The Threshold of Evolution
"Please take your seats. We will now begin Round Three of the Ciel Bank Cup integrated preliminaries."
Heo Gyu 9-dan's weighty declaration rolled through the playing hall. Stones whispered as the players already seated at their assigned boards drew for colors, and a quiet tension spread across every table.
Jang Yu-na moved without making so much as a footstep, taking in the room. The field had been cut nearly in half compared to the first two rounds — which meant the fight for a main-draw ticket was entering its final stretch.
Kim In-ha.
She turned the name over in her mind as her gaze found him: a man seated at a board some distance away, white shirt, hair neatly combed, posture perfectly upright, his face an unreadable blank. He was only an amateur. But he had survived both of the first two rounds, and that was a strength no one could afford to dismiss.
I never saw his opening at the Sudam Cup.
Her schedule then had been brutal — two autograph sessions, a special event, even a simultaneous match — and so she had only begun watching In-ha's game from the middle. The arrangement of stones whose sequence she couldn't reconstruct had been shocking enough on its own. What she had never seen was how he designed a board from the first move. Now she could watch every stone with her own eyes, from the very beginning.
I'll watch him carefully. I'll find out if he really is Mumyeong.
She edged a little closer. His opponent was the Chinese professional Lu Yuan 6-dan — a player who had lost to Mumyeong on her stream, yes, but whose form had genuinely surged of late. An amateur beating someone like that was, frankly, hard to imagine.
A stone clicked down. Lu Yuan 6-dan, holding Black, had opened. The game had gone about twenty moves — still the opening, the stage of painting the big picture. Jang Yu-na held her breath and followed.
Ordinary, so far.
A quiet formation. Unremarkable placements. It was early yet, but there were no eye-catching moves, no deviations from the standard sequences, and a faint disappointment had begun to settle when another stone landed.
Wait. Wait—
The point White had chosen looked ordinary at a glance. And yet that single move, strangely, made the entire board stable. Lu Yuan 6-dan was a player renowned for his powerful openings — and right now, it was Kim In-ha, holding White, who was taking the better shape.
This... this much?
Wonder replaced puzzlement before long. One move. Then another. Every point he chose was timed with an almost uncanny precision. He looked slow, yet he was not slow. He was never rushed, and still he took the initiative. Within the balance of the whole board he had already occupied the vital points in advance, and now he simply waited.
Is this even possible? Every move feels like a Blue Spot.
This was not imitation, not the mimicry of an engine. It felt as though he understood those moves, had digested them, and was playing them as his own. Jang Yu-na drew in a breath without realizing it.
C-could it be?
She knew this current. Mumyeong versus Lu Yuan 6-dan — Mumyeong, who had completed an opening entirely in Blue Spots.
It's the same. It's identical.
Back then, accusations of AI cheating had poured in. And now it was the same: not a single wasted stone, and looking back a few plays she couldn't even think of a better move than the one he had played. It felt close to the correct answer.
God, this is driving me insane.
If she weren't a referee, she would have wanted to run this sequence through DeepStone right then and there. She forced her breathing to settle.
Don't get excited. If he really is Mumyeong... the blunders will start from here.
That was how it had gone before. A perfect opening had, upon entering the early middle game, suddenly hemorrhaged howlers and surrendered the initiative. It should have happened again. It didn't.
It's... it's continuing like this?
What kind of middle game would unfold after the opening, what kind of fighting would erupt there — all of it had been anticipated in advance. The framework was woven together with such organic coherence that the only word that came was design.
Jang Yu-na couldn't breathe. She forgot her duty as a referee. She forgot the eyes around her. She was simply submerged, deep inside the board. Her hands clenched without her noticing, and a cold shiver ran down her spine. This game — the wonder this game alone was giving her — had overwhelmed her completely. In this moment she could not speak a single word. Even the suspicion of Mumyeong, even the name Kim In-ha, had vanished from her mind.
What remained was only one thing.
Go.
In this very moment, the feast of near-perfect moves. Deeper. Still deeper. She was being pulled in.
My mind is clear.
I looked down at the board in silence. A mere nineteen lines by nineteen. A little over three hundred sixty intersections. And this board felt strangely, unnaturally small — a sensation I had never felt before in my life.
Every time a stone clicked into place, somewhere in my mind the correct answer seemed to leap out. Too precise to call intuition. Too fast to call calculation.
I can see it. The optimal move.
It wasn't that I was reading the board. The board itself was already being drawn inside me, like a blueprint. It formed naturally.
Pretty shape, a lead in territory... all meaningless attachments.
Shape can be broken. A lead can be overturned. In moments like these, AI offered a direction: the optimal move, the most correct play grounded in calculation. The so-called Blue Spot.
...My thinking is starting to resemble it. The eye that reads and grasps a position.
The opponent I had played against most recently was not a person. It was the artificial intelligence DeepStone — a cold win-rate calculator, an absolute judgment that pierced every phase of a game. I had worked relentlessly to understand that AI, to challenge it. In the process I had even played a complete mess of a game on Jang Yu-na's stream. Perhaps those trials had become fertilizer after all. A little — just a little — it felt as though I had borrowed the AI's field of vision.
