What the Chinese teams fight for

In the quiet hours before the show begins, while our heroes dream of dota, one man lies awake in his bed one eye open staring at the ceiling, the other concealed behind a black eye patch. He contemplated the events around the world since the last TI. It had been utter chaos... and it was all his fault. He was the one who released COVID into the world.

Immediately following TI9, Ceb secreted away to the Chinese Dota Temple, he had heard rumor of its location near the Yangtze and Han rivers, close to the capitol city of China’s Hubei province, Wuhan. His immense fortune from investing 100% of his earnings from TI8 into bitcoin made his search nearly trivial. He and a small team equipped with technology that dealt in "exploratory physics" found the temple sat upon a silvery pond in the middle of a hidden glade. This was the source of Dota power in China.

Ceb knew his biggest threat to his Dota supremacy would be from China and he sought to undermine that, he would steal their future. The material in the pond was not water, but an essence; something in our world from the spirit world. Ceb had swept his hand through the essence, and it felt like water, but when he closed his hands it slipped through his fingers like a vapor - He could grasp but he couldn't hold. The essence of Dota.

He and his team extracted the essence. But in the process a malfunction in the equipment put some of the essence it was holding into an unstable state. The engineered glass enclosure began to crack and finally exploded in a ring outward a cloud of green gas miles high. The team had a former special ops commando on staff, so he had prepared them for an eventuality like this. They quickly fastened a mask and goggles and finished their work. After a few minutes the cloud of poison had dissipated and all life left behind had withered.

Ceb filled the pool at n0tail's Portugal compound with the essence. The team swim and play and bathe in it. This is how OG made it through qualifiers, and this is how OG made it to the upper bracket.

... and this is what the Chinese teams fight for. To regain what was stolen, they have no choice but to win. The only way to restore balance is to use the Icefrog's boon, a gift given to the Grand Champion of TI. And so if they cannot defeat Ceb and OG, all hope will be lost. A Chinese team must lift the Aegis.