A fit young man walked out of the General Administration of Sports’ Management Center, dark clouds forming above his head as he looked at the ground.

 Turning the corner, he took his phone out of his pocket, but his hands and face were quaking with rage!

 “Apology… the higher ups want me to make an apology! Is there something wrong with them!? I’m a national athlete but they want me to apologize to some dumb gamer!?” Cao He’s blood was boiling. He hadn’t expected the news to reach their higher ups, and he certainly hadn’t expected them to ask him to make an apology to the media!

 How could he not be angry!? He was an athlete and had devoted so much of himself to win trophies and glory for his country, but because he had said that e-sports wasn’t a sport, he now had to go and say sorry to the e-sports community!

 Cao He was going crazy. If his coach hadn’t calmed him down and advised him to just follow orders, he had planned to quit the Asian Indoor Games entirely! He didn’t care who took his spot, just don’t go crying to him when you brought home one medal less!

 Unfortunately, he didn’t have a choice, and so, he begrudgingly logged onto his Weibo and typed out a lengthy apology, tagging some notable e-sports representatives like Yu Luocheng, Xie Lianda, Asmodai, and various others on his post as well.

 When Cao He found out that Luocheng and Xie Lianda were the two that had come to the Sports Administration in the first place, this apology made Cao He ascend to a whole new level of outrage.

 Those two dipsh*ts didn’t deserve his apology!

 Cao He managed to finish his apology, gritting and grinding his teeth while doing it, but he wasn’t sorry at all.

 In fact, this whole ordeal just deepened his hatred.

 “Oh come on, why are you being so stubborn about this? E-sports has a lot of people supporting it, so why go through all this trouble? I’m sure you know you have a title and reputation to maintain, you shouldn’t stoop down so low. You can participate in the Asian Games, championship tournaments, and the Olympics… Can e-sports do that? Once you get a trophy from the Asian Games or the Olympics, the people and the media will be supporting you, e-sports is not going to take that away from you,” Cao He’s coach, Lu Weiheng said.

 Weiheng was an experienced coach for the national team, and right from the start, he had never thought e-sports was an official sport.

 And exactly because he had this attitude toward e-sports, he was too lazy to even give it a second thought let alone belittle it.

 To restate facts, diving champions got to go on TV, they got sponsorships and funding as well as prize money from their country, they were basically local heroes! It didn’t matter how many e-sports players were out there, they were just playing silly games that harmed young children and teenagers, there was no need for them to get on their level.

 As for the Asian Indoor Games, it wasn’t any competition of particular note. The organizers were from Korea, so they didn’t have a say in whether or not the Koreans wanted to include e-sports but who cared? If you had the guts, come and compete against us in diving, swimming, ping-pong, or badminton, China would beat them with one hand tied behind its back!

 After hearing what his coach had to say, Cao He finally calmed down.

 It was true. A national athlete like him didn’t need to argue with some kids who earned money by playing video games. The apology meant nothing, it was just a cork to shut those stupid netizens up. Once he got the title of Olympic Champion, then they would see that e-sports had no right to even speak up to true professionals like him!

 ***

 On Weibo, Cao He couldn’t handle the continuous outrage from the netizens, finally releasing a formal apology and wishing e-sports a better and brighter future.

 Everyone and their moms knew that the kid only did so because of the pressure from higher ups and the e-sports community. The apology obviously wasn’t genuine and no one really cared.

 Noise about Cao He and his post slowly started to die down after his official ‘apology’, but this situation made something very clear. A vast majority of netizens still had some sort of sense of justice toward e-sports. They may think that playing video games all day long was bad, but people like Cao He, who berated professional e-sports, couldn’t just be allowed to continue spreading such a message.

 So what if this generation liked playing video games?

 So what if this generation didn’t follow idols or singers and instead chose to follow e-sports stars?

 Looking down on e-sports meant looking down on all the 80’s and 90’s kids who loved video games!

 ***

 After Cao He’s mini scandal, Luocheng’s follower count on Weibo had seen a massive increase.

 He didn’t try to manage it or anything, it’s just that most people who were into e-sports also knew of him and had decided to give a follow. They had seen Luocheng in the pits of despair when he walked out of the Sports Administration. They had also seen Luocheng’s rage when Cao He came out with that post, and during this time, many other e-sports pro-players gained quite a number of followers as well, they had all reacted to the situation the same way Luocheng had…

 Luocheng realized that when they were under attack, e-sports players and enthusiasts had each others’ backs, all of them had banded together, creating a force so strong that it shook the media and other traditional sports to the core!

 The reason why their country’s e-sports community wasn’t united, could it have been because Chinese e-sports players hadn’t yet performed well enough on the global stage?

 This got Luocheng thinking, if… if his team could get into the top 8 of the S International League, with Europe, Asia, America and all the other countries paying attention to China’s e-sports situation, the General Administration of Sports and players all over China would have no choice but to do the same!!

 Going off of that, if his team managed to claw its way into the top 4, the international finals, and possibly even win the S International League World Champion, how many people would be united under this title of World Champion, and how far would the effects of such a feat spread throughout the media and the internet.

