The Grandfathers.
The Grandfathers.
Time passed, leaving seven days until the winter closing ceremony, and I headed straight for the Hanseong headquarters as soon as school ended.
The Hanseong headquarters, imposing as ever.
As I walked playfully with Da-yeon, HSW Teams 7 and 5 took their places behind us.
Team 5 were all in crisp suits, exuding a cold aura.
Team 7, in stark contrast, wore the same suits but with a looser look that flaunted their wildness.
Tattoos covering the arms where they'd rolled up their dress shirts, scars left by blades and bullets...
And faces that were handsome yet somehow twisted...
Everything combined to project an image you wouldn't want to tangle with.
Unlike Team 5, who walked directly behind Da-yeon in clean lockstep centered on Kim Tae-jun,
right behind me, Team 7 walked clustered around Kang Jong-hyeon, laughing and horsing around with each other.
Anyone watching could see that their specialty wasn't guarding people.
We entered the shortest, innermost of the three massive buildings within the Hanseong headquarters,
and the HSW members all dispersed to their stations.
Then we smoothly took the elevator going straight to Lee Gi-seok's office.
"Si-yoon, your grandfather's here too."
"Yeah, I heard."
Lee Gi-seok's condition had been exposed to the media as currently critical, so it had effectively become public knowledge.
That very Lee Gi-seok was right now playing Go against my grandfather, shouting all the while.
"Our Si-yoon will teach you a lesson!"
"Oh?! With less than a month of experience, playing against me, a professional Go player?"
"Don't you go regretting this, my friend!"
Maybe because I'd never seen my grandfather dressed up so sharply before, he looked more like a trendy middle-aged guy than I'd expected.
There was a reason the two of them had gotten this close, and to put it simply, it was the same reason Dad and Lee Jin-seok had gotten close.
My grandfather wasn't shy, just like Dad, and as a novelist he was knowledgeable across all sorts of fields, so he easily kept the conversation going.
And perhaps because Lee Gi-seok had never had anyone he could call a friend before, he truly treasured my grandfather.
When he was with my grandfather, Lee Gi-seok revealed new sides of himself I'd never once seen.
Sides that even made Da-yeon and Lee Jin-seok stare in surprise when they witnessed them.
Lee Gi-seok saw me and called out.
"Si-yoon! Come, have a seat."
"Yep~"
I exchanged a glance with my grandfather, and he put on a stern face and slowly nodded.
It was as if... he was telling me to show Lee Gi-seok, who'd become like an older brother and close friend to him, what despair really meant...
Before I knew it, Da-yeon was already playing around with my grandfather, Kim Kang-woo.
And I accepted the black stones Lee Gi-seok handed over, calling them a handicap.
I wasn't the type to turn down something like that.
"So, you said you studied for a month?"
Clack.
"Yes."
When I picked up a stone with my thumb, index, and middle fingers, Lee Gi-seok corrected me.
"Here, try placing it like this."
Snap.
Lee Gi-seok placed the stone with a clean motion.
"It's fine just putting it down, what's the big..."
But I stuck to my own way and simply laid the stone on the board.
Clack.
"Huh, have you not taken a real interest in the game...?"
Snap.
"Hmm, it's interesting. I just don't feel the need to be formal yet."
Clack.
"I see..."
Lee Gi-seok felt regret that Si-yoon approached Go with such a light heart.
He believed that Go could reveal a corner of your opponent's inner thoughts and clearly indicate the direction of their conduct.
Watching the inscrutable Si-yoon just carelessly lay stones down like that was deeply dissatisfying.
For a moment, Lee Gi-seok thought about proposing a wager to draw out Si-yoon's true intentions, and he stared at the board.
Clack.
"......."
I looked at the board, which hadn't yet passed twenty moves.
Hadn't his own son, Lee Jin-seok, once called little Si-yoon a once-in-a-generation genius?
Her style of play certainly resembled the currently popular AI, Alppago, very closely.
But learning Go superficially has clear limits.
My forty-eight years of life built around Go...
I had already reached the professional level, but I'd temporarily given up Go as a hobby to focus on management.
And I had never once played seriously against Kim Kang-woo.
We'd act like we were evenly matched, and then I'd always take the win and be too busy teasing him...
