The Beast Bares Its Fangs
The WY Cup Amateur Championship.
After a light lunch at a small rice-dish joint near the venue with Grandfather, I arrived at the final match.
I lifted my head briefly to study my opponent — a girl of high school age, mature in some ways yet still carrying a certain youthful freshness.
Beautiful eyes drawn in soft curves, a slender jawline, long hair gathered up and tied back — she was a genuinely lovely girl, and she played a tighter, more systematic game than the opponent I'd faced in the semifinals.
Lee Jiah, was it? One of the top-ranked insei.
Insei — trainee professionals — were like blades forged by the finest blacksmiths from the finest ore. When the era's greatest talents are cultivated in the very best environments, becoming incapable of playing bad Go simply isn't an option.
Her finishing work might still be incomplete, but these were weapons destructive enough to cleave a dull professional cleanly in two.
Pick up any one of them, and not a single flaw could be honestly found.
And yet only after hundreds, thousands of collisions against one another — a rigorous process of selection — were the very best few insei permitted to step through the narrow gate into the professional world and unleash that power.
That is why an unbridgeable gap exists between amateurs and professionals.
And as if to prove that she stood among the very front-runners of the professional qualification race, my opponent's fundamentals were impeccable, beyond reproach. Except…
"…Hm."
White 70. Black 71. White 72, Black 73 — an exchange of moves.
Before I realized it, I was frowning. I hadn't lost ground. If anything, I had gained.
Since crushing her head-on would be difficult against an opponent this solid, I had probed the upper side, aiming to force a ko, overturn the board, and drag the position into chaos.
But she seemed to have read the intent buried beneath it all — the girl across from me chose a compromising move, absorbing a degree of loss in order to avoid the melee.
Lee Jiah understood Go far too well. Understood it almost excessively.
Knowledge never works only in your favor. It makes a person humble — and at the same time, it makes them afraid.
A beginner who knows nothing feels no fear. Whatever they play, they cannot see what consequences await.
But a master with a wide field of vision is forever wary, forever afraid — because they can see the dangerous futures invisible to beginners.
And so, among those who study Go, some grow steadily more passive the more they learn.
Carefulness and vigilance are certainly good things.
But too little or too much of anything turns out badly — and Go is no exception.
The middle way. One must always pursue the proper balance.
At the decisive point of a game, boldness is sometimes required.
Of course, I don't mean the reckless bravado of a beginner charging into the enemy's fortifications without retreat even in an absolutely losing fight.
I mean standing one's ground at an evenly matched point of contention. If you could fight only when victory was certain, that would naturally be ideal — but circumstances are never always favorable.
If you come out passively every single time, you may avoid losing badly, but you will never win.
"…."
Watching the girl's Go — hunched and cowering despite its enormous frame — felt like watching the Go of my own final years.
Confidence worn down by repeated defeats; only safe moves played, just to avoid losing big; any adventure avoided if it carried even the slightest risk; no new challenges attempted; win rate collapsed at the bottom. An unending chain of vicious circles.
For a high schooler, she was already old by insei standards.
That she was still an insei meant she had failed the professional exam several times over. It would be no wonder if she had lost faith in her own Go.
Viewed coldly, her talent and skill alone were more than sufficient to turn professional as a woman. But with passive Go like this, she would never become a professional — and even if she somehow did, she would taste nothing but failure.
I had no obligation to do anything.
Even if I simply left the girl alone, no harm would come to me.
If I meddled for no reason and threw away the prize money, there could be nothing stupider. After all, hadn't I returned to Go in the first place — regardless of my feelings about the game — to prepare for the financial hardship ahead?
And yet, whenever I tried to reach a decision, an uncomfortable weight settled in the corner of my chest.
Was it because watching splendid talent wither before it could ever bloom bothered me? Or because seeing my past self in her stirred something like pity?
The time remaining on the clock was steadily draining away.
I had no time to waste on deliberations like this.
I made my decision at once.
Yoon Woo-jae, 6-dan — a retired professional who now streamed Go commentary online — smiled to himself as he watched his viewer count swell.
There were more viewers now than when he had broadcast world title matches.
The WY Cup Women's Amateur Championship. It was a large tournament for an amateur event, true, but it was never the kind of competition built to command this much public attention.
It had become a talking point when Hozumi Asana — who had just clinched the youngest professional debut in Japanese history — entered, but if that had been all, no one would have gone out of their way to seek out the broadcast.
The true center of the tournament's popularity was the player named Ryu Seoa, who had defeated that very Hozumi Asana in her first match of the main draw. A player the same age as Asana: ten.
But unlike Hozumi Asana, who had long basked in attention, Ryu Seoa was a player absolutely no one had ever heard of. An unfamiliar presence who had appeared out of nowhere, never once surfacing in the Go world before.