 Just take the Asian Indoor Games for example. The main organizer was Korean, and since e-sports was somewhat one of Korea’s specialties, they included e-sports in the competition to give themselves a few more medals. If China’s e-sports became as notoriously invincible as Korea’s, it didn’t matter how many medals Korea prepared, they would just be giving China more glory, and so, could the Sports Administration still ignore them then?

 They had to shine in global tournaments, only then would their government truly view e-sports with any form of importance and support it!

 Luocheng didn’t need insincere apologies from the people that looked down on e-sports. He wanted these ignorant and prideful people to be completely eradicated, he wanted to be able to stand on the same ground as other ‘national athletes’ and earn the same respect without being discriminated against, without being shunned by parents, and without being forgotten by the global sports community!

 Not participating in the Asian Indoor Games was fine. He believed that even if their country didn’t recognize the growth of e-sports, other countries would quickly advocate for the inclusion of e-sports in their sporting competitions. When China started to fret over the sudden news, their group of determined pro-players would already be ready for whatever the world decided to throw at them!

 However, right now, all this talk was pointless. First, they needed to give those international teams a little surprise. This September during the S International League, Team Skycrown would lead China’s e-sports into the limelight!

 ***

 (Side note: In reality, the LPL is divided into the Spring Season and the Summer Season, with the Spring Season being further divided into a Group Stage and a Play-Off Stage. Only the Group Stage of one of the seasons is written into the web novel and that sort of takes care of all the domestic competitions since these stories should have a constant sense of progression in them. Writing basically the same things over and over again doesn’t really add much, and to truly showcase each team’s abilities, the champion of real competitions isn’t decided so quickly, just want everyone to know so no one gets confused~ If you want to know more about the competitions, make sure to stay updated on the official LPL website!)

 ***

 Just as Cao He’s little Weibo mishap had subsided, the People’s Court was having a public hearing on Xu Pingyang’s case.

 This was something very close to their hearts, so how could the members of Team Skycrown not show up?

 Thus, their gang of night-owls set their alarms to wake up bright and early, had breakfast, tidied up their hair and outfits for the day, and happily made their way to the People’s Court.

 The hearing for this case was quite upscale, many people came, and there were even more armed policemen.

 Let the trial commence!

 Two policemen escorted Xu Pinyang who was clad in grey prisoner’s clothes to his seat.

 Xu Pingyang still had a completely bald head, and from the looks of it, his time in custody had been pretty rough. The last few strands of hair on his head had mostly all fallen and he looked as though he hadn’t slept a wink in days. He had clearly been washed and cleaned up for today’s hearing, but overall, he still looked like a wreck.

 The Xu Pingyang they were familiar with always had a smile plastered on his face, be it out of genuine goodwill, or more likely than not, out of mischief. This time, they finally had the chance to see Xu Pingyang at his lowest, causing Da Luo and Lin Dong to almost start applauding.

 Karma had finally hit him. Watching as the judge meticulously listed out every single one of Xu Pinyang’s crimes, watching the lawyers present one piece of hard evidence after another, watching Xu Pinyang lose all his will to even protest… At that moment, the years of hatred that had gathered within Team Skycrown was swept away all at once!

 “The verdict for Xu Pingyang’s large-scale cyber scams and robberies has been decided. As the defendant has been involved in crimes of over ten million, Xu Pingyang is hereby sentenced to… Lifetime imprisonment!”

 The judge had a powerful voice, and the words “lifetime imprisonment” echoed throughout the court.

 Hearing the words come out of the judge’s mouth, Xu Pingyang was left in a daze and his legs gave out from beneath him, leaving him crumpled on the floor with his mouth open and eyes wide, wondering where he went wrong.

 Lifetime imprisonment… lifetime imprisonment!!!

 Xu Pingyang had never thought that his account stealing workshop could completely change his life. Once by giving him wealth beyond imagination, and once more by giving him such despair that he could not handle!!!

 You could only imagine how much Xu Pingyang regretted his decisions at that moment. Not long ago, he was a king in the e-sports clubs, he drove a Benz, lived in a mansion, had girls at his beck and call… But all of that vanished in a blink of an eye, and the rest of his life was reduced down to the four grey cement walls of his prison cell!

 The verdict shocked Team Skycrown as well. They had thought Xu Pingyang was going to get a few years of prison time for sure, but they hadn’t expected him to spend the rest of his life there.

 “Why did he get such a harsh verdict? Hasn’t he already paid off everything he could?” Lin Dong asked Li Meiqi’s brother, Li Xi.

 Li Xi was the one who had caught Sun Liang and handed him over to the cyber police, so he obviously knew a little about the ins and outs of these types of things. He glanced at Xu Pinyang being dragged away like a stray mutt and said quietly, “Cybercrimes these days are extremely serious, account stealing, trojan, viruses, all of these could incur serious monetary loss equivalents and more robberies and scams in real life. People like Xu Pingyang have already been observed by law enforcers for quite some time, and with crimes in the ten millions, he could even be given a death sentence, so a life sentence is already going easy on him. His money isn’t going to help him either, the cyber police are determined to put an end to cyber scams, briberies, account stealing, etcetera… They’re not going to hold back.”