At 20:23 on December 13, 2009, in an alley beside the Sequin Sound bar in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France, Zhang Kuang leaned against a corner, clutching the back of his head in bewilderment.
"What's going on? I transmigrated? And became a Football Juniors player? Then I even got a system? This is fantastic!"
But... heavens, can you tell me what's wrong with my system? Why are there two systems? And why is each one only half?"
Zhang Kuang's mind was a little muddled. He needed to sort things out first. Where should he start?
He might as well start with before his transmigration. Just give things a gentle untangling, without teasing out anything that shouldn't be there.
In 2027, he had been a hardworking food delivery worker serving the people. That evening, while waiting for an order outside a restaurant, he had come across the opening of a novel about a man who entered a roadside green belt, only to be hit by a yellow car and sent transmigrating.
The novel had made him laugh in anger. This author was clearly a hater. They'd really run out of things to attack, so now they attacked everything, fixating on other people's faults while ignoring their virtues.
Yet just then, as Zhang Kuang leaned beneath a streetlamp on the sidewalk, a car so green it was unsettling came hurtling toward him and sent him flying into the air.
Come on, he was only thirty! He worked diligently, shouldering hardship without complaint. He couldn't afford a home or a wife, didn't spread anxiety through society, and was a loyal Yutian fan. Why hit him? Why not hit those haters instead?
Ah, what would his parents do when they found out? What would Number 38 at Red Romance do? How heartbroken would they be!
No, why transmigrate him into a young footballer? His only involvement with football in his entire life had been a year of intensive training at a football school when he was sixteen. His feel for the ball had been fairly good, and his schoolteacher had said that with some intensive training, he might have the potential to become a professional player. From then on, his grades had plunged straight down. The real kicker was that after a year of training, the training school had discovered he was an injury-prone glass man and persuaded him to leave.
After that, his only connection to football had been watching matches. He rarely even watched the five major leagues, mostly just the World Cup, the China national football team, and the Chinese Super League before 2019. He had been an Evergrande fan.
Later, Evergrande had disbanded, and he had more or less stopped watching football to focus on delivering food.
After so many years, he had finally saved a little money and wanted to buy a home and find a wife, only to be hit by a car and sent transmigrating.
He wasn't familiar with football! What was the point of making him transmigrate into a footballer?
All right, time to sort through the current Zhang Kuang's life. Yes, this Football Juniors player was also named Zhang Kuang. He was eighteen this year, born on August 18, 1991.
Fifty days earlier, he had still been a U20 national team player. Although he had made the national youth team, whose members all seemed to come from wealthy families, his own background was far from comfortable. His mother had died young, leaving him and his father, Zhang Jianguo, with only each other.
His father worked as a rebar worker on construction sites and had endured bitter hardships to raise him. How he had become a footballer had to be traced back to his father. His father had once been a professional player in the Jia B League, but while manipulating a match's score, he had gotten carried away and scored a goal, costing the bookmakers and many players money.
Then, with everyone furious at him, his professional career had been brought to an end. What team would dare take such an uncontrollable player?
After slinking away from professional football, Zhang Jianguo had no real way to earn money. He had always played football, had little schooling, and had never learned any skills. Once he stopped playing, he could only do manual labor, tighten screws in factories, and the like.
He might once have fixed matches and participated in football gambling, but the lion's share of those earnings had nothing to do with players like them. At most, they received a bonus of a few thousand yuan.
Zhang Jianguo had met Zhang Kuang's mother while he was still at football school. He had only been eighteen then. Although footballers couldn't make a fortune, their regular income had been decent. Back in 1989, he had often played commercial matches, so afterward he would treat his teammates to skewers and barbecue.
Zhang Kuang's mother had been a waitress at the barbecue restaurant. Young and fresh-faced, she had only been seventeen herself and had little education, having gone out to work after finishing junior high. Zhang Jianguo had sweet-talked her into his arms in no time.
His parents had married because of the pregnancy. Strictly speaking, neither had been of legal marriage age at the time. Later, when professional leagues were established in China, Zhang Jianguo had made it through the selection process and joined a Jia B League team.
But by the time Zhang Kuang could remember anything, his mother was already gone. Apparently, she had started working in a factory after giving birth to him. When he was five, she had been leaving a night shift when a truck rushing to make a delivery in the industrial park hit and killed her. In any case, some compensation had been paid.
In 1996, Zhang Jianguo had lost both his wife and his professional career. Then he had taken his only son, Zhang Kuang, with him, and the two had begun a drifting life.
Everything had seemed set to remain quiet like that, until one day Zhang Jianguo received a renovation job at the football school he had attended as a child.
The football school's coach, Wu Guohua, had sighed deeply upon hearing what had happened to Zhang Jianguo. While they chatted, the very young Zhang Kuang had watched the students on the pitch with shining eyes, then gone over to kick the ball around. Wu Guohua had eventually spotted him and praised his talent for football.
And so, Zhang Jianguo had supported Zhang Kuang's training at the football school through hard manual labor. In 2009, he had finally saved enough money and given a few gifts, securing eighteen-year-old Zhang Kuang a place in the U20 training squad.
There had been a reason for getting Zhang Kuang into the U20 squad: paving the way for his future professional career. Once he made the U20s, he would most likely sign with a Chinese Super League or China League One club and become a starter. Everything would be fine then.
Several China League One and Chinese Super League clubs had already been in contact with Zhang Kuang. Wu Guohua and Zhang Jianguo had both been full of joy. Years of nurturing him were finally about to bear fruit. Once he finished this training camp and played a few friendlies, he might become a starter for the 2010 AFC Youth Championship.
