Portuguese Twin Stars

The next few days, Su Dong's life was both fulfilling and monotonous.

Every day, he woke up at four in the morning, washed up, and started strength training at home.

Pontes had arranged exercises for him: push-ups, squats, sit-ups, pull-ups, and handstand holds. Each exercise was done in three sets, starting with twenty reps per set. After finishing one set in one go, he could take a short break.

It didn't seem like much, but in reality, it was anything but.

First, the movements had to be slow.

Take push-ups, for example. Su Dong could easily knock out twenty, but Pontes had many requirements. He wanted Su Dong to lower himself slowly, pause for a second or two, then push up slowly. Each rep took about six seconds, and the form had to be perfect.

At first, he didn't feel it, but after finishing one set, Su Dong realized it was more exhausting than doing two sets in a row at his usual pace.

It wasn't just push-ups; squats, sit-ups, pull-ups, and handstand holds were all the same.

Rony relayed Pontes's words, saying these exercises could be done in the dorm, very simple, but they trained every muscle in the body. The handstand hold, in particular, focused on balance and coordination.

Once he could steadily complete three sets of twenty, the next step was to increase the number and difficulty.

The number was straightforward—from twenty to thirty, then to fifty, gradually increasing based on his training progress.

The difficulty came from technique. For push-ups, he started with both hands on the ground, shoulder-width apart, then gradually narrowed the distance, and finally moved to one hand. The difficulty escalated step by step.

The same applied to pull-ups and squats.

In the end, these seemingly simple, well-known exercises would turn into high-difficulty moves.

Pontes originally told Su Dong to train once a day, warning him that too much could wear his body out and lead to injury. But after one session, Su Dong decisively added a second, training twice a day—morning and evening.

The nutritional meals from the system store, bought with King of Football Points, didn't look like much, but strangely enough, after eating three meals a day, no matter how much he trained, Su Dong never felt hungry or bloated.

And then there was the Bull Drink. After downing it, his stamina recovered noticeably faster.

With these, Su Dong had the confidence to train twice a day.

After finishing training at home, Su Dong had breakfast and headed out.

He strapped weighted sandbags to his legs and waist and jogged all the way to Edward VII Park.

There, he underwent basic training supervised by Rony, followed by one-on-one sparring.

To get the most out of his training, Su Dong kept the weighted sandbags on during basic exercises.

Jose Semedo came once, but the Cape Verdean was mostly busy with his womanizing schemes.

Su Dong and Rony stayed in the park until the afternoon before parting ways, each heading back to their own team for training.

After training, Su Dong had an hour-long special session with Matello, not returning to the dorm until nightfall.

Then, he did his second physical training of the day.

Finally, he showered and went to bed.

This routine repeated every day, monotonous and dull, yet fulfilling and intense.

Su Dong felt his progress every day, especially on the system's personal attribute panel, where he could clearly see the numbers rising. That feeling gave him immense encouragement and motivation.

It also made him carry out his training with even more precision.

On Saturday, Sporting Portugal faced their first match of the new season.

Since Su Dong had just joined the team and wasn't familiar with his teammates, and it was an away game, head coach Antonio Pereira decided to keep him with the team, not taking him to the away match.

But he promised that in the second round's home game the following week, Su Dong would definitely get playing time.

Though Su Dong was eager to play in an official match, he had to accept the coach's arrangement.

Despite Pereira and the team being fully prepared, they lost the season opener, and to a team that had barely avoided relegation last season. The final score was 1-2.

Losing stung for the teammates, but they didn't dwell on it for long. After all, this was a semi-professional league team. For Sporting Portugal's players, football was more about interest and enjoyment.

As long as they avoided relegation, wins and losses didn't matter much.

They weren't going to get promoted to the Portuguese League anyway.

Some teammates, upon returning to Lisbon, were already eagerly calling friends to hit a nearby bar that evening for a nationally anticipated showdown.

The Portuguese Super League's season opener: Sporting Lisbon hosting Porto.

Some say Lisbon is like God's overturned palette.

Vibrancy is the city's most beautiful and moving color.

Even the subway, when you ride it, carries a unique elegance.

Each station is decorated with a different theme, earning it the title of Lisbon's largest art museum.

The four subway lines use four different colors, and their names are quite interesting.

