Chapter 63

Chapter 63

Chapter 63 A Divine Move (8)

It was a memory from National Champion Han Seun's distant childhood.

-Click.

A stone was placed on an old Go board.

The board had lost its luster from the countless stones placed upon it over the years, and the lines had faded where stones were most frequently played.

Worn so badly that he had to consider several times whether he was placing a stone on the correct star point, this board held the entirety of Seun's childhood.

"Seun."

"Yes, Master."

His master, who would sometimes go almost half a day without saying a word while they played across from each other, suddenly called his name. Seun widened his eyes and answered.

"Do you like Go?"

"Yes! I always win!"

"You little rascal! Winning and liking something are two different things!"

"But winning is fun."

"What will you do if you lose? If you meet an opponent you simply cannot defeat and lose every time you face them?"

"I don't think that would be fun..."

"Would you quit if it stopped being fun?"

"Hmm."

His younger self couldn't answer.

After all, losing to anyone other than his master was unthinkable.

Prodigy, wonder child, genius.

Those labels had followed him around since before he even attended kindergarten.

The Go board was like a playground, and the contests fought with black and white stones were games of tag in which he captured his opponent's stones, or hide-and-seek in which he concealed weaknesses.

After enjoying himself to his heart's content, instead of being scolded for playing until late, he would be showered with praise.

After acquiring a master, he had to sit with proper posture and hold the stones in an uncomfortable manner when playing Go, but in return, he received even more praise.

Even the much older adults he had begun facing more frequently were no match for him on the Go board.

When they raised their thumbs and occasionally gave him pocket money while saying they'd learned a valuable lesson, he would race to the stationery shop and become the envy of all the other children.

The world belonged to Seun.

When he could already hold his own against his revered master with just a two-stone handicap, he couldn't even imagine losing a match against anyone else.

Only because his master had specifically asked did the thought of what losing might be like briefly pass through his mind.

"I just won't lose! That solves it!"

"Will you try? You're setting out on a path even this master of yours couldn't follow."

"Starting today, let's play a hundred games a day! No, a thousand! Then I don't think I'll lose to anyone else!"

"Good heavens, you're going to work your poor old master to death."

Having reached his own conclusion, Seun felt as pleased as though he'd solved a difficult life-and-death problem.

His master smiled warmly at him.

And then his master's smile faded.

When the haze of memory cleared, what appeared sharply before his eyes was a small urn.

Seun had grown older with the passing years, but his master had returned to the earth.

Seun carefully placed the bouquet he'd brought beside the urn.

"I'm late. And I realized far too late that my solution to that life-and-death problem was wrong. It turns out I never really liked Go."

He had lost.

Not to an accomplished professional Go player, but to a foreigner who awkwardly held the stones between his thumb and index finger while exchanging answers with someone through an earpiece.

No, to be precise, he'd lost to a computer.

And the humiliation dragged him, a man who had never known defeat, down into the depths.

'AI Brings the Era of Han Seun to an End'

'Han Seun Suffers Crushing Defeat Against AlphaGo. Retirement Possible...'

'The Limitations of Han Seun's Go Are Now Clear'

...

The endless flood of articles and interview requests no longer contained any praise.

The moment his myth of invincibility, built up like an impregnable fortress, collapsed, he collapsed along with it.

Of course, he'd merely lost to a machine. He hadn't actually been stripped of his undisputed title as South Korea's National Champion. He'd even received an offer for a respectable professorship at a university.

But his shattered spirit wouldn't allow him to hold anything other than a liquor bottle.

He hated Go.

He loathed and despised it.

And even in that mire, he had never found an answer to the question his master had asked him in childhood.

Then the game records of Dangsan-ri that Master Park had sent him allowed him to face his younger self once more.

The boy who had known nothing about stone movements or opening strategies and had rampaged across the Go board however he pleased.

'Dangsan-ri, what about you? Will you still be able to play Go the same way after losing?'

He hoped not.

He hoped that after being defeated, those wildly rampaging stones would give way to an ordinary playing style in which a commentator could predict the next move and the one after that.

If Dangsan-ri ultimately accepted defeat and became an ordinary professional who played Go for a living, then his own despair would be perfectly natural.

That was why he absolutely had to participate in this tournament.

He wanted to face Dangsan-ri, whose style resembled his own past, and exchange questions and answers through the placement of stones.

And he himself had to be the one to defeat those stones.

'I'll definitely face him. If he plays the way I used to, there's no way I'll lose.'

National Champion Han Seun took a tablet out of his bag and opened the OnGame application.

【You have entered the 2025 OnGame Masters Go Tournament channel. Would you like to begin your match?】

"Yes."

National Champion Han Seun pressed the Start button with his middle finger curled over his index finger, as though placing a Go stone.

_____________

"Defeat is not an option. You can only lose after you've defeated everyone else."

"Understood. If we do that, we'll be able to play Go comfortably on those glass boards, correct?"

"That's right."

Seated together with the immortals, we were reaffirming our shared determination.

We couldn't lose.

Because an unexpected investment had been required, losing was no longer an option.

Naturally, participating in the tournament required identity verification through a mobile phone.

I'd somehow managed to arrange their identities through the National Intelligence Service, but asking them to activate mobile phones as well would have been too much.

In the end, I spent my hard-earned money activating four mobile phones. Although I'd bought used phones and only needed to purchase SIM cards, the monthly basic service charges for four phones were nothing to scoff at either.

And because the preliminary matches would take place simultaneously, I'd also rented additional laptops from a rental company.

I'd already spent roughly a million won.

We absolutely had to win the J-Pads. Otherwise, that entire million won would be a loss.

