The game was over.
The final obsidian stone rested on the board, a silent, black tombstone marking the grave of Lin Ruoli's pride. The complex, beautiful world of strategy and intellect, the one place she was an undisputed queen, had been utterly and completely conquered. Her mind, which seconds before had been a raging tempest of calculations and desperate gambits, was now just… empty. A complete and total blank.
All that was left was the hollow, ringing echo of her absolute defeat. The strategic part of her brain that had been fighting so hard for her honor, for her very self, was gone. It had been systematically dismantled, humiliated, and discarded like a child's broken toy.
She didn't protest. She didn't cry. The capacity for such complex emotional responses had been temporarily burned out of her. She just stood there for a long, silent moment, a beautiful, near-naked statue of shame, the cool air of the chamber raising goosebumps on her exposed skin.
