A FEW DAYS later, I turn onto a side street in Seoul's Gangnam District, following a sign that says 02 PC BANG. Down several flights of steps, I enter a dark, windowless room furnished with rows of computers. An older woman sits near the door, next to a display of energy drinks. The cafe is silent except for League's telltale sound effects (coins tinkling, weapons firing). Near the back of the room, three Korean men sit shoulder to shoulder, tapping at their keyboards. One of them, a 27-year-old named Kim Hyun-jun, says he comes here a couple of times a week, usually for five hours at a time.

When I ask him whether he's heard of Faker, he looks at me as if I've sprouted a third eye. "Of course," he replies, while his friends snicker. "Everyone knows him. Faker is God."

Korea has more than 12,000 PC bangs, many of which are open 24 hours a day. They started cropping up in the late 1990s, when the Asian financial crisis spurred the government to invest in broadband. According to OGN's Wi, the recession helped spawn the Korean eSports craze. "The unemployment rate went up, and there was a huge amount of people looking for things to do," he says. "So they started playing video games." Today it seems counterintuitive that in a country where young children carry smartphones that aren't yet available in the West, people still flock to old-fashioned Internet cafés. But there are sociological reasons for their persistence. In Seoul, where many families live in small apartments, kids are less likely to play shooter games in their living rooms. Instead, they escape to PC bangs.

The first eSport to sweep the country was StarCraft, a real-time strategy game that's as complicated as chess. StarCraft was released in 1998; by the middle of the 2000s, Korea boasted a thriving professional league, a regulatory agency (the Korean eSports Association, or KeSPA) and two cable networks dedicated to gaming. But at the end of the decade, StarCraft was losing steam -- just in time for Riot Games, a small company based in Santa Monica, California, to bring League of Legends to market. Riot doesn't break out user numbers by country, but more than 27 million people play the game every day. When professional teams started to form in Korea in 2012, an advanced infrastructure of coaches, sponsors and training houses was already in place.

Faker lives with his teammates in an apartment on the fringes of Seoul, in an area populated by half-empty office buildings. The players share bedrooms. When they wake up around noon, a cook comes in and prepares lunch. Afterward, they walk a few minutes to their training center. For the next eight hours, they practice by scrimmaging against other teams, occasionally taking breaks to study game film. Faker usually practices by himself for at least four more hours.

When I visit the facility, SKT's coaches, Choi "L.i.E.S." Byoung-hoon and Kim "kkOma" Jeong-gyun, are in their shared office, sitting side by side in matching leather chairs. I ask kkOma, who is playing League at his computer, what he thinks of the Korean Exodus. "It depends on the results of this year's championship," he says, one hand rapidly clicking on a mouse, eyes locked onto the screen. "If Korea wins, it isn't a problem. If another region wins, maybe there is."

When I mention Faker, kkOma furrows his brow. "It's a team game," he says. "When the team doesn't do well, Faker doesn't do well. He looks as good as he does because there's a baseline set by the rest of the team."

Outside the coaches' office, God himself stands in the hall, gazing at a picture of the 2013 roster posing with the Summoner's Cup in Los Angeles, the players beaming as they each point a finger to the sky. I ask him whether he's still in touch with the players who left Korea, and he says no. "I'm busy practicing."

Faker grew up in the Gangseo District, not far from the SKT training center. He and his younger brother were raised by his father (he says he hasn't seen his mother in a while) and his grandparents. From an early age, he was an autodidact, the kind of kid who solved Rubik's Cubes and read foreign books to teach himself new languages. His father, a carpenter, was slightly bewildered by his precocious son. Sang-hyeok always loved games -- learning them, practicing them, conquering them. He discovered League when it launched in Korea in 2011, and he started playing it around the clock; before long, he was so good the Korean server struggled to match him with players of equivalent skill. When SKT approached him, he had just started high school. After joining the team, he dropped out.

Faker shows me the computer room where he practices, then leads me to a lounge furnished with a massive leather sectional, a shelf of trophies and a rack of sneakers from New Balance, one of SKT's sponsors. A cooler is stocked with sports drinks provided by another sponsor, Pocari Sweat. The sofa is big enough for sprawling, but Faker perches on the edge, his hands clasped together. When I ask him to describe his life at the training center, he paints an ascetic picture. He has no real hobbies outside of gaming, and he's never had a girlfriend. The walls of his room are blank. He likes water.

I tell him I've read that he owns a couple of plants and ask him what they look like. "There's a tree-ish one and a grass-ish one," he replies. He pats the tufts of hair above his temples, a recurring tic.

Initially, SKT's coaches were put off by Faker's shyness. One was even worried he might have a speech disorder -- some days, he uttered only a few words. "He didn't talk very much, so we had reservations about whether he would be good in a team environment," Choi says.

I think if I practice hard, I will indisputably be the best again. - Faker

But when Faker talks about League, he visibly relaxes. I ask him how he can play so many champions -- while most gamers have mastered a few characters, he's played more than 30 at the professional level -- and his eyes light up. "My strength is in understanding the flow of the game, when to fight and when not to fight," he explains. "Regardless of which champion I play, that strength is there." As he recounts his professional career, details trickle out. At the 2013 world championship in Los Angeles, his team took him to Universal Studios; he smiles broadly when he recounts the Transformers ride. Sometimes, he opens his practice sessions to fans and plays American pop music in the background. His favorite artist is Taylor Swift.

