-to-two kill ratio. Even if I smurfed from Diamond into Gold, I’m not sure I could put on a performance like that.”

“Penguin, are you sure you didn’t switch to the wrong stream? Someone tell me—we were watching JM queue with NXG in a normal ranked game, weren’t we? This wasn’t a professional qualifier!”

“Brother, don’t lie to yourself. I checked the earlier match records. PE aren’t weak at all. They’re actually one of the top three teams in the qualifiers.”

“What the hell?”

“You’re not joking, are you? What was that match, then? PE got utterly demolished from start to finish. ‘They played poorly’ doesn’t even begin to explain it.”

“Is it possible that JM and his NXG team are simply too strong?”

“Having watched the whole thing, I have to say the guy above is right. There really is a gap between the two sides—not in individual ability, but in their understanding of team play. They aren’t even operating on the same level.”

“I’m a Diamond II player in a lower-ranked region. All five members of PE are Challenger players. I was lucky enough to be matched against them once and got brutally beaten. I never expected that, on the professional stage, these guys would get brutalized too.”

“NXG is absurdly strong. Do you people even realize that?”

“So they teach us in ranked, and once JM enters the professional scene, he still has to teach professional players how to play?”

The discussion in the stream grew more and more heated, gradually spreading from the broadcast room to Weibo and the major online forums.

Even Penguin itself had never expected its trial broadcast to coincide with NXG deciding to test their true strength—and giving the match everything they had.

Twenty-one to two!

Set against the overwhelmingly striking score of a professional qualifier, and combined with the deep impression Jiang Ming had left on the national server’s players by reaching the number-one ranking, the words “the number one player on the national server” and “an invincibly powerful professional team” came together and instantly ignited Penguin’s long-prepared promotional campaign for the professional league.

The event had not even officially begun. NXG had only just secured a place in the LPL.

Yet the League community exploded.

# Undefeated in the professional qualifiers—NXG walks through the opposition as if no one were there!

# They play against Challengers like they are bots. Just how strong is JM’s understanding of the game?

# NXG looks like a well-trained special-forces unit with iron discipline.

# A ragtag operation—no, NXG may actually be the LPL’s first properly organized army.

# Breaking: NXG’s terrifying training schedule. After seeing this, do you still want to play games?

# NXG players’ daily schedule and training plan…

Amid the match reports, a strange timetable also began circulating.

It was probably an information board installed in the training room ahead of renovations or the purchase of club equipment. Someone passing by had photographed it. Seeing the online discussion surrounding NXG’s performance in the qualifiers, the photographer decided to capitalize on the attention and uploaded the image to Weibo.

That seemingly insignificant post set the already surging discussion about NXG ablaze.

“???”

“There’s no way this training schedule is real!”

“Damn, are they serious about training until three or four in the morning every day?”

“Let me calculate this. Including the so-called tactical study sessions, each player must be practicing roughly twelve or thirteen hours a day.”

“!!!”

“This is not right. NXG, something is seriously wrong with you. JM, is this some kind of internet-addiction rehabilitation camp? Who the hell can endure thirteen hours of training every day?”

“A daily schedule precise to the minute? You’re telling me this is the kind of timetable a group of gamers follows?”

“Internet-addicted youths… At this moment, I feel like I’m the real addict. According to NXG’s schedule, what’s the difference between playing games and having a job?”

“Wake up. Your job doesn’t even last that long!”

“If NXG really trains its players according to the schedule exposed online, then the unquestioning, disciplined gameplay shown in the video suddenly becomes much easier to understand.”

“Holy crap, is this what a top student from Jinling University can do? He reaches number one on the national server through gaming, earns millions a year running an online shop, becomes one of the platform’s flagship streamers—and now you’re telling me that even when he forms a professional team, he runs it more systematically than everyone else?”

“I graduated from Jinling University too. I’m sorry for embarrassing the school.”

It exploded.

After NXG’s terrifying training load was revealed online, the spectacular professional beatdown match on the TGA platform saw its view count surge dramatically.

No one had expected Jiang Ming’s NXG to become the first major center of attention in the LPL almost overnight.

Not WE, the winners of IPL5. Not the equally famous twin-star team IG. Instead, it was a brand-new roster founded only recently by a streamer known for selling pancakes.

It was almost as if fate itself had arranged everything perfectly. Without Penguin’s sudden decision to run a trial broadcast, or Jiang Ming’s choice to take the field and use PE to test exactly what level NXG could reach when playing at full strength, even if NXG’s training schedule had later been exposed, it would have meant little.

Without results to support it—or a match as overwhelmingly one-sided as the one that had just taken place—people would have sighed in admiration at most, then soon forgotten all about it.