Unspoken Rules
Chul-jun stole glances at Si-woo.
It wasn't like Si-woo was suddenly super talkative, but looking at his face, he seemed to have cheered up quite a bit.
Now that the tension had eased, the questions that had been bugging Chul-jun since yesterday bubbled back up. He was dying to ask.
The text message he had received from his teacher this morning sat right on top of the question marks filling his head, leaving him in a state of utter confusion.
Every time I look at Si-woo, all I can think about is Baduk...
Now, his face is even starting to look like a Baduk stone...
Even though his teacher had told him not to talk about it, Chul-jun wanted nothing more than to discuss yesterday's game record with Si-woo right this second.
And so, he was practically vibrating with anxiety.
"Hey! Chul-juuun! Aren't we playing the next round?"
"Huh? Oh."
"Aren't you hitting rematch?"
"Ah..."
"What's up? You scared? Now that Si-woo's joined, your real skills are totally getting exposed, aren't they?"
Si-woo stole a glance at Chul-jun.
Their eyes met for a split second, but Chul-jun quickly averted his gaze, his brow furrowing.
Si-woo swallowed hard.
He remembered something he hadn't wrapped up yet.
I should apologize properly, right?
While Si-woo was thinking this, Chul-jun's brow furrowed even deeper as he stared down at the floor.
"Um, Chul... jun?"
Chul-jun flinched in surprise.
"Huh? Yeah?"
Si-woo lowered his eyes slightly and managed to squeeze the words out.
"I'm sorry. For hitting you yesterday..."
Chul-jun quickly waved his hands in dismissal.
"No, it's fine! Really! I didn't get hit even once, and you're the only one who got hurt!"
Min-jun and Ha-rang, who were standing nearby, snickered.
"Whoa, Chul-juuun! The teabagging is real!"
"'Your fists cannot reach me!'"
"He tripped and hurt himself while putting on a solo show, didn't he?"
"Wow, Chul-jun is savage. He's killing Si-woo twice!"
Chul-jun shouted, his face flushed with panic.
"No! That's not what I meant!"
"Yeah, don't care!"
"Yeah, didn't ask!"
Si-woo's ears turned even redder.
He suddenly felt annoyed.
Just then, the teacher tapped on the desk.
"Alright, alright. Recess is over! We skipped Korean during first period today, so make sure to read pages 20 to 26 later. Got it? Second period is math! Everyone, turn off your phones and go sit in your seats."
Chul-jun sprang up and dashed to his seat at the very front.
Si-woo stared blankly at Chul-jun's retreating back before hanging his head.
Chul-jun's mind had been a tangled mess since morning.
He shouldn't have played online Baduk yesterday.
The more matches he played against stronger opponents, the larger the question marks surrounding Si-woo's game record grew.
At first, he had approached it through mathematics.
For Chul-jun, math was the most precise tool for deciphering any phenomenon.
A Baduk board was a 19x19 grid, totaling 361 intersections.
Since black and white took turns placing stones, the number of possible variations was astronomical, but the number of truly meaningful moves was extremely limited.
During the opening stage, the moves chosen by masters were clustered within a very narrow range of the total possibilities.
Grasping that range wasn't difficult.
From the mid-game onward, he had to consider three things simultaneously.
Expanding his own territory, reducing the opponent's territory, and leaving behind good positions to utilize later.
By calculating how much each move contributed to these three factors, he could roughly see which move was the most efficient.
However, as the mid-game deepened, those calculations began to falter.
The three factors did not always point in the same direction.
To expand territory, one had to stretch out aggressively, but doing so would eliminate positions that could be used later.
When there was no move that satisfied all three, which one should be chosen?
That was the biggest problem.
It was no longer a mathematical calculation.
Certain moves changed the very shape of the board rather than just the number of points.
Stones that had been acting independently would suddenly connect into a single mass, or stones that seemed connected would belatedly be revealed as severed.
The moment the shape of the board changed, the entire flow of the game shifted.
Expressing that in numbers was incredibly difficult.
Yet, he could see which moves would alter that shape.
He couldn't explain how he was able to see it.
He had simply started seeing it after playing continuously.
After studying the game records of masters for about an hour, that sense had suddenly unlocked.
Among the moves played by masters, there were quite a few that couldn't be explained by his calculations.
A move that seemed like a loss right now, but became a decisive ladder ten moves later.
A move that sacrificed territory to rob the opponent of the initiative.
A move that seemed utterly meaningless but shifted the tension of the entire board.
So, he had created a new metric.
The tension of the board.
A tense board and a loose board were different.
On a tense board, the state of the game could swing drastically depending on where a single stone was placed.
On a loose board, most moves wouldn't cause any major shifts.
If you seized the tensest point first, your opponent would have no choice but to be dragged along.
That was what people called the initiative.
Once he added this metric, defeating 6-dans wasn't all that difficult.
He just had to use what he read mathematically and what he read through tension simultaneously.
Whenever he found a move where those two aligned perfectly, his opponent almost always collapsed.
Yet, even as he played like that, the feeling that something crucial was missing only grew stronger.
