A dual-timeline esports story set in the golden age of DOTA 1, telling of a battle for redemption and vindication spanning 12 years.
In 2013, Lin Che, captain of Wuhan's Wildfire team, squeezes into a leaky internet cafe with a group of underestimated teenagers. They live on instant noodles, all to make a run at the TI3 qualifiers. In an era when esports was denounced as "electronic heroin," their dreams crumbled before the harshness of reality.
In 2025, gifted player Lu Xingci is mercilessly cut from an AI team. He lives in the shadow of his older brother, Lu Feng. Twelve years earlier, Lu Feng was the brightest mid-laner in the DOTA scene, but on the eve of TI3, he was falsely accused of match-fixing and took his own life at an internet cafe. Everyone called him a fraud. Only Lu Xingci believed his brother was innocent.
By chance, Lu Xingci logs into the private server his brother left behind and meets Lin Che from 2013 across time. From mutual suspicion to trust, they form an alliance across the years: Lin Che investigates the truth in 2013, while Lu Xingci gathers evidence in 2025. They discover that the real culprit behind Lu Feng's framing was his best friend, Jiang Yi, now a business tycoon who controls global AI esports.
This isn't an overpowered comeback story. They couldn't change Lu Feng's death, but with a fair and honorable victory, they cleared the deceased man's name and proved that human passion can never be replaced by AI.
Dedicated to everyone who has risked everything for a passion the world didn't understand.
