A Silent Conversation
There were ten maps in total, but only two were preferred for 1v1 matches.
The higher a player's skill level, the fewer early-game movement patterns they used—rarely exceeding eight per map.
Depending on their weapon loadout, high-level players always chose the path with the highest win rate.
Chul-jun narrowed those paths down to the two safest points.
Since his fingers weren't fully accustomed to the controls yet, Chul-jun opted for a defensive strategy rather than an aggressive one.
It was incredibly simple.
Since he knew exactly where and when his opponent would appear, all he had to do was aim at that spot, wait, and—bang, bang, bang!—fire.
Of course, it couldn't be perfect every time.
When a shot missed, he never got greedy; he immediately retreated to the second safe zone.
The second safe zone was a bottleneck that restricted the opponent's pursuit to only two possible directions.
It was the same as before.
He only had to watch two directions, and the moment the opponent appeared—bang, bang, bang!
Because this was a strategy he had only simulated in his head after watching videos of top players, he lost the first match—a first-to-five-kills battle—by 3-5, and the next one by 4-5.
In truth, he wouldn't have lost both matches if he had strictly followed his planned strategy, but Chul-jun had intentionally altered his movements in a few rounds to prevent his opponent from reading his patterns.
The third match began just before lunchtime.
Having gathered enough data and successfully masked his own patterns, Chul-jun executed his strategy flawlessly this time.
The result was a 5-1 victory.
Min-jun, staring at his phone screen with utter disbelief, slowly raised his head to look at Chul-jun.
Chul-jun gave him a broad grin and mouthed a single word.
"Easy."
No Min-jun, the undisputed gaming champion of Hanyoung Private Elementary School, hung his head in defeat, while the three boys gathered around them erupted into cheers.
"Whoaaaa!"
By the window, Park Si-woo, who was wearing noise-canceling headphones and studying a Baduk game record, scowled.
He shook his head in pathetic disappointment.
"No way! How did you do that in just one day? That's insane!"
Ha-rang made a huge fuss, while Min-jun pouted.
"If we played at an internet cafe, I'd totally win!"
"Yeah, right. Classic loser talk, lol," Ha-rang teased.
"Hey, seriously!"
"Someone's salty!"
Min-jun grimaced hard.
"Hey! Chul-jun!"
Chul-jun turned around with a bright smile.
"Yeah?"
"Let's play again at the PC bang later!"
"A PC bang?"
"Mobile games are basically auto-aim anyway! PC is where the real skill is."
"Oh, I'll have to ask my uncle first."
"Your uncle?"
"Yeah. I live with my uncle."
Just then, Ha-rang chimed in.
"Wait, really? Are your parents abroad too? Mine are!"
"No."
"Then where? Do they live in the countryside?"
"No. I'm an orphan."
"..."
Ha-rang instantly fell silent, blinking in surprise.
She had never met a kid who didn't have parents.
But was it okay to say something like that with such a bright, innocent smile?
Even though she hadn't done anything wrong, she suddenly felt incredibly apologetic.
Beside her, Min-jun nodded solemnly.
"Man, you're so lucky. No parents."
Ha-rang stared at Min-jun, her face twisted in utter horror.
Min-jun just tilted his chin, looking back as if to say, What?
Then, he gave Chul-jun a big thumbs-up.
"Seriously. I'm so jealous."
Ha-rang jabbed Min-jun hard in the ribs.
"Hey... shut up!"
"I'm serious!"
"Wow, even for a friend, you're seriously crossing the line. I might have to unfriend you for this."
Min-jun scrunched up his nose.
"Anyway, PC bang? Oh, right. If your uncle says yes."
"Yeah!"
Chul-jun nodded with a bright smile.
Si-woo absolutely detested those three, who seemed even louder than usual today.
He gripped his pencil with irritation.
He couldn't focus at all.
What's so fun about a stupid game like that...
Laughing and shouting over nothing.
As expected, simple, low-level kids became friends instantly.
Si-woo glanced at Chul-jun, who was smiling brightly, surrounded by the other kids.
"Whoa! But seriously, how did you get so good? You were a total noob yesterday!"
"For real! You can't improve that much in one day just by practicing. You were totally faking it yesterday, weren't you?"
"No, he wasn't. I saw him playing yesterday, he was trying his best. And his movement was actually pretty similar to yesterday."
"Come on, tell us! How on earth did you do it?"
Whether his noise-canceling headphones were malfunctioning or the other kids were just too loud, Si-woo couldn't block them out.
The muffled, fragmented voices filtering through were even more distracting.
In frustration, he just turned off the noise-canceling function entirely.
Chul-jun, looking smug after winning a low-brow game, shrugged his shoulders.
