The night in Sai Wan was a slumbering beast. Leo Li, clutching the unnervingly heavy old Go board, walked the empty streets, each footstep landing like a hammer blow against his own frantic heart. He had abandoned his safe, predictable flat. He had abandoned all the rituals that had sustained him for eighteen years. He was terrified—a deep, cellular terror of losing control. But at the same time, a strange, guilt-ridden sense of "freedom" pulsed through him like a low-voltage current. For the first time in his adult life, his path had deviated from its preset track.
He was heading towards Kwun Lung Lau, the massive public housing estate that loomed over the western edge of Hong Kong Island like a concrete mountain. Its complex structure and a thousand lighted windows, in Leo's eyes, now resembled a giant, unknowable Go board. He didn't know which intersection he was walking towards, nor what awaited him there.
Just then, a warm memory, one he had deliberately buried, surfaced unbidden in his mind.
He was nine. The school was holding a poetry recital contest. He was pathologically shy, and the thought of standing before hundreds of students had given him nightmares for a week. He wanted to withdraw. His father didn't force him. Instead, that weekend afternoon, he sat Leo down before this very same Go board. Midway through the game, Leo made a small mistake and fell into a losing position, his eyes welling up with frustrated tears.
His father didn't console him. He simply pointed at the board and said gently, "Leo, life is like a game of Go. What's important isn't winning or losing, but seeing every possibility on the board. Right now, you're afraid of just one possibility—the possibility of 'losing'—so you're afraid to place your next stone. But if you give up on the contest out of fear, you lose the chance to see all the other possibilities, the ones that lead to a 'win.' Get on that stage. Even if you stammer, even if you lose, you will have 'placed your stone.' You will have seen another possibility. That is more important than winning."
The next day, he got on the stage. He did stammer. His face was red with anxiety. He didn't win any prize. But he finished. As he walked off the stage, he saw his father in the back of the crowd, giving him a proud thumbs-up.
That warm memory gave Leo an unexpected surge of strength. He took a deep breath, walked into the cavernous entrance of Kwun Lung Lau's Block B, and pressed the button for the rooftop.
The wind on the rooftop was fierce, whipping his hair across his face. Ah Zhe was leaning against the railing, overlooking the glittering panorama of Hong Kong Island. The lazy demeanor from Apliu Street was gone, replaced by a sharpness that seemed out of place with his surroundings.
"You finally made it," Ah Zhe turned around. "Was starting to think you'd bailed."
"Why are you helping me?" Leo asked, the question taking all the courage he could muster.
"Because of your father," Ah Zhe answered directly, lighting a cigarette. The ember glowed and faded in the wind. "My old man was a peripheral member of the 'Pigeon Society,' handled some of their tech support. He used to talk about a core member, a Mr. Li, who was a brilliant Go player. Called him a genius, a madman who wanted to challenge God with an abacus. My dad owed him a favor. So, consider this me paying back a debt of honor."
"The Pigeon Society… my father…"
"Their enemy is powerful," Ah Zhe cut him off. "More powerful than we can imagine. Look at this."
He pulled a ruggedized tablet from his backpack and spread the crossword newspaper on the rooftop floor, scanning it with the tablet's camera. He pointed to the clues and their answers, like "Beethoven's Hero" for "Napoleon" and "Cause of the Trojan War" for "Apple."
"This isn't a normal crossword," Ah Zhe's fingers danced across the screen. "It's a double-encryption system. First layer converts the answers to Morse code. The second layer then uses a specific Go algorithm for substitution… according to my database, this algorithm is from 'Go of the 21st Century' by Go Seigen."
A string of numbers resolved into an IP address.
"Got it!" Ah Zhe said, excited. He immediately began tracing it. "Let's see where our old man wants us to go… Aberdeen… no, wait…"
Ah Zhe's face suddenly changed. The glowing dot on the map, like a ghost, instantly jumped from a server in Hong Kong to a financial data center in London. It lingered for less than a millisecond before leaping to a host at the New York Stock Exchange, and then, finally, vanished completely from a server in Tokyo.