The opening formation was complete.
I looked at Si-yoon as she placed a stone and nodded.
Up until now, you've been clueless about how fearsome this old man is and evidently looked down on me...
I'm going to push forward in earnest now...
I'll make you truly feel the terror of age and experience...
I'll force endless choices in a dilemma and bestow a pressure that a child's mind will find near impossible to bear.
Young genius... please, don't crumble too quickly.
With a clean motion, I began to play the greatest moves—
Snap!
—that I had been hiding all this time as a businessman.
Snap.
Clack.
'To save the upper right corner, it's more advantageous to develop the upper side rather than the right side...'
...Snap.
Clack.
'If I follow along like this I might lose by three and a half points... so I'll abandon the upper left side, give up building territory based on the left side, and...'
......Snap.
Clack.
'Oh... I really like that approach.'
......Snap.
Clack.
'I can handle this the same way I saw in that life-and-death problem... so I'll prod the lower left side for a little more profit.'
Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack...
"....."
Even though it was Lee Gi-seok's turn, he was thinking for a long time, so I glanced at him; his pupils were trembling and he couldn't tear his eyes from the board.
Every time Lee Gi-seok took his time and made a move, I would unfailingly place my black stone the instant he set his down.
And even when Lee Gi-seok played after an enormous think,
it was still within my predictions, so I simply began placing stones on the spots I'd already considered.
Even if a move fell outside my expectations, my overwhelming processing speed would give me the answer in under a second.
That was when Lee Gi-seok's fingers began to tremble violently.
'Does the old man have a hand tremor as well...?'
I noticed now that the stones he'd just played were shinier than the others, so it looked like he might also have hyperhidrosis.
.......Snap.
Clack.
Lee Gi-seok was gradually losing focus on the game and kept stealing glances at me.
I maintained the exact same expression from start to finish as I played, and my grandfather, standing beside me, wore a look of reassurance.
Plunk.......
The decibel level of Lee Gi-seok's stones touching the board had grown as subdued as the sound of my own.
"I lost..."
"Oh... I won~"
Lee Gi-seok stroked his sweat-soaked forehead and stared at the board with a shocked expression.
And after running his hands over his face, washing it with sweat instead of water, Lee Gi-seok looked at the board once more.
"....."
Da-yeon cautiously approached Lee Gi-seok.
"Grandfather... are you okay...?"
"Da-yeon..."
"Yes...?"
"What kind of fight have you been fighting, all by yourself..."
"...Excuse me?"
The look on Lee Gi-seok's face seemed to ask how Da-yeon had managed to endure by my side without developing an inferiority complex.
Lee Gi-seok asked me for a review, and I obliged.
"That move? My grandfather plays like that. And it looked more useful than I thought."
But the more we talked, the more I sensed a growing complexity in the way he looked at me.
Lee Gi-seok collected himself and spoke to me.
"Would you play one more game?"
"Oh... of course."
Playing Go online under the nickname 'dbwk12', I'd become quite popular.
As proof, the number of people requesting matches kept increasing.
That said, no matter how much time passed, not a single person had ever requested a rematch more than three times.
Because... just like Lee Gi-seok despairing in front of me now...
once I beat an opponent once, I would beat them even more overwhelmingly in the next game, to a degree incomparable to the previous one.
And I would do it using the opponent's own methods.
dbwk12's win rate was 82%.
It's a high number, but the reason it isn't overwhelmingly high is that I lost a lot while learning early on.
And even now, I still can't beat a few of the well-known named players among the 9-dans who are active online.
Having been defeated by me once again, Lee Gi-seok kept silent and nodded.
"Just one more game..."
Three times against the same person... It's a first, but I don't mind it.
I like people who challenge me.
That was the case with Park Gi and Jae-hyeong too.
Because of that, only people who haven't despaired remain around me...
I lost completely.
So perfectly that I couldn't even lift a finger.
Does Kim Kang-woo even realize what he has awakened...?
I play on even terms against the giants, those 9-dans who are glories of the past, without any of them going easy on me.
My power makes my opponents give me leeway?
Those 9-dans who have already stood at the summit would never do such a thing, and since I don't mind losing either, the games are even more fair.
The first game was manageable.