With this approach, he couldn't truly understand the hesitation he had seen in Si-woo's game record.
Because there was something in Si-woo's record that couldn't be explained by any metric.
There were moves that weren't mathematically optimal, and moves that looked like he had misread a tense spot.
But it didn't feel like he did it out of ignorance.
It felt as if he knew, but hesitated because he felt he shouldn't go there.
The 6-dans he faced yesterday certainly played well.
They read the tension, understood efficiency, and didn't lose the flow.
Yet, they didn't come anywhere close to the question mark he had seen in Si-woo's notebook.
The more he thought about it, the more he realized it wasn't a matter of playing well or poorly.
It felt like something he could never understand no matter how much online Baduk he played, or how high his own skill level rose.
Chul-jun was dying to know.
During class, avoiding the teacher's gaze, he repeatedly stole glances at Si-woo sitting by the window.
He could still see Baduk stones overlapping with Si-woo's face.
What should I do?
He was banned from talking about Baduk, but he wanted to ask so badly.
Wait, only talking about Baduk is banned, right?
One of Chul-jun's eyebrows twitched.
Right on cue, the bell rang to end the class.
He quickly grabbed his notebook and pencil.
Chul-jun spread his notebook open on Si-woo's desk.
Si-woo tilted his head, wondering what on earth he was doing.
The notebook was filled with unrecognizable scribbles.
"Ah. Not this page."
Chul-jun quickly flipped the page.
Two rectangles were drawn on it.
Si-woo's brow furrowed.
Meanwhile, Min-jun and Ha-rang approached with mischievous grins.
"Okay. This is the math we just learned."
"......Huh?"
The moment the word 'math' left Chul-jun's mouth, Min-jun and Ha-rang groaned, "Ugh!" and immediately turned on their heels, while Si-woo blinked in utter bewilderment.
"These two rectangles have the exact same area!"
"......."
"But one has an extremely long width, and the other has a perfectly balanced width and height. Which one looks stronger?"
"Well..."
He said it was math, but now he was asking which one looked stronger?
"......Is this math?"
"Yeah. Close enough!"
Si-woo stared blankly at the rectangles.
Chul-jun pointed at the shapes with his finger.
"Look! The rectangles are constantly expanding their areas. But for the wide rectangle, as the width increases, the rate of growth gets faster and faster, right? But then, it might suddenly stop at some point. The balanced rectangle can also expand, but its speed is slower. But then, the wide rectangle suddenly stopped. The balanced rectangle was just sitting there. It's not a local maximum. Nothing external touched it either. It just stopped. Based on that, does this long one look stronger? Or does the square look stronger? Don't think about things like surface tension! Just go with your gut!"
Chul-jun's brain was working so hard it was practically on the verge of overheating.
He thought he could pull it off, but trying to explain it purely through math had its limits.
As a result, his words got all tangled up.
Even as he spoke, he kept checking Si-woo's expression, wondering, Is this right? Does this make any sense?
And the result was...
"Uh... What's a local maximum? Surface tension? Are you sure we learned this in class today?"
Chul-jun panicked.
Then, he weakly shook his head.
"Uh... No."
"Then why are you asking me this?"
"......."
Just then, Min-jun, who had drifted away, slinked back over.
He had fled because he loathed math, but listening from afar, it didn't seem like the conversation was going to get any more academic.
Where does he even learn this weird stuff...
"Hey. Stop talking about boring stuff. You down for a try-not-to-laugh challenge?"
Chul-jun scowled.
He was in the middle of an important conversation...
Min-jun glanced down at the open notebook.
A square and a long rectangle were facing each other.
At a glance, it looked like a balance chart for weapons in Rival.
"Isn't the question just which of these two is stronger?"
"...Huh?"
"This one is an AR. An assault rifle. It has twenty-five bullets. Low delay, too. So even if you miss a few shots, you can keep moving and look for the next opening. It's what the casuals use. Super standard. And this long one is a sniper rifle! It's got that one-shot potential. A clean headshot and it's an instant kill. But it only has five bullets. There's a bit of a delay, too. So if your mechanics aren't up to par, you get counterattacked immediately. It's incredibly strong, but there's a lot of risk."
Min-jun pointed a thumb at himself.
"So the sniper is a weapon for real men. Alpha males!"
Chul-jun blinked his round eyes.
Just then, Ha-rang slid into the conversation.
"But honestly, I'm not a big fan of snipers. If you don't get that one-shot kill, you're in deep trouble. Especially when you only have five bullets. What if you miss all five? You'll get taken out while reloading! I absolutely hate that. With an AR, even if you miss a bit, you get another chance. So I'm team AR."
Min-jun chuckled and threw an arm around Ha-rang's shoulder.
"Spoken like a true casual."
"Min-jun always panics when he misses his first shot with a sniper."
"No, I don't!"
"Didn't you miss all five shots in a ranked match, get knifed, slam your desk, and get scolded by the PC bang part-timer?"
"I was just having an off day!"
Chul-jun stared at the two of them blankly.
Wow, you can explain it like that?
Min-jun slapped a hand onto Si-woo's shoulder.
