Entertainment to the death, make a tokusatsu film that will crush the entire internet.

The video was released late at night.

The poster is a Bilibili UP master with just over four digits of followers, whose ID is "Unlicensed Knight".

He mainly makes game mashups and animation AMVs on weekdays, and occasionally posts some life vlogs. He is the kind of ordinary creator who diligently updates but has never produced a hit video.

His pinned post reads, "Powered by passion, I'll keep editing until someone watches," and it has fewer than 100 likes.

When he uploaded this video, he probably didn't think about what would happen next.

The video's title is plain and has almost no potential for virality.

"Ordinary People".

The cover is a simple composite image created with Photoshop, showing the back of Soldier: 76 from Overwatch on the left and a black-and-white news photo on the right.

During a flood relief operation, a group of soldiers wearing life jackets stood hand in hand in waist-deep floodwaters, forming a human wall.

There are no fancy transition effects between the two images, only one line of text: Who is protecting us?

But this title, this cover, and this content creator with a negligible number of followers caused a stir across the entire internet in a short period of time.

The video opens with a news clip that has been deliberately darkened.

There was no background music, only the original soundtrack from the live performance.

The sounds of rain, water, and intermittent commands from the walkie-talkie.

The river in the scene has overflowed the embankment, and the muddy water, carrying mud, sand and broken logs, rushes towards the residential area. The camera shakes as it sweeps across the flooded streets and the houses that are teetering in the flood.

A reporter's voice came from off-screen, visibly trembling: "It's three in the morning, and the water level is still rising..."

Then, the scene cuts to the moment the rescue team appears.

The bright orange life jackets shone brightly in the dark floodwaters, one by one.

Music enters.

That was a piano variation of the Overwatch theme melody, a version adapted and performed by an unknown music enthusiast, which had a more restrained gentleness than the original's grandeur.

The piano notes fell like raindrops, landing on the shoulders of the orange-red figures in the picture.

Editing has begun.

The editing of "Unlicensed Rider" is not complicated, but each frame corresponds to a specific point.

The footage of 76 soldiers setting up heavy pulse rifles to cover their teammates' advance is alternated with documentary footage of a forest ranger rushing towards the forest fire with a fire extinguisher.

The game footage of an angel spreading its wings of light and swooping down from the sky to revive teammates is overlapped with a surveillance video of an emergency doctor kneeling on a stretcher to perform CPR on a patient;

A slow-motion shot of Reinhardt raising his energy shield at the forefront of the team is superimposed onto a news photo of a group of firefighters carrying water cannons and rushing into the fire from the opposite direction.

There was not a single line of narration.

There is not a single superfluous annotation.

A cannon shot from the fortress was superimposed onto a shot of soldiers saluting in front of the boundary marker.

The scene instantly shifts to the moment when the fighter jets are launched from the aircraft carrier deck.

The beeping sound of D.Va's mech self-destruct countdown was cut into a first-person perspective video clip of a bomb disposal expert wearing a heavy bomb suit walking alone toward a suspicious package.

The video had no background music, only the heavy breathing of the bomb disposal expert.

Rift's line, "Don't worry, leave it to me,"

The accompanying image is a street surveillance video showing a girl in a school uniform bending down to protect a child who has fallen on a zebra crossing.

Winston's quote, "We are born to change the world," is superimposed on an aerial shot of a group of construction workers erecting a power transmission tower hundreds of meters in the air, with clouds churning beneath their feet and steel frames standing steadily in their hands.

The visuals became faster and faster, the rhythm became denser, and the music gradually incorporated strings and drums in addition to the piano solo.

The heroes' ultimate skills unleash one after another on the screen.

Meanwhile, scenes from the real world shift at the same pace: flood control, disaster relief, peacekeeping, and protection.

The grand finale—the angel.

Her ultimate skill animation is shown frame by frame.

The angel hovered in mid-air, its wings of light bursting open from its back, spraying golden light in all directions.

The scene was preserved intact, without any real-world images superimposed on it, and without any sound effects covering her voice.

Her voice was gentle yet firm as she uttered the line that everyone, both on and off screen, was intimately familiar with.

"Heroes never die!!!!"

The scene then shifts, freezing on the faces of those being protected.

After the flood, a little girl being carried down from the roof by rescue workers looks back at the camera.

Beside the ruins of the fire, an old man held a firefighter's hand, his face filled with tears and wrinkles.

In front of the border post, a child stood on tiptoe and gave a slightly awkward salute to a departing military vehicle.

The music slowly comes to a close at this moment, and the melody returns to the initial single piano note.

black screen.

White text appeared—

"The world needs more heroes."

"And you can be one too."

Without lengthy, sentimental build-up, the image freezes, and the playback ends.

It was released just after midnight.

