Chapter 24. When Li Xiaofeng Became Sky

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十四 当李晓峰成为SKY

Written by BBKinG before WCG 2005. First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 15, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19637811

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on July 27, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

By the age of 20, two things had happened that Li Xiaofeng could never have imagined. The first was learning that he had not only a brother four years his junior, but also a biological sister two years younger who had been sent to live with relatives so the family could avoid a fine under the one-child policy. The second was standing atop the podium at the ACON5 world esports tournament in May 2005, as his player tag, WE.Sky, became an emblem recognized by esports fans around the world.

Sky's gray childhood

Sky was born on the 27th day of the third lunar month in 1985, in the small city of Ruzhou, Henan Province. His father was a doctor at Ruzhou First People's Hospital. His mother worked at a distillery until she was laid off in 1998 amid the restructuring of China's state-owned enterprises. Both of Sky's aunts had married and moved far away, leaving his grandparents in need of someone to care for them. With three children also growing up in the household, the burden of supporting a family of seven fell entirely on his father's modest salary. The immense pressure made his middle-aged father quick-tempered, and Sky, still an unruly teenager, often bore the brunt of it.

The children in Sky's neighborhood were always fighting and causing trouble. He had lived there for as long as he could remember, and gradually became one of them. He stole his grandmother's "Yuan Datou" silver dollars—coins bearing the portrait of Yuan Shikai—and exchanged them for cash. He skipped class to play arcade games, and his grades were unremarkable. His father, desperate for his son to make something of himself, grew increasingly anxious, and the scoldings and beatings became more frequent. Sky ran away from home several times while still in middle school. The longest absence lasted six days. The young Sky wandered aimlessly around the small city, cadged meals from friends when hunger got the better of him, and slept at night on newspapers in unfinished buildings. When he reached this part of the story, he looked up and smiled in embarrassment.

Games lit up his eyes: his memorable first trip to a tournament

In middle school, Sky saved his breakfast money every day to buy two arcade tokens and play Sangokushi. "You know, the one where you shake the joystick to eat the buns!" he explained excitedly. In 1998, his younger cousin introduced him to a PC game he had been playing, StarCraft. Sky was quickly hooked on this classic of gaming history, and from that moment on, his fate became bound up with esports.

The first time Sky traveled alone to another province for a tournament was in early 2001. An internet café near Huangfuzhuang in Xi'an was holding a competition. Although the prize money was only 500 yuan, many strong StarCraft players planned to attend. Sky had already made something of a name for himself on the battle platform in Shangqiu, Henan, and was one of the core players on Home, a well-known national team at the time. The moment he heard about the tournament, he decided to enter. Without considering how much the trip to Xi'an would cost or whether it might be dangerous, he bought a train ticket and set off.

Sky was confident before the tournament, and many spectators considered him a favorite. Instead, he lost in both the first and third rounds to lion_jin, a fairly well-known player at the time, leaving him outside the top 32. Sky was devastated. On the train home, he could not find his ticket when the conductor came to inspect it. The conductor refused to accept any explanation, so Sky had to buy another ticket. After paying, he had just 0.5 yuan left. When he reached Luoyang railway station at four in the morning, he had no money for transportation back to school, so he walked for three hours through the cold wind to reach his dormitory. Looking back, Sky said the trip still frightened him a little. He had gone to Xi'an without preparing or thinking anything through. What if something had happened?

Defeat meant giving up the dream and going home—and Sky once contemplated suicide

At the WCG Xi'an qualifier in 2002, Sky was knocked out in the first round. He was close to despair. As he left the venue and looked toward a third-story window, he genuinely wanted to close his eyes and jump. Before then, he had won nearly every major and minor tournament in Zhengzhou and had begun to dream of becoming a professional esports player. That dream had brought the conflict with his family to a boiling point. Eventually, he promised his father that if he failed to achieve a good result at that year's WCG, he would quit gaming for good, return home, and dutifully intern at his father's hospital to become a doctor. His first-round elimination therefore meant that his dream had been utterly and completely crushed.

Yet the turning point in his fortunes came at that very moment. The WCG 2002 regional qualifiers were held on different dates, and there was no restriction against entering more than one. This gave Sky a second chance. To protect his dream, prove himself to his family, and keep his fate in his own hands, he resolved to enter the WCG Wuhan qualifier. After buying his train ticket and paying the entry fee, he had little more than ten yuan left—not even enough for the journey home. Then the unfamiliar food and environment made him ill. He developed a high fever and needed anti-inflammatory medicine, but fortunately a friend helped him through it. Sky eventually placed third, yet he had still failed: only the top two players from each region qualified for the WCG China national finals in Beijing.

After that failure, Sky kept his promise to his father, went home and started his internship at the hospital.

The hospital year

In 2002, after returning home, Sky interned at his father's hospital for six months. He dispensed medicine in the pharmacy, passed forceps in the operating room, and accompanied doctors on their night rounds. Sometimes, after a surgeon had finished operating on a patient, Sky was even allowed to put in the final few stitches. During one operation, Sky saw a patient hemorrhage for the first time. The longer he watched, the more anxious he became, until he forgot to breathe and passed out. His father had to help him from the operating room. Later, after seeing such things more often, he gradually grew accustomed to this world of blades and blood.