No, 'manageable' isn't a word you should use for a little kid who can't even hold a Go stone properly...
But still, she was manageable.
Then came the second game...
Si-yoon, who started playing in the exact same style as me...
It's demoralizing.
She absorbs forty-eight years of my Go experience in a single game and grows from it...
Even worse, she takes my strengths and not only applies them in a single game but develops them further... to crush me.
Using a literally overwhelming, superhuman speed of thought.
A speed that seemed to involve not even a moment of deliberation...
She produces the right answer at an utterly nonsensical pace and presses me.
On the exact spot I would play after sufficient thought, playing in the exact same style I would use...
What a cruel method...
What a... way to make a person feel utterly wretched...
Could there be a more humiliating way to lose?
I can say for certain, out of all the games I've lost until now... this is the most shameful.
Whenever I think long and hard and play the best move, the little kid in front of me, with lightning play, produces an answer even more perfect than mine.
No... 'lightning play' isn't right... I want to call it literally 'instant thought'.
In the first game, she at least took about a second to play...
But in the second game, as if she knew exactly where I was going to place my stone, Si-yoon would pick up her stone the moment I picked up mine....
And there wasn't the slightest change in her expression.
It made my head spin—that look of hers... as if she were a wall so high that you couldn't even dare try to see over it because the top wasn't visible.
On top of that, the answers Si-yoon produced... were moves I could only play after a long think, which made it all the more infuriating...
In all my years, I'd never once felt stupider than anyone else, but Si-yoon seemed to be telling me, plain as day through her stones.
'As I thought, my grandfather is stupid...'
"....."
Looking at the fact that even during the review, I could fully understand why she played in a certain spot...
It must mean she played within the scope of my own thought, in the same way as I always do.
To think that the gap grew this wide after just two games...
So I grew curious.
Playing Go with the little kid in front of me wasn't just off-putting; it was stifling and pressed down on me so hard I struggled to breathe, making it deeply painful...
But the reason I could be in this position was because I had always pursued endless curiosity.
So... I was terribly, terribly curious. Just how much wider the gap would grow...
I requested another match from Si-yoon.
I could feel it the instant the opening formation was in place.
She had discarded my style.
As soon as nineteen moves had passed, a picture began to be drawn on the board.
The white stones laid out like faint sand dunes...
The positions of those white stones, which looked easy to break through and swallow whole...
If I started construction to turn them into my flat, fertile land, it was plain to see that the dunes would transform into a mountain of sand and swallow me up.
Even so, I didn't want to play passively.
Forty moves.
Ha... No one else would ever notice.
Why that child placed a stone there, in a position that meant she built nothing but superficial sandcastles and withdrew during the crucial early phase of securing territory.
If anyone else saw it, they'd just think she was a beginner who played in such a place.
Without ever imagining the monstrous thinking power of this girl...
Eighty moves.
The monster before my eyes, a genius in a girl's skin.
It seemed she was predicting, in less than a second, how I would play all the way to the very end...
The moment I started to get that feeling was...
The fierce battle that began in the upper left corner...
But I couldn't put this creeping unease into words.
Bothered by it, I abandoned the spot I'd originally intended to play and placed the stone elsewhere.
That was when... Si-yoon's thin eyebrows, which had been utterly expressionless, twitched.
Goosebumps erupted all over my body, and my thoughts seized up from the shudder that ran from my toes upward.
I won't entertain the thought that I misunderstood.
Si-yoon's expression was far too definite for that...
The look of someone who'd spotted a tiny flaw in a perfect picture...
Hahahahahahaha...
...bullshit.
Who did I think I was picking a fight with...?
I wanted to see the end of the picture Si-yoon was drawing.
But I didn't have the confidence to face that picture and remain in one piece.
I took my black stone and laid it down, strengthless, on the far edge of the lower right corner.
Rattle.
"I lost..."
I looked at Lee Gi-seok, whose expression had rapidly soured before turning into one of despondency, and nodded.
"I won~"
"Oh my~ My grandchild! Thanks to my grandchild, this old man's chest is puffing up higher than this building!"
My grandfather approached Lee Gi-seok, who wore a deflated expression, and laughed as he spoke.
"How about a bowl of makgeolli later?"
"...Haha...ha. That sounds nice..."