Ma Lin had no objections over the two matches, one win and one loss.
He was already Gold I. Losing meant losing fewer points, and winning resulted in gaining more points. The matching system was fair, effort would surely be rewarded, even though the reward came a bit slowly.
Some people put in far more effort than Ma Lin in their ranked matches, playing ten rounds a day, but they just couldn't climb the ranks.
Beyond their mentality, there was an extremely important aspect that bottlenecked them: they were stuck in energy training and martial techniques.
Publicly available training methods and martial techniques suited for Legendary Level 9 players were scarce and often of inferior quality, with low universality.
Lucky ones like Ma Lin, who could access top-tier energy training methods and martial techniques, were even rarer.