It was an eyesore, yet Si-woo found his gaze drifting back to him again and again.
"Well, the early-game movement patterns of top players never deviate from eight specific routes. Those offer the highest win rate."
"Oh, so Min-jun is officially recognized as a pro?"
"Shh! Our master Chul-jun is speaking! Go on, what next?"
"Plus, the paths become even simpler depending on the weapon. When you use a sniper rifle on the Arena map, you always jump to the high ground first. If you can't find me from there, you leap over the obstacles and rotate left. You avoid rotating right because there are too many obstacles blocking your line of sight."
"...Whoa."
"Since my controls aren't great, I just had to wait quietly at the corner right next to the spawn point. No matter how good you are, it's faster for me to wait and shoot with my crosshairs already set than for you to aim while moving. If I missed that chance, I'd lure you to the next spot..."
...
Si-woo shook his head inwardly.
Using that kind of strategy for a mere game?
He wondered what they were talking about, but as expected, it was just useless nonsense.
"Whoa, are you a genius? How do you think about all that while playing?"
"I just lay out several versions of the map in my head and react to whichever pattern fits. Even if my prediction is wrong, I can immediately pull up and apply a different strategy."
"...Huh?"
"Oh, it's similar to Baduk. You map out countless possibilities, predict your opponent's response, and guide them in the direction you want..."
"Chul-jun, you know how to play Baduk too?"
"Yeah."
"But that's so boring."
Si-woo's brow furrowed.
Why were they glancing over at him while calling it boring?
Si-woo snapped his head toward the window and clenched his jaw.
Then, Chul-jun's voice drifted over again.
"Actually, it's not. It's incredibly fun."
Si-woo's eyebrow twitched slightly.
"This game has ten maps, but Baduk only has one board. Yet, the number of possible variations on that single board is said to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe."
"...What? Atoms in the what?"
"Two players take turns placing one stone at a time, and no two games of Baduk are ever exactly the same. Not once in the entire history of humanity."
"Really?"
"Yeah. That's why they say a game of Baduk is a painting created by two people. A painting that vanishes once it's finished."
Si-woo scrunched up his nose.
As if he knows anything...
Just then,
"Am I right, Si-woo?"
"Chul-jun! He can't hear you. See those earmuffs on his head?"
He had heard every word, but Si-woo spun his pencil, pretending to stare blankly out the window.
Chul-jun tilted his head.
He had been observing Si-woo's movements, and the boy was definitely listening to their conversation.
Min-jun nudged Chul-jun.
"Hey, don't worry about him. He's a jatta."
"What's a jatta?"
"A voluntary outcast. He's the one ostracizing the rest of us. He's something else."
"Ah..."
"Anyway, how would you counter someone using a burst rifle instead of a sniper?"
"Well, the patterns get a bit more diverse for that..."
Sigh...
Screeech!
Si-woo stood up abruptly, his face flushed with irritation.
He felt an irrational surge of anger.
If he listened to any more of this, he felt like he would explode.
He stormed out of the classroom and headed toward the restroom.
What? A painting? Do you have any idea how nerve-wracking a single match is...
Si-woo ground his teeth.
Chul-jun blinked his round eyes as he watched Si-woo walk away.
The boy had definitely looked incredibly displeased again.
Why is he always so angry?
Chul-jun hadn't heard his voice since their brief exchange yesterday.
Even when all the boys in the class gathered to play games, he remained isolated.
When Chul-jun had greeted the class this morning, even the girls had responded, but Si-woo had simply turned his head away.
Chul-jun knit his brows.
Did I do something wrong?
It kept weighing on his mind.
His very first strategy—'befriend the lonely kid'—had ended in a miserable failure.
Well, since he had made friends with Min-jun and Ha-rang, it wasn't a completely devastating loss.
Chul-jun glanced at Si-woo's desk.
The Baduk book was open today as well.
Then, he noticed a pencil lying on the floor beneath the desk.
Did he drop it when he stood up just now?
He knew he shouldn't touch other people's belongings without permission.
But once he noticed it, his entire focus locked onto the pencil.
Sometimes, he got hyper-fixated like this.
Chul-jun fidgeted in his seat, unable to sit still.
I'll just put it back where it belongs.
Chul-jun quietly stood up and padded over to Si-woo's desk.
He picked up the pencil and placed it on the desk.
In doing so, his eyes caught a glimpse of Si-woo's notebook.
It was a notebook printed with 19x19 Baduk grids.
The grids were densely filled with hand-drawn Baduk stones, each marked with a number.
Yesterday, he had assumed it was just a printed book.
But these were all drawn by hand in pencil.
Is this a game record?
He had already touched someone else's property, and snooping was bad too, but...
The numbers must represent the order the stones were placed.