"Anyway! From what I can see, Si-woo is a real man too! I felt it when you talked about strategy earlier. You're just like me. You play Baduk like that too, right?"
Chul-jun flinched.
The teacher had told him not to talk about Baduk.
He quickly checked Si-woo's expression.
But Si-woo didn't seem particularly offended.
Si-woo shook his head slightly.
"No, I have a defensive style. I block and hold out."
Min-jun tilted his head.
"Huh? That's not what it looked like."
Chul-jun, who had been listening to their conversation with a racing heart, sprang to his feet.
"Min-jun is right! You find attacking more fun! That long rectangle there... Ah..."
Si-woo's face stiffened as he looked down at Chul-jun's notebook.
"Was this about Baduk?"
"......."
Chul-jun hesitated before nodding.
Si-woo let out a soft sigh and pulled his game record notebook from his backpack.
Then, he looked up at Chul-jun.
"I have something I'm curious about, too."
"......Huh?"
"What did you mean by what you said yesterday?"
"......."
"Here. Black stone number 46."
Si-woo opened the notebook and pointed to the spot with his finger.
Chul-jun swallowed hard and stared at the record.
The question marks in his head began to thud loudly.
After a brief hesitation, he spoke.
"......Here, you broke through the boundary your opponent had set up. It was clearly an aggressive move."
"......Yeah."
"You were doing so well, but then at move 46, you suddenly backed off."
"......."
"I just don't understand why you did that. It wasn't a mistake, either. You did it deliberately. You clearly had a different picture you wanted to paint, so why did you purposely paint something else?"
Si-woo's brow furrowed.
Believing he was ahead of his opponent in the reading of the game, his old habit had slipped out without him realizing.
Even so, it was only a few moves in the lower-left corner.
So, thinking he could make up for it elsewhere, he had backed away.
It was a common occurrence in Baduk.
Turning away from a battle with an uncertain outcome toward a spot where one could secure a stable profit.
Even if the result had been a loss.
Chul-jun furrowed his brow and traced the moves after 46 with his small finger.
"Why did you do that?"
Si-woo clenched his teeth.
"Isn't it better to paint something more fun?"
"I don't know."
"But that's what you wanted to do."
Si-woo slammed the notebook shut.
Then, he whipped his head toward the window.
How does he know what's inside me better than I do?
Honestly, Chul-jun was right.
Even if it didn't guarantee a win, he had wanted to break into the area White had claimed and fight to his heart's content.
But he had been just as terrified.
He was afraid of having to explain that move to his father during the post-game review if he lost.
Because it wasn't a move he had played after reading every single variation ahead.
"What is the meaning of this stone?"
Was he supposed to just answer, "Because I wanted to fight"?
His father would have let out a heavy sigh on the spot.
Si-woo scrunched up his nose.
"Oh, Chul-juuun! Insane. You totally pressed Park Si-woo's rage button."
"He doesn't even have headphones on, but he's pretending he can't hear us, huh?"
The bell rang for the start of class, and Min-jun and Ha-rang scurried back to their seats.
And, Chul-jun, hesitating, reluctantly turned around and walked away.
Only then did Si-woo let out a quiet sigh, glaring at the notebook on his desk.
He had no idea why he was feeling so angry.
Even during the recess after third period, Chul-jun just sat quietly in his seat.
Si-woo kept stealing glances at him while listening to Min-jun and Ha-rang chatter, but Chul-jun just stared at his own desk, lost in thought.
Is he angry?
If Chul-jun had approached him with a bright smile again, Si-woo had planned to apologize right away.
But taking the first step was still far too difficult for Si-woo.
And then, after fourth period English class ended.
"Alright, the after-school programs start next week, so if you haven't signed up yet, do so quickly. Today, after lunch, fifth period will be self-study! Use that time to read the Korean lesson we missed during first period..."
Just then, Chul-jun raised his hand high.
"Yes, Chul-jun?"
Chul-jun whipped his head around to look at Si-woo.
His face was remarkably serious, as if he had made a firm resolve.
"I want to play Baduk with Si-woo!"
The teacher looked at Si-woo with a bewildered expression, and Si-woo let out a quiet sigh.
The teacher scratched his head, looking troubled.
"Well, Chul-jun. Si-woo is..."
Si-woo also looked straight into Chul-jun's round eyes.
Since he knew how to read a game record, he must have learned a bit somewhere.
That was why he kept acting like this.
There were always kids like that at the Baduk academies.
Kids who thought they were pretty good in the elementary division would challenge him out of pure competitive spirit.
Without having any idea what level a research student actually was.
Usually, if he crushed kids like that thoroughly, they would never bring up Baduk in front of him again.
Si-woo spoke up.
"I want to play too, Teacher."
"......Really?"
On the outside, Go Chang-ho silently nodded, but inside, he was cheering.
Of course, Chul-jun would be no match for Si-woo, who had been a research student for years, but seeing the meaningful look on Chul-jun's face made him incredibly excited to see what would happen.
"Alright, for fifth period, we'll head to the lower-grade play room. Ah, anyone who wants to stay in the classroom and study can do so!"
One corner of Go Chang-ho's mouth curled upward.