Lin Yi was a prodigy mid laner who won the League of Legends World Championship at seventeen. At the peak of his professional career, he chose to retire.
He wasn't pushed out, he didn't injure his hand, and no outside factor was involved. He simply didn't want to play anymore.
No one understood. His teammates called him crazy, his fans said he had betrayed them, and the media ran headlines calling him "a fallen prodigy." Meanwhile, Lin Yi dragged his suitcase back to his hometown and took the last seat in a senior year repeat class.
Class rank: 732 out of 756.
He was going to get into Tsinghua.
His seatmate was Wang Hao, the only current Tsinghua student at the school. Dissatisfied with his major, Wang Hao had voluntarily dropped out to retake the college entrance exam. He agreed to tutor Lin Yi in math, but had only one condition: Lin Yi had to teach him how to play games.
Bronze III, a 31% win rate, and twenty straight losses.
One was a former champion who had fallen from the top of the world; the other was a top student who had left the ivory tower to start over. Two people, each branded a "failure" in a different way, sat at a narrow desk and traded the one last gamble they had left.
But retirement was never the end. When an old teammate called for help, when a former rival posted a taunting video ahead of the world championship, when everyone thought Lin Yi had already "died"...
That was when he put on his Guardian Angel for the first time.