"Heh heh. You're being punished for trying to satisfy your greed with divine power."

"The tournament hasn't even started yet."

"The way you're already fidgeting anxiously looks like punishment enough. Now go make me another cup of coffee before it starts."

"I need to concentrate right now."

"Come now, surely you have enough time to make one cup of coffee?"

I did.

There was still some time before my turn in the preliminary round.

But if this anxiety was my punishment, I wanted the Elder to share it.

____________

"Seriously, why isn't this guy answering his phone? Where on earth is he playing?"

Park Gidong, 9-dan, kept calling National Champion Han Seun, who had yet to arrive at the office.

(The phone you are calling is switched off or...)

"This is driving me crazy."

Fortunately, National Champion Han Seun's username was showing as online.

At the very least, they'd avoided the disaster of him getting drunk and failing to appear for a match, as he had done at other tournaments.

But Park Gidong, 9-dan, still looked decidedly uneasy.

'If I get stuck, I'll need someone to advise me. What if I end up getting eliminated in the preliminaries all by myself?'

One reason Park Gidong, 9-dan, had managed to reach professional ninth dan despite his unremarkable skills was his thorough ability to assess himself objectively.

When it came to Go, he was remarkably accurate at judging both his own strength and that of his opponents.

'Win the games you can win, and lose the games you're bound to lose.'

In a contest of reading moves, where the results unfolded according to the sequences one calculated, there could hardly be a more reliable advantage in the professional world.

By taking the optimal route through a promotion examination system that had undergone repeated revisions, he'd managed to reach ninth dan.

Although he'd achieved the remarkable distinction of joining a group of fewer than a hundred people in South Korea, he knew perfectly well that his actual skills fell short of ninth-dan standards.

That was why he'd shamelessly planned to play through the preliminary rounds alongside National Champion Han Seun.

If he happened to encounter some hidden master through sheer bad luck, he intended to get help in a hurry.

Of course, receiving outside advice during a match was strictly grounds for disqualification.

But after experiencing every kind of hardship and witnessing all manner of dirty tricks in the Go world, there was no chance Park Gidong, 9-dan, had any remaining attachment to principles of fair play.

Fortunately, his first opponent was playing with a style that seemed straight out of an ancient Go manual, despite using up almost the entire allotted time for each move. An easy victory seemed assured.

Feeling more relaxed, Park Gidong, 9-dan, opened his phone and browsed the posts on the Go community.

Title: Hey, what's with the lineup for this tournament? It's terrifying.

Body:

『Wasn't Han Seun pretty much guaranteed to lose his National Champion title and hit rock bottom this year?

He didn't even enter the Dongyang Sash Cup last time, so I figured he was completely finished. Why's he here? lol

OnGame's making hay while the sun shines too. They've changed the event page to feature Han Seun and everything.

But aren't these bastards seriously cruel?

They're using that picture of him looking miserable after getting absolutely destroyed by AlphaGo last time. That's basically a public humiliation campaign lololol』

┗ Go Gallery User 1: What, seriously? Just checked. lol

┗ Go Gallery User 2: He's still Korea's National Champion. That's too much. No wonder pros don't enter online tournaments.

┗ Anonymous: Yeah, sure~ The real reason they stopped coming is because AI companies pretended to be regular users, crushed them, and used the results for publicity~

┗ Biryu: Couldn't they just avoid losing?

┗ Go Gallery User 3: Are you a genius?

'Those little bastards. Not a single mention of me.'

This was the post where his name was most likely to come up, yet even here, everyone was talking only about National Champion Han Seun.

Park Gidong, 9-dan, gradually began feeling uneasy.

He'd started his first preliminary match, but there were only four spectators.

And one of them was himself, meaning only three other people were watching.

If there had been many professional players in the tournament, he might have understood.

But there were only two: National Champion Han Seun and himself.

The fact that only three people were watching a professional Go player compete hurt more deeply than a defeat he hadn't even suffered yet.

'Damn it. This won't do.'

Park Gidong, 9-dan, finally pressed the button to write a post.

Title: Does anyone know how good Park Gidong, 9-dan, who's competing alongside National Champion Han Seun this time, actually is?

Body:

I looked at his old game records, and he seemed pretty strong. Anyone know more details?

He's good at building early momentum, and his endgame is especially brilliant.

He's also turned around plenty of games he looked certain to lose. Seems like a really skilled player.

Could he be the dark horse of this tournament?

Seriously, with only two professionals entering, both seem guaranteed to finish in the rankings.』

'Good. Perfect.'

Fortunately, his first preliminary opponent wasn't particularly difficult.

It had taken him quite a while to type the post with his thick fingers, correcting typos along the way, but luckily, his opponent was also using almost the entire timer for every move.

『A new comment has been posted on your thread.』

'Good! Once I got things started, people responded!'

It was a notification he'd been awaiting even more eagerly than his first preliminary victory.

But the contents were utterly devastating.

┗ Go Gallery User 1: Master Park, please concentrate on your preliminary match.

┗ Go Gallery User 2: This is the intelligence level of a ninth-dan gatekeeper...

┗ Anonymous: If someone like this can become a professional ninth dan, maybe I should give it a shot too.

"Damn it."

And the comments on his post weren't the only thing that had turned disastrous.

"Huh? Wait, why does the board look like this? Huh?"

His opponent, whose somewhat old-fashioned username, Go Sage, matched his playing style, had completely overturned the position in just three moves.

『A new comment has been posted on your thread.』

『A new comment has been posted on your thread.』

『A new comment has been posted on your thread.』

...

At that moment, notifications of new comments began flooding Park Gidong, 9-dan's phone screen without pause.