Once he understood the meaning of the numbers, Chul-jun couldn't tear his eyes away from the pattern they formed.
More precisely, the process of how that pattern unfolded was utterly fascinating.
Chul-jun's round eyes sparkled.
Wow, this is just like the universe!
The moment the first stone was placed, all other possibilities vanished. The moment the second stone landed, even more disappeared. Hundreds of choices accumulated to create this single image.
The universe was the same.
The moment the first particle came into existence after the Big Bang, all other possibilities ceased to exist. The universe we live in today was simply the one reality chosen out of countless possibilities.
Chul-jun's eyes began to analyze the game record.
A 19x19 grid.
An immediate coordinate space.
Each intersection was (x, y).
The position of stone 1, the position of stone 2.
As the numbers increased, the coordinates accumulated to form a point cloud...
f(Black's move) = White's response.
It's not a simple function.
A single input yielded multiple outputs.
Because for the exact same move by Black, White could respond in several different ways.
A one-to-many relationship.
It wasn't a function; it was closer to a relation.
To turn this into a function, certain conditions are required...
A limit?
As the game progresses, the empty intersections decrease.
When the significance of the empty space converges to zero within the rules, the game ends.
But it ended before reaching zero.
Because there were no more meaningful moves left to make.
In mathematics, a limit goes all the way to the end, but in Baduk, it stops the moment meaning fades.
It wasn't numbers that determined the end, but human judgment.
Wow...
Chul-jun's mind kept trying to summon numbers and formulas to solve it.
But this was a painting that mathematics could never solve.
The numbers felt alive.
Stone 1 is placed, stone 2 responds, stone 3 responds again.
This wasn't just a sequence of coordinates.
This was a conversation.
A conversation held between two people without speaking a single word.
The record of that dialogue.
Wow, the Baduk I've been playing all this time was just child's play.
Chul-jun was intensely curious about the temperature of this conversation.
Behind the numbers was a hand.
Behind the hand was a person.
They were building their own universes against each other.
This was a proof that could never be explained by the mathematics Chul-jun knew.
He had spoken so lightly of a painting that was created through such bone-chilling intensity.
Only then did Chul-jun understand why Si-woo had been so angry.
"Hey!"
Someone came rushing up from behind. Chul-jun instinctively dodged to the side.
Si-woo, hurtling past where Chul-jun had just been standing, lost his balance and tumbled to the floor.
Chul-jun quickly apologized.
"I-I'm sorry."
Si-woo, who had fallen flat on the floor, scrambled to his feet, panting with rage.
He was a full head taller than Chul-jun.
"Who said you could look at my stuff!"
Si-woo swung a wild fist.
Chul-jun easily dodged the punch.
It was too slow, and its trajectory was painfully obvious.
Min-jun and Ha-rang rushed over.
"Whoa, whoa! Stop it!"
As Min-jun stepped between them, Si-woo glared at Chul-jun, huffing as he shoved his notebook and pencil case into his backpack and slung it over his shoulders.
Chul-jun peeked out from behind Min-jun's bulky frame.
"Um, I'm really sorry for looking at it without your permission. But... was that a game you played?"
There was no answer.
However, the subtle shift in his expression suggested it was.
Chul-jun felt genuinely sorry for upsetting him, but he was just too curious.
The question mark that had just formed in his mind was massive.
Yet, unlike usual, other questions didn't immediately follow; they seemed to get stuck in his throat.
This was a first for him.
Unable to contain himself, he blurted out:
"Why did Black play like that starting from move forty-six?"
Si-woo's eyes shook slightly.
"I'm really just curious!"
Si-woo grit his teeth, glared at Chul-jun, and turned away.
His pent-up frustration had completely boiled over.
He had no intention of speaking to him further.
He was about to storm out of the classroom when—
"Why did Black hold back?"
Si-woo froze in his tracks.
"You wanted to keep attacking, but you held back, and that's why you lost."
In that instant, the words his father had sighed during yesterday's review flashed through his mind.
—If you resolved to attack, you should have followed through to the very end.
"Dammit!"
Si-woo charged back and threw another punch. Chul-jun dodged effortlessly once more, causing Si-woo to lose his footing and crash heavily onto the classroom floor.
Chul-jun panicked.
It looked incredibly painful.
"I-I'm sorry!"
One of the girls ran out into the hallway.
"Teacher! They're fighting!"
The girl screamed, and—
"That's enough, everyone!"
Go Chang-ho sighed as he stepped into the classroom.
When he saw who the combatants were, his face registered curiosity rather than anger.
"Both of you, follow me. Si-woo, leave your bag there."
Though his voice was firm, Go Chang-ho's face was filled with intrigue as he turned around.