"Insane…" Ah Zhe's face was now as pale as Leo's. "This isn't a guide, it's a demonstration of power. They're using quantum-hopping technology to hide their tracks. Your father's enemy wasn't the Hong Kong police, Leo. It might be a nation-state."
Just as Ah Zhe was reeling from this technical defeat, his tablet screen went black.
Then, in the center of the screen, a line of white, pixelated text slowly faded in:
`Welcome, new player.`
The text vanished, replaced by a dynamic chart. It was a real-time candlestick chart for a cryptocurrency Leo had never heard of, labeled "LUNA." The chart showed that in the last few minutes, precisely during their trace attempt, the coin's price had experienced a minuscule, almost negligible dip, before immediately recovering.
On the grand scale of the chart, that tiny dip formed a clear, unmistakable downward-pointing arrow.
The tip of the arrow was pointed directly at their location on the map of Hong Kong: Kwun Lung Lau.
It was an act of supreme, brutal arrogance. The opponent was communicating with the power of a god: I see you. I can even manipulate a global cryptocurrency market just to draw you a map to show you that I see you.
Ah Zhe was paralyzed with a technician's despair. This was a power he could neither comprehend nor counter. But Leo, the man who knew nothing of finance or technology, was staring intently at the chart, the fear on his face slowly being replaced by an expression of intense, obsessive focus.
"That's not right…" he muttered, almost to himself. "The pattern… it's not designed to draw an arrow. It's too inefficient, there are simpler ways… They were testing something else…"
His long-trained sensitivity to patterns, honed by years of trauma, kicked in. He felt a chilling sense of familiarity in the curve of that tiny price fluctuation.
"Ah Zhe," he turned, his voice trembling with a strange excitement, "can you overlay this candlestick pattern with historical data? Specifically… October 1997. A stock called 'Ever-Tech Ventures'… the trading data from the last five minutes before it crashed!"
Confused but compelled by Leo's sudden certainty, Ah Zhe pulled up the historical database. When he superimposed the two graphs, he let out a sharp, involuntary gasp.
The two curves, separated by eighteen years, different markets, and entirely different technological eras, shared an internal, microscopic trading-volatility pattern with an over 90% similarity.
"They weren't drawing a map…" Leo's voice was a whisper. "They were running an experiment. They're perfecting the same algorithm that killed my father eighteen years ago!"
Ah Zhe was completely stunned. He looked at this pale, obsessive office clerk and realized for the first time that this man possessed a terrifying, incomprehensible gift for seeing order in chaos. His attitude towards Leo shifted from paying a debt to genuine awe and respect.
"I was just going to help you solve a puzzle," Ah Zhe said, his voice hoarse. "But it looks like we're both in the same sinking boat now. My workshop is definitely compromised. We have to go. Now."
At that moment, a shrill alarm blared from another of Ah Zhe's devices. He glanced at it, and his face turned to stone. "Shit! We've got 'utility workers' downstairs, sealing the building!"
Ah Zhe frantically packed his "junk," but when he tried to ditch the heavy old Go board to lighten their load, Leo clutched it tightly. "We have to take it!"
No time to argue. Ah Zhe grabbed a handheld scanner and quickly ran it over the board, trying to see what was so special about it. The scanner's screen didn't display any data. It instantly filled with a chaotic scramble of red error codes, let out a high-pitched scream, and then, with a soft pop, a wisp of smoke rose from its casing. It was dead.
"What the hell is in this piece of wood?" Ah Zhe yelled in disbelief. "Its energy density was high enough to fry my scanner!"
They were out of time. The sound of heavy footsteps echoed from the rooftop stairwell. They were cornered.
Ah Zhe looked at Leo, who was protectively hugging the Go board, then at the black-clad figures disguised as utility workers assembling below. For the first time, a look of genuine uncertainty crossed his face.
He asked the question that would define the rest of their story: "Hey, Go-board boy… who the hell can we trust now?"