When news first broke that Hozumi Asana had lost, he had assumed it was the product of chance, or luck.
But Ryu Seoa had marched straight through to the semifinals, and from that round onward the games were broadcast live, letting him carve her Go into his memory for the very first time.
It was astonishingly precise and meticulous — to the point of feeling machinelike in its coldness.
Coming from a blonde girl with a round, warm face, the dissonance was jarring. In moves as cold as forged iron, he sensed — somehow — a deep melancholy, and beneath it a fathomless, bottomless void.
The viewers, however, apparently felt nothing of the sort.
Half of their attention was fixed squarely on the girl's looks.
She was clearly mixed-race, with strikingly Western features — and pretty on top of it. It was only natural the chat gravitated toward her.
At some point, the chat that had been buzzing animatedly about the girl's appearance shifted its subject to the girl's strength.
How strong was she, exactly? Stronger or weaker than this player or that one? Requests flooded in, begging him to measure her strength on some concrete scale.
Yoon Woo-jae turned his eyes back to the game. Move 70.
If the names were hidden, the level was high enough that you could mistake it for a match between male professionals.
"Hm. I'd say Ryu Seoa is at least at the level of the men's insei second division, minimum. I saw it in the semifinals too — her fundamentals are rock solid. Saying that might not land for some of you, so here's another way to put it: if I, right now in my current state, entered the second division and played, I honestly couldn't even guarantee I'd break a fifty percent win rate — never mind a clean sweep."
Yoon Woo-jae evaluated Ryu Seoa on the information available alone. By conventional standards it was a generous assessment — and yet, for some reason, he still had the nagging feeling that it somehow underrated her.
"I asked every contact I have in the Go world, and not a single person knew her. So at first I thought she was an unpolished gem, raw talent nobody had discovered. But after watching her games… there's a trace of systematic training in there."
In truth it went beyond systematic — her play felt optimized down to the last edge, honed the way a top-ranked professional hones theirs. But that wasn't something he could say with certainty yet.
Past move 80, the upheaval began.
Holding White, Ryu Seoa shifted her stance to a degree that bordered on violence.
White 82 was a move that shaved flesh to the bone — but at the same time, a double-edged blade that tormented her opponent in return.
"Whoa."
Watching the game blow past move 90 in moments, Yoon Woo-jae let out an involuntary gasp.
Whenever Black tried to pull her foot free, White bit down and refused to let go, bleeding all the while, just to keep tormenting her.
White abandoned her own territory without hesitation.
Go is, after all, a relative struggle. If sacrificing your own house results in wrecking even a little more of your opponent's, then it is profit.
The one who loses less wins. The one who hurts a little less and is still standing at the end wins.
"Even watching this is making ME suffer, folks. I think White is angry about something. She was playing the calm gentleman, and now she's lunging like a madwoman with nothing left to lose."
The style Ryu Seoa had shown in the semifinal and the early finals had read as a flexible, mibeong-style fluidity. But soon not a trace of that softness remained — only a savagery, like a ferocious beast baring its teeth.
In a chaotic position, deep reading is forced upon both players.
White and Black alike began spending their clocks.
Black was the first to be driven into byo-yomi. In the finals, byo-yomi meant one minute per move, once.
A precarious tightrope — fail to find the next move within that single minute, and you plummeted into the abyss.
Before long, White exhausted her clock as well and climbed onto the wire.
Move 150.
Even on the wire, White paid herself no heed and showed her opponent no mercy. Like a sworn blood enemy, she poured everything she had into tormenting Black.
And yet, even on a wire shaking violently, neither player had fallen.
Balancing themselves with movements bordering on sheer technique, they drew gasps of awe even from viewers only loosely familiar with Go.
"Oh. Now THAT is a beautiful move."
Move 187.
Black produced a brilliant stroke. Brilliant moves do not emerge from diligent searching.
Brilliant moves are born from suffering and adversity.
Just as war has birthed countless great inventions, and heroes emerge only from the most terrible of moments —
Just as heroes are unnecessary in peacetime, hunting for brilliance in a stable, favorable position is a needless gamble.
A single exquisite move that would never have existed had White not pressed Black to the point of exhausted, anguished groaning.
The game, which had tilted fractionally toward White, tilted back toward Black with that one move.
But Ryu Seoa, holding White, did not stop.
Carving away the rotten flesh without a moment's regret, the girl reset her stance and swung her sword once more.
"I genuinely cannot call this one to the very end, folks."
Black, until now passive, had found her balance through that exquisite move. Unlike the opening, she now faced White's assault with confidence.
A great game cannot be made by one side playing well alone.
Art is born only when both players play well.
"Truly — win or lose, two rising stars came out of this one. We're so lucky to be watching this game live."
A contest impossible to look away from.
The game hurtled headlong into the endgame, and Yoon Woo-jae began the intricate arithmetic of counting territory.