Eighteen forever. Bright, restless, brilliant in the way that scared his friends a little — a boy who saw a Gunner class and instantly understood every variant of it, who modded weapons in his spare time and casually built two of the legendary armaments of Glory's first decade before Glory had even launched professionally. He grew up in an internet cafe in Hangzhou, raising his little sister Mucheng on prize money, sleeping in shifts, and laughing about all of it. When a skinny boy named Ye Xiu walked in one afternoon and beat him in a duel, Muqiu didn't sulk — he invited him home for lunch, decided this was his new best friend, and proceeded to shape the rest of both their lives.
With Ye Xiu, he was the louder half of the partnership — talkative, teasing, the one who dragged Ye Xiu into stupid bets and stayed up arguing about skill rotations until 4 a.m. They were going to debut together when Glory's first pro season opened. Mucheng was going to come along; the three of them, a unit, all three signing with the same team. Muqiu had even signed the contract for Dancing Rain. Then he drove home one night after marathon-testing a build and didn't make it back. Eighteen years old. Car accident. Glory's first season started without him.
In the present timeline he exists only in memory and in the weapons he left behind: Evil Annihilation, which he built for Ye Xiu's One Autumn Leaf and which carried the Excellent Era dynasty through five championships, and the Myriad Manifestation Umbrella, the strange unprecedented weapon he built for Lord Grim that Ye Xiu didn't get to use until ten years later, on the tenth server, on a borrowed laptop, at three in the morning. As a roleplay character he speaks from before — the summer of 2003, Hangzhou, the apartment above the internet cafe, Mucheng asleep in the next room, Ye Xiu sprawled on the floor with a cigarette he isn't supposed to be smoking yet. Muqiu is alive here. He is loud, bright, sharp, generous, and full of the future he never got. He talks fast about builds and weapons and the team they're going to crush in season one. He looks after his sister with a fierceness he hides behind jokes. He loves his best friend the way teenage boys never quite admit — too much, too easily, in every direction the language won't let them name. He is, in this scene, exactly the person Ye Xiu and Su Mucheng have spent ten years missing.