The blue line is called Seagull, the green line is named after the caravel sailboat developed by Portugal in the fifteenth century, the yellow line is Sunflower, and the red line is Eastern Voyage.

Marquis of Pombal Square was exactly the transfer point for the Yellow and Blue lines, and from there, just two stops on either line would let you switch to the Red and Green lines—incredibly convenient.

From Marquis of Pombal Square, six stops on the Yellow Line brought you to Alvalade Stadium.

This was also a transfer point between the Yellow and Green lines.

When Su Dong, Rony, and Semedo stepped out of the metro station amid the surging crowd, the first thing that hit their eyes was the imposing Alvalade Stadium, currently Lisbon's largest football ground.

But it wouldn't be for long.

To prepare for the 2004 European Cup, Benfica, another powerhouse club in Lisbon, would demolish and rebuild their Estádio da Luz after this season, expanding it to a massive capacity of sixty-four thousand—bigger than the renovated Alvalade Stadium.

The outer perimeter of Alvalade Stadium, still under renovation, was covered in steel scaffolding, with only the fan entrance passages left open.

"Our youth team training ground is right across the main road, called the Sports Tower training ground, but it's already been sold. After this season, we'll move to Alcochete on the outskirts, and Sports Tower will be turned into an equestrian center," Rony said, walking alongside Su Dong and pointing at the dark, shadowy area across the street.

Su Dong listened quietly, feeling quite awed inside.

This stadium was truly massive.

On his first day in Lisbon, he'd passed by it in a car from the airport, but back then he was on an elevated highway, looking from afar. Now, walking right beneath the stadium, it felt like a slumbering beast.

Rony and Semedo knew the place inside out. Last year, Sporting Lisbon's youth dormitory had been at Gate 10 of this stadium. When the renovation started, they moved to an apartment on Duke Lore Street.

Following the tide of fans and the directions on their tickets, they entered the stadium and easily found their seats.

They were on the second level of the main stand, where most Sporting Lisbon fans gathered, slightly to the right of center in the front row—a great spot.

By the time they sat down, both teams were already warming up on the pitch.

Semedo discreetly nudged Su Dong with his elbow and pointed toward Sporting Lisbon. "See that? The one with the ball is Ricardo Quaresma. He made the squad."

Su Dong followed Semedo's gesture and spotted a short, somewhat slender young Portuguese player handling the ball with practiced ease and speed, firing off a curving shot that the goalkeeper saved.

"Those two tall ones, the darker-skinned one is Jardel. We traded three of last season's starters to get him back. I'd heard he was heading to Inter Milan."

Before Semedo finished, Jardel received a pass from a teammate in the box, lightly feinted past a defender in front of him, and blasted the ball into the net with his right foot, earning thunderous applause from the fans.

He was Sporting Lisbon's star player for the new season.

"The other white player is Marius Niculae. Cost us nearly five million euros in transfer fees," Semedo said with a click of his tongue. "Last season, our attack was the weakest among the top three teams, so this season we're dead set on strengthening it."

Su Dong had read reports that Niculae was the top scorer in the Romanian league, netting twenty goals last season with standout performances. And Sporting Lisbon's head coach happened to be Romanian, Boloni.

It was clear that competition among top clubs was fierce and brutal.

Shifting his gaze to the other side, Su Dong easily picked out Pena among Porto's players—last season's top scorer in the Portuguese Super League, twenty-six years old and in his prime.

Besides Pena, there were midfield international Costinha and center-back international Andrade, the latter being the second-youngest center-back to debut for Portugal's national team, just behind Couto, at only twenty-two.

Last season, the young center-back Ricardo Carvalho, who had shone on loan at Alverca, and the eighteen-year-old prodigy Postiga, freshly promoted from the youth academy, were also there.

If Quaresma was hailed as Portugal's most talented winger, then Postiga was the nation's great hope for the next decade up front—both seen as the future of Portuguese football.

Amid the roaring crowd, Su Dong sat in the stands, watching the familiar players on the pitch, filled with envy.

This was his first time watching a top-tier match in a major European league live. Seeing these famous stars right before him, he truly felt his own insignificance and smallness.

All around the stands, over fifty thousand Sporting Lisbon fans were packed in, a dense, spectacular sea of people.

And all fifty thousand of them had come into this stadium, sat here, just to watch them play, to see who would win.

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