Event Year: 2001

Kishimoto (Kaio's first board) played a match with Hikaru to find out his real strength and expressed his puzzlement as to why Akira sees Hikaru as a opponent when he's not as strong. Through Kishimoto, Hikaru realises the widening gap between Aikaru and himself and that it would be impossible to catch up with Akaru with Hikaru's current pace. All fired up, Hikaru decides to start off with enroling in the Insei program with becoming a Pro and defeating Aikra as his goal. However, he failed to realise that Inseis can't participate in Amateur tournaments. Thus, he's being forced to make a choice between being a Insei or quitting Haze Jr's Go Club.

Hikaru is slowly, but surely, getting better as evidenced when he beats Mitani in a game though with a handicap as well as Tsutsui. To play go with Sai, now that they decided not to play internet go anymore, Hikaru tries to get his gramps to buy him a go board/stones. When Hikaru beats a strong opponent at the go school, even to the astoundment of the teacher, he finally understands that one can only judge how strong others are when he's strong himself. He bumps into Kaio's first board when he's browsing a bookstore and the latter pulls him away to a match.

Akira skipped his first match of the Pro exams in order to play the match against Sai on the net. Akira is perplexed over the identify of Sai which he thinks might be Hikaru while Ogata has his own thinking. Players all over the world are observing the match. Though Akira lost the match, he feels as though he had finally caught up with 'Hikaru'/Sai. When Akira heard from a Go cafe customer that Hikaru was sighted at an internet cafe, he races to the site thinking that he might be Sai. Hikaru denies he's Sai but gets ruffled when Akira seems to disregard him as a opponent. The episode ended with Hikaru saying 'If you keep chasing after an illusion of me, I'll pass by you eventually'.

Players who have been following Sai's net matches attended the 20th International Amateur Go Tournament in Japan. A commotion occurs at the mention of Sai's name as everyone is trying to who out who he is. The commotion caught the attention of Ogata and Akira. When Akira and Sai engaged in a match over the net, the former is reminded of his first match with Hikaru. Akira discontinues the match so as not to disrupt the ongoing tournament but fixes a date for a match with Sai which happens to be on the first day of Akira's Pro exams.