In early 2003, Sky's father left Ruzhou for further medical training at a hospital in Zhengzhou. Because the training was unpaid, his mother immersed herself in business to support the family and gradually had little attention left for him. This was when Sky became obsessed with the online game MU Online. He would even get up in the middle of the night to check whether he had found any valuable items. From April to August, he spent entire days gaming on the computer at home. He stopped playing StarCraft and abandoned his hospital internship as well. As a result of those months of obsession, his only achievements in 2003 were a regional GOC title and the GOC online StarCraft championship; he achieved nothing at that year's WCG. After playing MU for several months, Sky realized that no matter how hard he leveled up, he could not keep pace with professional power-levelers or players using cheats. He gradually lost interest in online games.

Struggling for the dream, back onto the professional path

In September 2003, the Deep Blue internet café in Zhengzhou wanted to develop several esports players for a tournament that the telecommunications company was organizing for internet cafés. It recruited Sky and several other reasonably well-known players, providing them with free computers and a place to train. Sky had only recently become familiar with Warcraft III, but he began climbing the rankings on Blizzard's Battle.net alongside several Home teammates. Within three months, he had fought his way to number one in China.

None of them had any income at the time, and they ate only one meal a day. The café was open for business during daylight hours, so they could train only at night. They slept in a small storeroom at the back. Its entrance was just one meter high, and inside was a bunk bed with only the top bunk usable. Every night, Sky squeezed onto that single bunk with a large friend. They lived this way for three months.

At Chinese New Year in 2004, Sky's father came home from his training program and was furious to learn that Sky had not continued at the hospital and that his mother had failed to keep him in line. For a while the atmosphere at home was extremely tense.

Just then, Sky heard that the Hunter club in Beijing was recruiting professional esports players, offering 1,000 yuan a month with room and board. He wanted to try. Although his father hated to see him leave, he reluctantly agreed, hoping that some hardship would do his son good. And so Sky left Henan to seek his future in Beijing.

Before joining Hunter, Sky had hoped his StarCraft results would earn him a place as a professional StarCraft player. Hunter's StarCraft roster, however, was already full, with PJ and others on the team, while it was desperately short of Warcraft III players. The club's management noticed that Sky had reached the top five on the Warcraft III Battle.net ladder in 2003, earning an invitation to Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational. They therefore placed him on the Warcraft III roster and signed him to a three-month contract. That was how Sky, almost by accident, became a Warcraft III player.

Sky treasured the opportunity. Ready to endure hardship and eager to learn, he practiced on Battle.net for more than 14 hours a day. His work paid off: during this period, he won the ACON4 Beijing regional championship.

From YolinY to WE, step by step toward the world title

In mid-2004, after failing to finish among the top two in the CEG Beijing division, Sky's contract with Hunter ended and he returned home. He was later summoned by KinG, a legendary figure in Chinese esports, and joined YolinY, a professional esports club founded just one month earlier. Good treatment and high-level team training steadily improved his form and skill. In June of that year, Sky finished second at the ACON4 China finals in Beijing. The champion was his YolinY teammate Suho, known as "the man whose left hand can dance."

In May 2005, YolinY secured sponsorship from the American company IGE and changed its name to World Elite, or WE. IGE also brought leading South Korean players into WE, creating a genuine world-class esports dream team.

Sky covered everything that followed in barely a sentence. In 2004, he was invited by World e-Sports Games (WEG) to spend a month in South Korea competing and taking part in exhibition matches. In 2005, he traveled to France for the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) and finished fourth. Later that year, he competed at ACON5 in Xi'an and claimed the Warcraft III world championship. Sky said only that he had never imagined achieving any of these results. Standing on the podium, he thought of his family and of the friends who had helped him over the years. Sky considers himself fortunate.

Sky and his friends

In 2002, Sky's family was under enormous financial pressure. To keep training, he spent just 0.5 yuan a day on food, buying five pan-fried buns for 0.1 yuan each and drinking the free soup served with them. At Sky's lowest point, Xiaoyao Feizai helped him arrange training time at an internet café and continued paying for his meals. By the time of writing, Sky was earning nearly 200,000 yuan a year in prize money and paying almost 50,000 yuan in tax. Yet when he spoke of Xiaoyao Feizai, his gratitude was unmistakable.

Speaking of KinG, WE's manager, Sky called him a born leader who organized everything thoughtfully, attending even to the smallest details so that everyone around him felt at ease. Sky deeply admired the strength of character with which KinG had brought together so many talented people and kept them united over the years.

Speaking of his WE teammates, Sky described Suho as hardworking and exceptionally talented. In 2004, Sky wanted to beat Suho in every match, yet Suho always seemed unfathomably strong. Every one of his WE teammates—WE.Anas, WE.DuCui, WE.TiGer, and WE.WYW—was a champion in his own right. Sky said that he was not a naturally gifted player and could make up for it only by working harder.

In mid-November 2005, WE.Sky and his teammate WE.Suho were due to represent China in Warcraft III at the WCG Grand Final in Singapore. Sky said that although he had been in somewhat poor form recently, he would train hard and strive to perform at his best in Singapore, so as not to disappoint everyone supporting him.

As soon as the interview ended, Sky returned to his seat and threw himself into practice. Looking at his serious, focused expression and recalling the mischievous, headstrong childhood he had just described, I felt that he had grown up.