He admits that fame perplexes him. League fans on Naver, a Korean Internet portal, track his every move. A recent Reddit post ruminating on whether he was flirting with a Korean television presenter drew hundreds of comments. When he makes a rare trip outside SKT's training center, he's often recognized by teenage admirers. "I usually wear a baseball cap," he says.

Faker doesn't like to talk about the offer from China. When I bring it up, his mouth twists a little and he rubs his hair again. "A lot of players who left say it's been difficult," he finally says. "I think going abroad is a good experience, but personally, I want to stay in Korea and win the world championship again." I ask him whether he believes he's the best player in the world. "Not yet," he says. "There are a lot of people on my level now. I think if I practice hard, I will indisputably be the best again."

DOA AND MONTECRISTO, the American casters, both live in Kyunglidan, a trendy neighborhood with narrow streets lined with jewel-box-sized cafés and craft breweries. We meet there for lunch -- jaeyook bokeum, or stir-fried pork belly -- with Susie Kim, a translator and former StarCraft caster. When I ask the group why Faker is regarded as the best player in the world, MonteCristo, who goes by Monte, jumps in: "How would you grade a professional athlete? Like, what makes LeBron great?"

I rattle off a few words: athleticism, skill, decision-making.

"It's the same. It's exactly the same," Susie says.

The League equivalent of athleticism is called mechanics, which refers to a player's ability to use his mouse and keyboard to make swift movements, like dodging shots. In this respect, Monte says, Faker is peerless. He points me to a video of what is widely seen as the greatest play in League history, clipped from a 2013 game between SK Telecom and the KT Bullets. Faker is dueling another player, Ryu, and they're both playing the same champion, a ninja named Zed. After a brief skirmish, Faker's Zed appears about to die, so he darts away. Then, just when Ryu thinks he has the fight sewn up, Faker unleashes a startling set of moves, cutting down his opponent in a blinding flash. The audience goes nuts. "He used six different abilities in the span of two seconds," Monte says.

Even more impressive, DoA adds, is the breadth of Faker's champion pool, which makes it easier for him to adapt to new patches to the game -- the "meta," in eSports parlance. Because Riot upgrades League every few weeks, players live in perpetual fear of having their favorite champions' skills diminished. Imagine if the NFL suddenly announced next year that rushing touchdowns were worth only five points, or if MLB expanded the strike zone for left-handed pitchers. Although the constantly changing meta keeps the game fresh, it can be agonizing for professionals. Some players never recover from an ill-timed patch.

That's one of the reasons the average eSports career is so short. Professional players typically retire before their mid-20s; like figure skaters, they peak long before then. Older gamers must battle slowing reflexes and fatigue, as well as injuries to their necks and wrists. "As a male teenager, it's easy to play video games for 16 hours," Monte says.

Because many Korean players skip college, their career options after retiring are limited. "A lot of pro gamers don't come from wealthy backgrounds," Susie says. "A good number of them are doing this because they're supporting their families." Increasingly, she says, players realize they have limited time to capitalize on their skills, which is driving some of them to leave the country. Although most professional gamers in Korea earn five-digit salaries and a few elite players make over $100,000 (Monte says Faker probably makes more than twice that; SK Telecom declined to comment on his salary), Chinese teams boast massive war chests. One squad, Invictus Gaming, is owned by the son of Wang Jianlin, the richest man in mainland China. This winter, Invictus added four Korean players to its roster.

Pro players also make money by streaming, allowing fans to watch them practice while advertisements pop up. One retired player in China, Wei "Caomei" Han-Dong, has said he makes more than $800,000 a year streaming. Korean teams have begun to stream a little, but in general, "they think it's inefficient," says Lee "CloudTemplar" Hyun-woo, a retired-gamer-turned-caster. "In Korea, to make money you have to put up results." Demand is out there, though. This February, a minor scandal flared up when a Twitch user started streaming Faker's practice games without permission.

Riot Games' Korean headquarters is located near Sinsa Station, a hotbed for plastic surgery. The airy office boasts the usual Silicon Valley trappings: arcade games, a Lego table, even a drum set. League is free to play, but Riot makes money -- $1.3 billion last year, according to SuperData Research -- by charging for cheap in-game features such as skins or custom kits for champions. Many of these add-ons become popular after professional players use them.

To stem the flight of Korean players, Riot and KeSPA, the league's regulator, have enacted a few changes. Last fall Riot instituted a new region-locking system that restricts Western teams from recruiting too many foreigners. Richard Kwon, Riot's Korean communications chief, hopes to persuade the government to grant reprieves from mandatory military service to successful eSports athletes, as it did for MLB star Shin-Soo Choo. Yet he insists the Korean Exodus is overblown. "What's different about the Korean scene is there's a very strong amateur scene," he says. "We can find and raise new talent easily."

Another Riot Games staffer jokes: "Faker Two."

Korean workplaces are famed for their emphasis on collectivism. No individual is greater than the group, and no quality matters more than unity. "Teams will say, 'If a player can't handle the amount of pay he's getting, we'll just send him off,'" CloudTemplar says. "'We can start fresh with a new player.'" Korean players aren't naturally gifted at video games, he says -- they're just better trained, with superior coaches. "That's probably our greatest strength," he says.

But what happens, I ask, when the coaches start to leave? "We'll just have to put in even more effort," he says.