The Winning Streak
It was a game that could have been decided in the opening. When I had pushed in and enveloped the top-left corner with a pincer approach, I had possessed the strength to settle the outcome right then and there.
My opponent's move had been a sharp, desperate gamble — but I judged that a safe, solid response would have been enough to punish it fully.
Instead, I had spurned the easy road, stubbornly groped for a new path, and ended up with a half-baked sequence. That was pure obstinacy on my part, nothing more.
The endgame stretched on, stone piling upon stone without end, until the grid of the board seemed to warp like a whirlpool before my eyes.
A raging ocean. Winds that whipped around me in the middle of the heaving swell, torrents of water that stung like lashes against my face, thunder splitting the sky above.
But if I held the ship steady and refused to be swept away by the violent current, the storm would quiet before I knew it, and calm waters would spread out before me.
A harbor, faintly visible in the distance. I did not let go of the thread of tension — my hands tightened hard around the wheel.
Only after the ship was fully moored at the dock did I lean back from the chair and take a sip of my long-cold tea.
A brutal match, nearly four hundred moves of relentless capturing races traded back and forth.
My head throbbed, my body ached from sitting motionless for so long — and yet I couldn't wipe the smile from my lips.
I had won.
Not a victory scraped together from foreknowledge of things to come, but one fought for and seized through pure intuition and reading.
Only afterward did I feel the pang of regret — I'd burned stamina I should have been banking for tomorrow's match. But holding nothing back from the game in front of you is not merely a professional's duty; holding back would have been a disrespect to my opponent as well.
Hui Yun 5-dan — an ill-fated connection, but a connection nonetheless.
"Thank you for the game."
I spoke in Chinese and offered my hand first.
"I learned a great deal this time as well."
Hui Yun 5-dan took my hand, making no effort to hide the bitterness on her face.
It was a game that would be difficult even to review properly. Still, letting it simply slide by didn't sit right with either of us, so by mutual agreement we briefly went back over it from the opening.
"Why did you play like this, here?"
Through the interpreter, Hui Yun 5-dan pointed to the spot where I had committed my decisive blunder.
She had grounds to ask. It was never a move played carelessly, one that deliberately invited disadvantage. It was simply that I had judged it through the clumsy yardstick of 'Ryu Seoa,' and made a miscalculation.
But that was not the kind of answer she wanted.
"Well... perhaps the price of following my convictions."
I had pursued a lofty purpose; the means had simply fallen short of efficient. That was all there was to it.
"I see. Though I couldn't even begin to guess what that conviction might be... I'll be rooting for you."
Perhaps I had come close enough to the answer she was hoping for, because she smiled faintly as she said it. The title of the continent's most beautiful Go player was not given for nothing — she was genuinely captivating.
Having finished a rough review, I wrapped up the brief post-game interview and collapsed into my mother's car like a sack of rice.
"You hungry? What do you want to eat when we get home?"
Mom asked, glancing at me sprawled across the back seat.
"...Something spicy. Brothy."
"Something spicy that our Seoa loves... that'd be a spicy fish stew, then."
"...Yes."
Mom was getting a more precise read on my palate by the day. I nodded, cheeks flushing warm.
"Then we should stop for groceries on the way back. That all right?"
"Of course."
"Good. Pro Ryu is one match from finishing her streak — this mom needs to keep her strength up."
"Thank you, Mom."
"Thank me nothing. If you show up tomorrow with no energy and lose, your grandfather will murder me."
Mom shook her head slowly as she spoke.
"I should pay my respects to Grandfather once the tournament's over."
"You should. He's beside himself wanting to see you. He'll brag to complete strangers that he's Ryu Seoa's grandfather, that man..."
"...Oh, surely not."
"You don't know your grandfather well enough, that's all. When I was in school—"
Mom launched into an old story, and I listened with half an ear as I closed my eyes.
The final match of the streak.
As if to answer the crowd's expectations, countless Go fans had flooded in to watch.
The weight of it.
The importance of the game that would close out the tournament, and the feverish anticipation of a public whipped into a blaze by four straight wins.
In my past life, crushed and hollowed out by defeat, I had lost the ability to feel this crushing pressure at all — I couldn't even trust myself anymore. Now, in this fragile, fragile body, on top of the punishing schedule of five matches in as many days, it bore down on me until I could hardly breathe.
"Heh heh..."
Before I realized it, a smile had spread across my lips.
The weight pressing down on my shoulders.
If I gave in and collapsed beneath it, that was the end. But if I could bear it and rise, it became the rich soil of growth.
It was painful — but not so crushing that I would fold without even trying.
My final opponent was Lin Meichao 9-dan of China.
Ever since her professional debut, she had performed consistently at the very top of the Chinese circuit.
As her nickname 'Snow Maiden' suggested, she was a player of astonishing composure and ice-cold decisiveness.
Hair tied back in immaculate order, indifferent eyes flicking over me.
Merely meeting her gaze sent a chill through me.
The nigiri was settled.
I would take black. She reached for white.
This was a tournament where the finest female players had gathered and burned with passion and fighting spirit — I couldn't afford to fumble the finish.
I laid out the board at a leisurely pace.
Against Lin Meichao 9-dan's strategy of aggressively biting into the corners and sides, I naturally accumulated thickness.
I had no intention of overreaching my station just to satisfy the world's inflated expectations.
Once you sat down before the board, the stakes of the game ceased to matter.
A trivial match or a crucial one — either way, it was the same single game of Go. To play sloppily because a strong opponent lowered my winning odds, or because the game mattered little; to play feverishly because prize money and honor hung on it — either would betray everything I believed in.
"Whew."
I took a slow, deep breath and let the impatience and greed ripple out of me unconsciously.
What came after the game could wait until the game was decided.
What mattered now was the process. Playing as I always did, as I had practiced — piling stones neither in excess nor in want — that was the whole of what I needed to attend to.
I focused on nothing but the synthesis of Shin Changmo's Go and Ryu Seoa's. If I leaned on the Go of the past alone, the same thing would simply repeat on every larger stage to come.
Because I did not contest Lin Meichao 9-dan's advances — because I yielded ground — I gave up territory and took thickness in return.
The fate of the game would be decided by how much of that thickness's value I could convert into concrete points.
Thickness.
A word spoken constantly in the Go world, yet its value bordered on the mystical. Surrouding stones, the opponent's response, move order, hostages — with countless variables in play, calculating the true value of thickness precisely is something only an artificial intelligence, with its overwhelming computational power, can manage.
Of course, a handful of humans — those at the summit of the Go world — can grasp that value with rough accuracy. The legendary professional known in this era as the 'Divine Mountain,' still in the full flower of his prime, is one of them.
I have no such machine-like calculation, no such piercing instinct. At least, not yet.
But though I failed to adapt, I am the only professional alive who lived through the AI era. I never ran the calculations myself — yet I glimpsed, over and over, the answers the machines had produced.
Not perfectly accurate, but I had learned to approximate.
A tacit negotiation with Lin Meichao 9-dan.
To those who knew Go well, it might have looked as though I kept taking the short end of every exchange. But layered on top of a steady read of the position, the latent value said I held a slim advantage.
Past the hundredth move, Lin Meichao 9-dan — perhaps judging she had secured enough territory — began to play for stability.
She was sealing off every variable. Mistakes would not be forgiven.
I would have to milk the potential of each and every stone, squeezing every drop of development out of my thick, resilient framework.
"Hoooh."
With a treacherous path of thorns stretching out before me, I steadied my breath for a moment.