I Have Too Many Money-Making Talents - Chapter 114

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Too Much Talent That Pays 114
‘Now, let’s go win.’
As though I had already decided everything.
I stepped quietly into the Convention Hall.
That’s when.
‘……Wait, what?’
Far across the room, beyond the cluster of reporters, at the corner of the corridor leading to the Hotel Lobby.
My gaze, which had drifted past without thought, stopped there.
It felt like they’d been standing there since before.
Whether they noticed my stare or not, the silhouette with the hat pulled low spun around sharply.
I followed their retreating figure with my eyes.
Jeans, a hoodie, a thin coat.
Plain clothes.
But even in sneakers, remarkably tall for a woman.
The gait.
And oddly, a silhouette I felt I knew.
‘Could it be…….’
My heart trembled slightly.
I couldn’t be certain, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away easily.
The face hidden beneath the hat.
But somehow, it resembled too closely the person I was thinking of.
‘For now, focus only on Baduk.’
I shook that thought from my head.
With a match ahead of me, there was no room for other emotions to slip in.
I moved my feet back into the Convention Hall.
The game tables, noticeably fewer than yesterday.
My seat today was in the broadcast area atop the platform.
I climbed up and sat in my designated place.
I paused to steady my breathing and looked around.
An away match.
The air was definitely different.
Foreign languages.
Subtly different humidity.
And an indescribable texture to the air itself.
‘……Good.’
Still, adaptation came easily.
If anything, the tension from this unfamiliar environment seemed to sharpen my focus further.
Footstep, footstep.
Then Kurosawa Ren, 8-dan, climbed onto the platform and sat across from me.
Twenty-three years old.
Up close, he looked even younger.
No—younger still.
And yet.
‘That look in his eyes—he means to climb over me.’
Despite his youthful, polite demeanor, the sharpness in his pupils didn’t escape notice.
Suddenly I was curious.
Whether he could keep that look in his eyes even after this match ended.
Moments later, the camera’s red light came on, and the organizers gave the signal to begin.
We naturally covered our stones.
‘White.’
After exchanging bows, Kurosawa, holding black, made the opening move.
Click.
Small point in the upper left corner.
The same opening as when I played Jeong Si-hu, 9-dan.
Click.
I responded at the star point in the lower right.
The opening unfolded with the corners as its focus.
Even from the Joseki alone, I could feel his style.
AI-based research opening.
Precise and territory-oriented.
Each stone seeks a position of balance.
‘Deep comprehension.’
Impeccable opening construction.
And precisely the flow I’d anticipated.
But I had no intention of letting that flow continue.
Tap.
I answered not with a contact move, but with a counter-contact move.
Breaking from textbook joseki, I twisted the sequence.
There’s no room for predictable development in my baduk today.
Conservative Japanese Go.
It shows in the game records.
They pursue stable victory within the framework, but never break free from it.
Never transcend that boundary.
I’d made a name for myself breaking such baduk.
Not local fights, but baduk that commands the entire board.
Not individual stones, but baduk that shakes the whole flow.
And now I intended to seize and destabilize Kurosawa Ren’s baduk itself.
“…….”
I lifted my head and met Kurosawa Ren’s gaze.
I recalled the look in his eyes from before—when he’d watched me.
Challenging. Unshakable self-belief.
The confidence that he could open any closed door the world set before him.
‘I’m sorry.’
Thought is free.
But.
‘……I don’t play halfway with those who challenge me.’
Not so much that he could ever consider challenging again.
His baduk.
I would crush it completely.

* * *
‘I can win this.’
Kurosawa Ren steadied himself with the thought.
Tap.
He placed his stone and withdrew his hand.
His breathing quickened.
He drew slow breaths, gathering his composure.
‘I am—my baduk is……the baduk that defeated Jeong Si-hu.’
The world’s finest professional.
The longest-reigning number-one ranked player in world baduk since the AI era.
Even if it was only a single game.