I placed a stone with confidence. A slightly more correct point. A slightly faster timing. An exchange that left a slightly greater profit.
Blue Spot.
The AI's gaze: even with less territory, even if the position sat slightly behind, the perspective of choosing the move with the highest win rate. I felt I had begun, faintly, to understand that current. Something like certainty seeped up from deep in my mind.
Lu Yuan 6-dan's fingertips trembled. A player strong in the opening — and the displeasure of falling behind in the fuseki, he who prided himself on it, was written in that tremor.
He's being dragged along by me.
He would be feeling it too. And yet he couldn't bring himself to play the next move. The position was not yet complicated. Not that many stones had been exchanged. I already held the initiative, and every choice from here on would be a path selected from a disadvantaged seat.
His gaze swept over me for a moment. Displeasure. Wariness. And something like fear at the fact that he was being pushed, all mixed together in that look.
It's too early to be surprised.
In our first game, around the early middle game, I had played a string of blunders and taken it all the way to a counting fight. This time was different. I had improved far beyond that. I had grown. This was the proof — right now, crossing from opening into middle game.
A shift in thinking.
From the AI's perspective, to Kim In-ha's perspective. I am not a machine. I don't believe I possess a precision calculator without error, the way DeepStone does. But because I am human, I can reach the grain that AI cannot see. Sensation. Psychology. Warmth. What the opponent fears. What mistakes can be induced. Where to press, and how they will yield. This is reading that only a human can do — reading a machine cannot imitate.
And now it was time for that sense to shine.
A stone snapped down. What players commonly call a leaping attachment — adventurous, bold, with real risk in it. I did not hesitate.
Lu Yuan 6-dan's eyebrows twitched. The pressure of momentum. The wavering of his psychology. All of this, right now, was a board I had designed. Go that I was driving.
Your talent has reached the threshold of evolution.
Lu Yuan 6-dan's resolve going into this Ciel Bank Cup integrated preliminary was different from usual.
Not just the main draw — I'll aim for the semifinals.
He had the confidence. He had the skill. He had reached the semifinals of China's Fenghua Cup and was in the midst of a rising reputation. Of course, he had also suffered humiliation along the way. Wanting to school an arrogant Korean user whose style provoked his competitive fire, he had issued a challenge to Mumyeong — and been thoroughly defeated. The live footage had even been uploaded to Chinese platforms and become an object of mockery.
I don't care.
He paid it no mind. What mattered was the attitude of learning from defeat.
It became an opportunity to look back at my own Go.
Mumyeong's Go had been impossible to pin down. He played opening moves close to AI, then slowly dismantled him with traps that defied explanation. That was when Lu Yuan understood why he hadn't stayed calm, why he had fallen for the inducing moves, why he had been caught in the psychological war. It was because he himself had been lacking.
I have to kill the humanity in me.
Wavering emotion. Pride that intervened on the board. A posture that hesitated before uncertainty. He had tried to cut all of it away. To overcome it, he had constantly reviewed Mumyeong's moves, analyzed games with DeepStone, and carved the logic of AI plays into his bones. Precise win-rate grounds. Analyze the opponent's intent. Calculate the optimal response, then calculate again. Opening, transition, combat, endgame — in every phase he had completely excluded human sensation. A change he himself was satisfied with. The feeling of having become a living algorithm.
I'm going up.
In Rounds One and Two he had handsomely beaten Korean professionals. And Round Three — the Korean amateur selection player, but he did not let his guard down. His only thought was to step on him and climb with everything he had.
And yet now, he was being caught by the ankle in a place he had not expected.
He's finding Blue Spots better than I am?
Lu Yuan 6-dan's eyes wavered. Still the opening stage. But his opponent was as precise as AI, and played moves that sat outside of any predictable calculation. He couldn't believe it. No — he couldn't accept it. Just one move. That one move that had gotten ahead of him had twisted every current in his mind.
I can make it up.
He clenched his teeth. He had only fallen behind a little in the opening. The fuseki wasn't everything. He immediately launched a counterattack: the most precise move AI would recommend, thickness used to suppress the opponent's territorial formation, a pattern that twisted the position and cut the flow. Approaching from an AI perspective, he sought to seize the initiative of the middle game.
But—
H-his style changed?
It was clearly the same person playing. The flawless AI sense from the opening had vanished. The grain of the moves had changed. Reading. Piercing. Stabbing. The mechanical plays disappeared, and moves that pressed on the psyche closed in around him. Sweat beaded on Lu Yuan 6-dan's fingertips.
Th-this—
Sensation summoned memory. That day. The game he had lost by half a point. A defenseless current he could understand but could not answer. His body remembered first. His hands stiffened. His eyes wavered. Exactly the same pressure as then.
He slowly raised his head. The man across the board — white shirt, expressionless face. Those eyes held no emotion at all. But the stones he had placed were proving it. That flow. That sensation. That way of winning.
Back then, if it had been unfinished Go that still creaked — now it was different. Not a single wasted move. Not a single current missed. Accurate. Precise. Frighteningly organic.
A completed form.
The word flashed through his mind, and without realizing it, his lips moved.