If Zhang Kuang could score a few goals in the friendlies or AFC Youth Championship qualifiers and show what made his game distinctive, his market value would soar. All their effort and years of waiting would have been worth it.
After all, it wasn't as though no clubs had wanted to sign Zhang Kuang over the years, but they had kept holding off. If Zhang Jianguo hadn't been unable to scrape together the money, Zhang Kuang could have entered the national youth teams long ago, perhaps making a name for himself and signing with a Chinese Super League club much earlier.
But Chinese football in this era was just that fucked up. No matter how good you were, without red envelopes to clear the way, you couldn't get in.
Zhang Kuang did have some talent, too. The problem hadn't been his football, but his interpersonal relationships-or rather, competition.
Within just a month of joining, someone had begun opposing him at every turn. Their usual clashes over one thing or another hadn't been too serious, and sometimes he hadn't even talked back when called a wild child.
Until fifty days earlier, when that person had not only called him a wild child but deliberately slide-tackled him. The mild-mannered boy had finally erupted, pinning the other person to the ground and beating him within an inch of his life.
In the end, the coach had called his father. Upon hearing the news, his father had rushed over in a burning hurry, only for yet another car accident to send him to his grave.
At this point in his sorting, Zhang Kuang couldn't help cursing aloud. "Can't you come up with any accident besides a car crash? Have you run out of ideas? If you have, just say so!"
What happened afterward was clear enough. Zhang Kuang had been expelled and banned from playing for five years.
What was Zhang Kuang, an eighteen-year-old who knew nothing but football and had been banned for five years, supposed to do?
After he received the 200,000 yuan in compensation for his father's car accident, Coach Wu Guohua, who looked years older, had offered him a suggestion: go abroad.
But he didn't know a single person overseas. How was he supposed to go abroad?
Wu Guohua's advice had been to leave first, then find a local football agency, pay them an agency fee, and have them arrange trials with clubs.
If he could pass a trial during this winter transfer window, he would have successfully made the move overseas.
If he couldn't pass a trial, Wu Guohua had advised him to use whatever money remained to enroll in an auto repair training course.
Wu Guohua had suggested France. Ligue 1 was the weakest of the five major leagues, the easiest to get started in, and didn't require a work permit.
Of course, he wouldn't pass a Ligue 1 trial, but he might succeed in Ligue 2. After all, Zhang Kuang's technique was fairly decent; otherwise, they couldn't have squeezed him into the U20s. What level did "decent" mean?
Wu Guohua thought he wasn't much worse than that Wu Lei from Shanghai.
Fortunately, although he hadn't learned much else academically at football training school, he had practiced enough English to barely communicate.
Only that had given him the courage to come abroad.
He had only arrived three days ago and had arranged to meet the SportCover football agency tomorrow to discuss representation. Today happened to be the day of Paris Saint-Germain versus Saint-Étienne, so he had come to watch the match.
He had never imagined the developed West would be so lawless. Right after leaving the match, someone had struck him from behind with a club and robbed him.
And that had allowed the Zhang Kuang from 2027 to transmigrate into him.
All right, he had sorted out the causes and consequences without teasing out anything that shouldn't be there, such as fishy-smelling fluids.
Now, about this system he could see. He was fortunate: transmigration had brought him a system.
But he was also unfortunate, because he had received two... no, two half-systems. One was called the [Heaven and Earth Creation Immortal Cultivation System]. That one was probably meant to send him cultivating immortality on some foreign continent. Just how was he supposed to create heaven and earth? He would have to study it carefully.
The other was the [Heaven Rewards Diligence Football King System], a system that had him train diligently, earn training points, improve his skills, and become a football king.
Both were good systems. Both were quite nice.
But the crucial issue was that each system was now missing half, and they had somehow been oddly glued together. What kind of system did that make this?
More importantly, did it work? How was he supposed to use it?
For example, the [Heaven Rewards Diligence Football King System] only explained: heaven rewards diligence. Training earned experience points, with every minute of effective training granting one experience point. Every ten thousand experience points could be converted into one skill point...
And then? Then there was no then. Oh, right, there was more.
There was more information, such as his stats as an attacking player: shooting 70, positioning 56, heading 54, speed 78, explosiveness 71, physique 63, passing and receiving 57, dribbling 58, defending 43, ball control 57, free kicks 51, mental strength 62, vision 59.
These were his main stats as an attacking player. His stats were pretty good. Shooting alone was at 70, and his speed and explosiveness were decent too.
But on another look, something was wrong.
Why was his overall rating as a striker only 60.74? Why was his rating as a winger only 59.74? And why was his overall rating as an attacking midfielder only 55.8?
Weren't his shooting, speed, and explosiveness all at 70 or above?
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(Here's how the different tiers of competitions are divided!)
Top-tier competitions: UEFA Champions League, Europe Cup, World Cup
Tier-one competitions: Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A, South America Copa Libertadores, FIFA Club World Cup
Tier-two competitions: EFL Championship, Primeira Liga, Eredivisie, Russian Premier League, Campeonato Brasileiro Série A, Argentine Primera División, Süper Lig, etc.
Tier-three competitions: EFL League One, 2. Bundesliga, Segunda División, Serie B, J1 League, Belgian Pro League, Ukrainian Premier League, Liga MX, etc.
Tier-four competitions: EFL League Two, Chinese Super League, Major League Soccer, Saudi Arabia League, K League 1, A-League, Campeonato Brasileiro Série B, etc.