That victory was no mere upset.
Proof of skill forged through time.
And the awareness of having crossed the barrier of the world stage.
Kurosawa transformed that victory into confidence, into certainty.
‘……Don’t be deceived. The shaking is only a feint. Stay measured and punish it—that’s all.’
He analyzed his opponent with cold precision.
Kim In-ha, the 9-dan who blazed onto the Korean scene.
A man who won world amateur tournaments and seized the Kuksoo title.
The baduk world called him the ‘Commissioned Champion,’ praised him as the undefeated legend.
But Kurosawa Ren saw something different in his baduk—it fell short of that standard.
‘Illusion. Baseless baduk.’
Moves you’d only see in 1990s game records.
No criteria. No structure.
Baduk that lured mistakes from opponents under the vague pretext of momentum.
Rather, it offended his training in traditional, joseki-centered Japanese Go.
‘……Shaking? Moves that elude AI’s prediction? That’s just a blunder by another name.’
AI establishes absolute standards.
Intuition, instinct?
Just dressed-up language.
Anywhere that wasn’t a Blue Spot was wasteful.
Click.
He deliberated carefully and responded from an AI perspective.
‘Today, I’ll make that mouth stay shut for good.’
He had confidence.
The upward momentum from beating Jeong Si-hu, 9-dan.
And an International Tournament held on Japanese soil.
Japanese Go hadn’t come to an end yet.
It wasn’t as though Fujisaki Yuya, 9-dan, was the only one in Japanese Go.
He wanted to prove to the world that he existed too.
Click.
A Local Fight that began on the lower edge.
With solid Opening Strategy he sealed weak points and built the board state in preparation for the central battle.
But then.
Click.
Upper right corner.
White stones had invaded.
A move he hadn’t calculated for.
‘It’s nothing special. If I respond calmly, it’ll be fine.’
There was no disturbance in his composure.
He played a counter-move.
Then White’s stones changed direction toward the upper edge.
‘Why? Because I didn’t shake, he’s starting to improvise?’
He smirked inwardly.
A flood of meaningless moves.
That’s what he thought.
But then.
‘……He’s letting go again?’
Stones that weren’t connected to one another.
Chaotic moves scattered not just across a local fight, but across the entire board.
They flowed as though scrawled thoughtlessly.
Yet.
That scrawl was accumulating.
‘With such foolish-looking moves…….’
Click.
In that instant, the White stones that had seemed meaningless before came alive one by one.
Dots became lines.
Lines became flow.
Covering the entire board.
‘……What, what?’
His eyes trembled slightly.
It had clearly been moves that looked like doodles.
Scattered plays with barely a connecting point to be seen even if you looked hard.
It was surely like that.
Moves that meant nothing when placed
now all had influence.
Moves that seemed aimed at the center touched the weak point on the lower edge.
Seeping to the right side, they revived the single point that had infiltrated the upper right corner.
Kurosawa Ren’s hands tightened.
‘This can’t be right. It’s impossible…….’
He ran through his Move Reading again.
The moves he’d ignored up until now.
The ones he’d flatly dismissed as meaningless destabilization.
But it wasn’t so.
‘I…… didn’t see it?’
Chaos?
No.
It was meticulous arrangement masquerading as disorder.
Simply, his Move Reading hadn’t reached that far.
‘……I can’t keep up.’
His fingertips turned cold.
His breath grew ragged, and cold sweat beaded on his brow.
The precise calculations that had sustained him had, in the end, brought about his own collapse.
The confidence that had swept across the board had grown murky and obscured.
Only then did Kurosawa Ren, 8-dan, understand.
The Baduk he had scorned.
That seemingly chaotic Move Reading.
It had never been chaotic at all.
He simply had not been able to keep pace with it.
And that despair.
That simple fact.
Pulled him down into an endless mire.
‘Ah.’
Yes.
That was why.
Baduk that could not be explained by game records.
Baduk that confined one’s opponent within its flow.
