Nineteen-year-old Chen Yifan is the night shift network administrator at the "Speed Internet Cafe" outside the university town. He has an unknown skill: in the national server ladder of the popular competitive game "Anno", he uses an account named "Fanchen" and has been entrenched in the shadow of the passerby king all year round. His winning rate is frighteningly high, and his operations are so fast that only "afterimage" legends are left on the screen. Until one night, as usual, he used a broken mechanical keyboard from an Internet cafe and a mouse with a broken wheel to casually defeat a professional player who was broadcasting on the opposite side. He took off his greasy headphones and scratched his head, thinking only of making his third bucket of braised beef noodles today. What he didn't see was that in the corner of the Internet cafe, an unshaven man who had been staring at his screen all night was so excited that he put out his cigarette butt in an empty mineral water bottle. Three days later, the youth training camp manager of the domestic giant team "Cangqiong" took his contract and sat at the front desk of an Internet cafe piled with instant noodle buckets and cigarette ashes. "Come and work professionally." The manager said, "Or, continue to make noodles here." Chen Yifan looked at the number on the contract that he had never imagined, and then looked at his fingertips that were trembling from staying up late for a long time. He thought of the hunched backs of his parents back home, and the only five hundred and thirty-two dollars and eighty cents left in his account. He licked his dry lips and wrote his name crookedly on the last page of the contract. The legend belonging to the "mundane world" is over. In the professional arena, a storm called "Afterimage" is about to land.
