Preliminaries, Days Three and Four
NJ Fire Cup Unified Preliminaries.
Rounds three and four of the preliminary stage, held across the third and fourth days of the unified qualifiers.
I dispatched Yoo Seongho, 1-dan, and then Tanigawa, 5-dan, in succession to advance to the finals of my group.
As much as I hate to admit it, a stray thought crosses my mind: perhaps I've been reaping the benefits of my current appearance.
I — Shin Changmo — was, from the very start, a player with an overwhelming strength in the opening phase of the game. It was extremely rare for me to enter the middle game already behind in the fuseki, and many of my matches ended with me crushing my opponent from the first dozen moves onward.
Because of that, players who lacked confidence in their own openings did their utmost to keep the early game against me as plain and simple as possible. Their thinking was to play the fuseki to a draw and settle the matter in the middle and late game.
Tangling themselves up in complicated variations had, time and again, produced no remarkable results and burned through their clock for nothing, so it was the natural response on their part.
And that kind of response was, on the whole, efficient. In most cases I had no choice but to play out my matches having claimed only a single point of profit or two in the opening.
But the current me is an amateur with no game records and no data anywhere. What's more, to all outward appearances, I'm a tiny, painfully young child.
That an inexperienced player would be weak in the opening is a perfectly reasonable, common-sense inference.
The only problem is that I exist, absurdly and impossibly, far beyond the bounds of common sense.
Yoo Seongho, 1-dan, and Tanigawa, 5-dan, both chose violence over caution in the opening fuseki. Even had I been in their position, I would have made the same choice — it was that obvious.
Unfortunately for them, their choices led to the exact opposite of what they hoped for.
Not only did I seize the territory, I took the initiative as well, and I was able to steer the game comfortably while they, having lost control of the board, were dragged along by the nose and never got to show their true strength. The same current that had flowed through my first match, the preliminary round two, carried on through every game after.
I don't feel as though I defeated these opponents on merit. They simply hadn't analyzed me, and I was lucky enough to win easily.
On the other side of Group I's bracket, Li Junyan, 6-dan — ranked seventeenth in the Chinese Go Association — faced Park Pilgyu, 9-dan.
On paper, Li Junyan held the clear advantage, but when he committed an enormous blunder, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, latched onto it with unrelenting tenacity and clawed his way to victory.
Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, is a living legend of the Go world — someone I had looked up to since childhood. His prime had flourished a full thirty years ago, yet he kept studying without end and held his ground at the very front lines, all the way through the years when I was active as a rookie.
Even as young stars rose to challenge him, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, remained unshaken in his place. When the world grew pessimistic and predicted his decline, he quietly overturned their forecasts by qualifying for the main stages of tournament after tournament.
Tragically, I never once faced him across a board.
As I remember it, before the chance ever came, Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, died in a terrible car accident.
And yet now, after everything has come full circle, the opportunity has appeared before me in this strange form. Fate truly is a peculiar thing.
The venue for the Group I final is the Special Match Room, where the most important games of the Hankuk Kiwon are played.
Merely being allowed through its doors is proof of strength.
Either your opponent is strong, or you yourself are strong. It must be one of the two.
Competing in an open tournament's preliminaries at the Hankuk Kiwon hadn't quite made it feel real — that I had truly returned to the world of Go.
But now, at last, I feel as though I've set my foot firmly back into this lonely, long-missed world.
"Phew."
A quiet, distant feeling settles over me as I turn the shower faucet. Cold water begins to soak my small body, starting from the crown of my head.
From the moment we're flung into this harsh world bearing nothing but our own finitude, human beings were never permitted a perfect life to begin with. There is no such thing as a perfectly alive group—no life completed, no self fulfilled.
High or low, powerful or obscure, every one of us remains nothing more than a mere speck of dust. Knowing we can never reach it, we still writhe and struggle toward perfection anyway.
We chase nothing but the afterimage of something ultimate and final, infinite and eternal — and in the end, we fall away into a single cold stone, robbed of all warmth.
Shin Changmo ended that way. Ryu Seoa will, in the end, come to the same.
"Hahh... hahahaha..."
I can't help but laugh at the sight of myself hurling my body into the very same fire.
