The world had shrunk to a grid of nineteen by nineteen lines. Just a board. Just polished stones of black and white. At least, that's what Jiang Shen told himself.
He breathed in, The air in the championship hall was stale thick with the silence of a thousand people holding their breath. He could feel the weight of their eyes on his back, the heat of the television lights, the almost-silent hum of the grandmaster clock beside him. All of it faded to a dull distant roar.
Only the board was real.
Across from him, the living legend, Master Tanaka, sat like a granite statue. The man hadn't so much as blinked in twenty minutes.
Why would he?
The game was his.
Everyone thought so.
The commentators in their hushed booths, the experts online, the very air in the room—it all screamed that the young prodigy, Jiang Shen, had finally, fatally, overreached.
Just a board, he thought again, his mind a sea of calm in the storm of his own making. Just stones.
It was a beautiful trap Tanaka had laid. A classic. The Dragon formation in the west was a coiled, snarling beast, ready to swallow his own meager group of white stones. The Tiger in the east was poised to pounce, cutting off any escape. A perfect pincer. Textbook stuff.
But textbooks don't account for ghosts.
Twenty moves ago, Jiang Shen had made a play that had caused the entire hall to gasp. A move the pros called "amateurish at best, suicidal at worst." He'd sacrificed a small but vital group of stones for what seemed like no reason at all. Tanaka hadn't even hesitated. He'd snapped up the offering, his own formations swelling with captured territory, his victory looking more and more assured.
A mistake. Everyone saw it as a mistake. Even Tanaka, for a brief second, had a flicker of pity in his ancient eyes. Pity for a boy flying too close to the sun.
Jiang Shen's gaze drifted over the board. He wasn't seeing black and white stones anymore. He was seeing the flow of battle, the lines of influence, the life and death of entire armies. The novels he read in his spare time—tales of immortal cultivators and warring empires—felt more real in these moments than anything else. His sacrificed stones weren't a blunder. They were a seed. A forgotten troops to sent on a suicide mission deep behind enemy lines, waiting for a signal.
And now, the time was right.
His fingers, long and steady, plucked a single black stone from his bowl. The gentle click as he picked it up was the only sound in the universe. He didn't hesitate. He placed it at a point that seemed utterly nonsensical. Point C-17. An empty, almost irrelevant space, far from the main battle.
A murmur went through the crowd.
Was he giving up?
Was this the random, final act of a defeated player?
Master Tanaka frowned for the first time in an hour. His eyes, which had been fixed on the main battlefields, were now drawn to this strange, lone stone. This anomaly. He stared at it, and the gears of his legendary mind began to turn, retracing the last twenty moves.
Jiang Shen knew the exact moment the old master saw it. The faint widening of his eyes. The almost imperceptible intake of breath.
The ghost had just sprung its trap.
That lone black stone at C-17, so far from everything else, was the final link in an invisible chain. It connected to the "dead" group of stones he had sacrificed. It formed a hidden eye. And that eye, now alive, gave life to another dead group, which in turn threatened the very heart of Tanaka's massive Dragon. The entire western formation, which looked so powerful and solid was suddenly revealed to be a hollow shell with its heart cut out.
It was a strategy so deep so far-reaching, that no one had seen its birth. They had all been watching the roaring tiger, while the real threat was a single assassin who had slipped into the emperor's bedroom twenty moves ago.
Tanaka's granite composure finally cracked. He saw the full, horrifying picture. He was surrounded. He had been for the last hour. He just hadn't known it.
Jiang Shen picked up another stone. Click. He placed it. A simple, quiet move that solidified his advantage.
Tanaka stared at the board for another five minutes, his mind racing, but there was no escape.
Every path was a dead end.
Every move led to a greater loss.
With a long, slow sigh that seemed to carry the weight of his entire career, Master Tanaka gave a deep, respectful bow. He tipped over his king stone. "I resign."
The hall exploded. The silence shattered into a roar of disbelief and thunderous applause. Flashes from cameras went off like a firestorm. At nineteen, Jiang Shen had just become the youngest World Go Champion in history.
He stood up, gave a respectful bow back to the legendary master, and turned to face the cheering crowd. He felt a quiet sense of triumph.
The perfect game.
The final move.
And then, a sudden, sharp pain flared behind his eyes. White hot. Blinding.
The roar of the crowd warped, fading into a low, metallic buzz. The bright lights of the stage blurred, the colors swirling together. He looked down at the board. The lines... the stones... they were melting. Black and white swirling together, flowing down an invisible drain in the center of the world.
Am I falling?
His knees buckled. The world tilted on its axis. He felt a profound sense of confusion.
The final move..... wasn't it?
Then, only darkness.