Above Guixu, the Immortal Craft cleaved through the waves.
A Go board with nineteen lines in each direction hovered in midair. Black and white stones had battled within its narrow confines for four hours. Yun Lou played white, Lu Changfeng black. The stones intertwined like two dragons locked in a deadly struggle, each entangled within the other, every move concealing a sharp edge.
Yun Lou's style was elegant and nimble. His stones descended like beating wings, light and traceless. Often, he would place a stone casually in some seemingly insignificant spot, only for it to bare its vicious fangs dozens of moves later.
Lu Changfeng's style, by contrast, was steady and weighty. Every move seemed as though he had already calculated the entire board. Neither hurried nor slow, he fortified his position step by step, calmly dismantling each of Yun Lou's surprise attacks while quietly laying ambushes of his own within seemingly ordinary responses.
By the middle game, Yun Lou's brow was drawing into an ever tighter frown.
His fingers hovered over a white stone without coming down. His pupils narrowed slightly as he rapidly calculated every remaining variation.
The endgame concluded.
Yun Lou withdrew his fingers from the white stone and let out a long breath.
One and a half points.
He finished calculating the final endgame moves in his head and reached a result he could scarcely believe-he had lost by one and a half points!
It was neither a crushing defeat nor a resignation in the middle game. Instead, during the endgame, where skill was tested most severely, his opponent had ground away his advantage bit by bit with watertight calculations.
It felt like a duel between two swordsmen in which his opponent had seen through the path of every strike. Then, at the very instant he