But whether you sit still and rot away, or burn until nothing remains but ash — the outcome is identical either way. So I have decided to burn, magnificently.
Longer than Shin Changmo did, and more brilliantly.
Just like Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, whom I'm about to face.
"Hehe..."
I feel my heart burning with anticipation as I drench myself from head to toe.
Gong Daegil, editor-in-chief of one of the most influential Go magazines in circulation, had set aside every other task and come to the Hankuk Kiwon at the crack of dawn to personally cover the figure currently stirring up a storm in the Go world.
Ryu Seoa.
Champion of the women's division at the WY Cup National Amateur Tournament.
He had heard the name even before the NJ Fire Cup unified preliminaries began. A child prodigy who, in the very first round of the main draw, had eliminated Hozumi Asana — the girl the Nihon Ki-in was cultivating through a flagship, association-wide project — and then gone on to win the whole tournament by dispatching a Hankuk Kiwon insei.
A reporter assigned to the WY Cup coverage had reported that the pretty mixed-heritage girl was newsworthy on her looks alone.
The story practically packaged itself, so he'd kept a vague intention of doing a proper feature on her someday, when he could give it his full attention. It had merely slipped down the priority list ahead of a major tournament, that was all.
As it happened, that girl had used her WY Cup champion's privilege to enter the NJ Fire Cup unified preliminaries directly, skipping the amateur qualifiers entirely. An enormous boon, courtesy of the relationship between WY Corporation and NJ Corporation.
He, the editor-in-chief, had thought nothing more of it than: let's hope the girl, granted a brief taste of the big stage, comes away inspired rather than crushed.
Facing the future women's professionals she'd one day compete against, even once, was good experience. And if her opponent happened to make plenty of mistakes, an amateur champion like her might well luck into a win or two — but he had far more important matches to worry about, so he wiped the girl from his mind.
Even if she won a game, it would only ever need a single line in the results column afterward.
Except — it turned out the girl hadn't entered the women's division at all, but the open division, of all things. And starting from the very first day, she'd beaten a Chinese professional.
By the time the news reached his ears, Ryu Seoa had already defeated a Hankuk Kiwon professional. He'd felt the ground tilt beneath him and thrown his entire staff's resources at her on the spot, but all they'd salvaged were a handful of match photographs. Not an interview, not even a single question lobbed her way.
Apparently everyone had the same idea — rival magazine reporters were there in force, along with quite a few reporters from the general dailies. Pure Go fans with no press credentials had turned up in noticeable numbers too. It was a large open tournament, true, but under normal circumstances no one would have been camping out for spots like this.
Wei Demei, 3-dan, of China. Yoo Seongho, 1-dan, who'd turned professional two years ago. And Tanigawa, 5-dan, of Japan.
Distinguished opponents all — the kind even elite women's professionals would hesitate to promise a victory against.
Yet Ryu Seoa had defeated every one of them without a single loss.
Official record: three wins, zero defeats.
An unprecedented situation: a female amateur who wasn't even a professional now carried a higher rating than the women's pros.
Word was that the Hankuk Kiwon board of directors had already concluded — regardless of the Group I final's outcome — to grant Ryu Seoa a Special Professional Induction at the board's own discretion.
There were also reports that the Nihon Ki-in, having heard of Hozumi Asana's crushing defeat, was moving to approach Ryu Seoa. If you meant to land a big fish that rare and hold onto it safely, it was the obvious decision to make.
Either way, the girl who had produced results no one could have predicted now faces Park Pilgyu, 9-dan — the man who felled Li Junyan, 6-dan, Group I's presumptive finalist.
The youngest competitor versus the oldest. And what competitors they are: the youngest a mere ten-year-old elementary school girl, the oldest a living legend of Korean Go.
It's a once-in-a-century event, the kind that would stir interest even in people with no interest in Go whatsoever. That was surely why the daily-paper reporters had dug in and set up camp as well.
Through the quiet, he feels a hand brush his shoulder. His cub reporter, along for the assignment, is pointing furtively at something with an almost conspiratorial gesture.
A blonde girl, doll-like in appearance, walking toward them hand in hand with a middle-aged man who looks to be her grandfather.
Determined not to be late, he tosses away the cigarette he'd been sneaking and quickens his pace before anyone else catches on.