The number of comments and bullet comments has started to surge rapidly.

The first group to flood into the top-rated comments section were gamers.

"I just logged off Overwatch and saw this, I couldn't hold back anymore."

"I'll never slack off when playing Angel again."

"I knew I'd get goosebumps every time I heard 'Heroes Never Die,' and now I understand why. It's because that line isn't just a skill voice line in the game; it's real."

A user with the verified ID "Emergency Room Black Slave" wrote a long passage.

"I was rotating through the emergency department today. I was called in to help out in the early hours of the morning. An elderly man suddenly stopped breathing. My supervising teacher knelt on the stretcher and performed chest compressions the whole way, even when his feet were run over by the wheels."

The moment the heartbeat returned, the family member knelt on the ground and kowtowed. The supervising teacher simply said "It's what I should do" and then limped back to the duty room.

It turns out, the hero was right beside me.

A message was left by a grassroots worker whose ID was located in a western province.

"Last year, when I was on duty for flood control, I was standing on the embankment wearing a raincoat. The rain was so heavy that I couldn't see the people on the other side. There was no cell phone signal, and the walkie-talkie only had 'received' and 'present' on it."

At that time, I didn't think of myself as a hero; I just felt that this was something that had to be done.

I saw this video today, and when I saw Reinhardt holding his shield in the game, I suddenly burst into tears.

It wasn't because we felt understood, but because we realized that someone had seen us.

These comments are piled up in the comment section, each telling a different story, but each responding to the same theme.

No one organized it, no one set the pace; everyone was simply touched by a certain segment or line from the video, which touched the softest part of their memories, and then they wrote it down.

The next day, the unlicensed rider posted an update.

"I don't know what to say, but when I woke up, my number of followers had increased more than all of the past few years combined."

Actually, I've wanted to make this video for a long time, but I haven't been able to find suitable materials and angles.

It wasn't until I played Overwatch and heard Mercy's line that I understood.

I didn't create the video; I just pieced together the emotions that everyone already had.

Thank you to every dedicated hero, and thank you to the Land of Light for giving us these words.

The number of reposts and comments continues to rise.

The topic's popularity spread across higher levels of social media, from the gaming section to the film and television section, and from the film and television section to the social topics section.

Different user groups evoked different emotions from the same video.

What gamers see is "the games we play are more than just games";

What frontline workers saw was, "Finally, someone understands us."

What ordinary netizens see is, "So this is how close heroes are to me."

Around noon, Yang Qian's Weibo account, "Light Country Animation Studio - A Guang," updated with a new post.

He shared a video of "Unlicensed Rider" and commented on it.

"Great video, heroes never die! Ordinary people can also become heroes."

The comment section below the reposted post quickly gained popularity.

"Ah Guang actually reposted it! Were you slacking off at work again?!"

"Waaah, Ah-Guang understands us, he's always been by our side."

"He understands, he has always understood, and what he is doing is making the stories of ordinary people visible."

"Heroes are not born strong; they become strong by making heroic choices."

"I now reasonably suspect that A-Guang's original intention in making Overwatch was to find something that everyone would play, and then secretly hide a sentence in it that everyone should hear."

Yang Qian sat in her office scrolling through these comments and smiled knowingly.

Smuggling in personal agendas?

Isn't that basic stuff?

Just then, a new notification popped up on his phone.

Upon opening it, the smile on my lips deepened by an inch.

The official account of the Communist Youth League reposted the video with a very brief comment.

"There are many ordinary heroes in life, and you can become your own hero."

The comment section of this repost was quickly flooded with comments from countless netizens, with some sending a row of salute emojis.

This sentence was almost instantly repeated by the barrage and repost section.

Like a silent relay race, the last runners are the ordinary people reading this text on their screens.

The ripple effects of the dual authentication quickly became apparent that afternoon.

The search index and popularity of Overwatch have surged.

People who don't usually play games are starting to wonder, "What game does the phrase 'Heroes Never Die' come from?"

People who weren't initially interested in shooting games started asking, "Is it true that the heroes in this game say a lot of heartfelt things?"

The application channel for the test server was overwhelmed by traffic that evening.

The number of people in the queue exploded.

The head of the technical department's operations team looked at the server load curve on the screen, hesitated for a second, and ultimately did not knock on Yang Qian's door.

He simply issued dispatch instructions methodically in the work group, then tilted his head back and finished the last sip of strong tea in his mug.

"We can still fight! If things really come to a head... this was entirely within my expectations!"

Within the Land of Light, Su Xiaoran, carrying a tablet, hurried towards Yang Qian's office.

When she pushed the door open, Yang Qian was standing in front of the French windows, holding a piece of paper that she had just taken out of the printer.

"Director Yang, what's this...?"

"Draft proposal for the new project."