Scattered freely on the surface, yet every path connected to a single thread in the end.
A faint tremor ran through his hand as he held the stone.
He could no longer maintain his center.
‘…I can’t win.’
The sensation of floundering within a net.
The more he struggled to escape, the tighter the flow constricted.
His will had shattered—he could not bring himself to play the next move.
In his despair, Kurosawa Ren, 8-dan, recalled.
The countless matches he had faced since his professional promotion.
And all the players he had fought.
Even if he combined them all, they did not reach the heel of Kim In-ha, 9-dan.
He was a calamity.

* * *
Park Ji-man’s Baduk studio.
The Nichirenhai—little different from the first official tournament of the new year.
The fact that it was an International Tournament carrying on the tradition of its predecessor, the Fujitsu Cup, also drew attention.
But the eyes of Korean Baduk fans were fixed elsewhere.
Kim In-ha.
His interview footage, broadcast live in Japan.
And the Japanese tabloid media that twisted it and spread it with malice.
As historical sensitivities between Korea and Japan were added to the mix, the fans’ anger flared up like kindling catching flame.
“Everyone, don’t worry. Our In-ha plays better the more he’s criticized.”
Park Ji-man, speaking with the caution of a worried elder, scrolled through the chat and gave a characteristic playful smile.
“…Mental fortitude? Pfft. Even when he got cursed out by a hundred million Chinese Baduk fans, he didn’t flinch. Not one blink. Si-hu may have lost, but In-ha doesn’t lose.”
The moment he said that.
He paused himself.
‘Did those words really just come out of my mouth?’
Just half a year ago, the idea of Jeong Si-hu, 9-dan, losing was unimaginable.
Much less to a Japanese player.
During the live broadcast, he would have lamented Si-hu’s elimination.
There was Kim Eun-woo, 9-dan, ranked second domestically, but he struggled in major tournaments, particularly in International Tournaments.
But now.
Even without those two, he found himself believing more in Kim In-ha’s Baduk.
And that belief had not proven wrong today either.
“Don’t give up! In-ha, don’t give up!”
Park Ji-man’s delighted shouts burst forth in rapid succession.
Manic Destabilization.
White’s moves ranging across the board in all directions.
All that flow was not merely the product of instinct.
“Today, In-ha’s sense has gone wild. Every move right now…they all have solid reasoning. Look—the variations that appear in the AI reference boards. His Move Reading is just insane!”
Every word was true.
Kim In-ha crushed Black methodically, like a man without blood or tears.
“……No, wait. In-ha, you could compromise here, couldn’t you? Why are you really doing this? Going after another large group?”
Kim In-ha is commonly known as an intuitive player.
But beneath that foundation lies meticulous Move Reading.
Those who’ve played against him to the final count are left speechless by his precise Position Evaluation.
Today was different.
Even in positions where he didn’t need to push, he simply would not relent.
In the end, Black’s large group gasped its last breath under White’s relentless assault and perished.
Every stone Black had placed became useless, crumbling entirely.
Baduk devoid of mercy.
“I… I think In-ha came into this with a plan today, you know? He’s just…… completely crushing it. I can feel the madness.”
The chat exploded.
-Today, it seems like Kim In-ha came prepared.
-Ah, this is it. The difference in our levels of perception lol
-Wow. Pulling off manga tactics in real life.
-Even if he loses everything else, he can’t lose to Japan.
-If I were the opponent, my mental state would’ve shattered…….
Korea versus Japan.
Not just Baduk enthusiasts but casual viewers unfamiliar with the game were in a frenzy.
Kim In-ha’s celebrity status.
The issue that had set communities ablaze.
And now, the dopamine exploding from the decisive victory.
All those emotions detonated at once.
“Everyone, In-ha’s momentum is extraordinary.”
And Park Ji-man’s words that followed lit the final fuse.
“The first international tournament of the year. Against Japan—— Starting with the Korean flag planted. I think In-ha is about to show us something.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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