Translator: Dreamscribe
An apartment in Daejeon,
Park Sung-dae, a mathematics teacher at the Gifted High School, looked at the stack of reference books piled up on his desk and held his forehead.
The night was already deep, and outside the window, it was pitch dark. And so was his mind.
A few days ago, when he received the list of new students from the academic affairs office, one student’s name caught his eye.
Yu Seo-ha, 13 years old.
International Mathematical Olympiad individual 1st place winner,
An elementary school student who perfectly solved what is considered the hardest problem in IMO history.
The word "genius", which has been excessively overused these days, could not properly describe that child.
His heart felt as heavy as a stone.
“What am I supposed to teach him?”
He had a master's degree in mathematics from Seoul National University,
Sung-dae had taught countless gifted students over the years, but not once had he ever felt that his own mathematical ability was lacking.
But now, he was not so sure.
Even among teachers, there are battles of pride.
And having graduated from a Science High School and a Gifted High School served as an effective means to prove his pride.
People often asked why he became a teacher after graduating from such prestigious universities, but being a math teacher had the appeal of directly guiding a student’s growth.
Students who used to mechanically solve problems would open their eyes to mathematics through his lectures. And after going through intense thinking and meticulous logic, they would finally reach a complete proof.
In that moment, the look in the students' eyes would change.
Teacher Park liked witnessing that moment.
Mathematics is not about finding the right answer but a language of exploration and proof. But what kind of help could he offer a boy who was already walking that path?
His concerns only deepened.
***
Spring sunlight slipped through the leaves and shattered onto the road.
Cherry trees and zelkova trees lined both sides of the school route,
And past them was a flower path where azaleas and lilacs blended together.
It was a beautiful scene, but Seo-ha felt a strange atmosphere settle over the school like a barrier.
Today marked the third day since entering the Gifted High School.
Seo-ha had come to a conclusion.
This place was a kind of another world.
A twisted space that exists in reality but is not reality.
There was clear evidence of this.
The total number of first-year freshmen was 120.
However, not a single one of them came from a single-parent household. (The principal proudly mentioned this during the orientation.)
Seo-ha looked up data from the Statistics Bureau.
According to the “Single-Parent Family Status Survey” in 20xx, 9.3% of all households in Korea were single-parent families.
There was no need to even calculate.
The probability that all freshmen came from two-parent households was 0.000818%,
1 in 120,000.
About the same probability as flipping a coin and getting heads 17 times in a row.
“Scary, sample bias.”
It was astonishing that the filter called college entrance could shake the sample this strongly.
So the idea that this place was an alternate world where even the laws of probability and statistics were twisted was a logically valid inference.
Someone was approaching.
‘Ah! An inhabitant of the other world.’
Kim Eun-bin from the same class.
In this place where the male-to-female ratio was 8.5 to 1.5, she was a rare sight.
“Hello.”
Seo-ha bowed his head and greeted her politely.
Even though they were different in age, she was still a classmate. Perhaps this kind of greeting was a bit too much.
But Seo-ha had learned through his IMO experience that showing the utmost courtesy to those older than him, regardless of reason, made life easier.
However, no reply came.
Seo-ha raised his head and looked at her.
A common trait of the inhabitants of the other world was that they were always doing something.
Are their ears vulnerable? Except during class time, they always protected their ears with earphones.
They always held something to read in their hands.
Step, step.
As Eun-bin walked by, her eyes met Seo-ha’s. But without any reaction, she simply passed by.
Seo-ha nodded and said, “As expected….” With this case, the probability dropped even further.
41.4%.
Another law of the other world.
Having grown up in the countryside, Seo-ha greeted every neighbor he passed on the road. And he always got a greeting in return, 100% of the time. It was as natural as air.
But it was different here.
On the road, or in the hallway, the eyes of the students passing by were always buried in a book or tablet screen.
Even if their eyes met, like now, they would just ignore and pass by.
Seo-ha sensed this strangeness within less than two hours of entering the school, and he was currently collecting data for his research.
‘Mom, Dad, and Seo-eun.
This is a place where even the laws of mathematics are twisted, and the most basic social conventions of human beings are not observed. I’ll be able to manage, right?’
It had not even been a few days since he left, but Seo-ha already missed home.
A fast food chain in front of the school,
Seo-ha sat at the table with a tense expression. Across from him, Su-jeong, who had now become his sunbae at school, was resting her chin in one hand and smiling with her eyes as she looked at him.
“Is the world coming to an end? I can’t believe I’m going to the same school as you.”
Her face, contrary to her words, looked like she was thoroughly enjoying this.
She was in her third year now, and Seo-ha was a freshman.
Not long ago, there had been as much distance between them as between an elementary student and a high schooler. But now, they were schoolmates, sunbae and hubae.
‘I know he’s going to have a hard time, but I can’t just pretend not to know him.’
As someone who had gone through this school before him, she had a lot to say to this pitiful little lamb.
Su-jeong was, in fact, a bit excited. She had entered elementary school a year earlier than others and graduated middle school early.
A two-year age gap with her classmates.
There was always a sense of distance with her classmates.
Everyone around her was older, and Seo-ha was the only younger person she could actually talk to.
So Su-jeong decided to generously share all the know-how she had accumulated with Seo-ha.
“Okay, what did I tell you?”
At Su-jeong’s question, Seo-ha flinched.
“You said 90% of the students who ask me questions already know the answer…”
Snap!
Su-jeong snapped her fingers.
“Exactly! Isn’t it so funny? Why do you think they ask even though they already know?”
Seo-ha’s expression turned blank.
“Maybe… they want to confirm if what they know is really correct?”
Could there be any other reason?
“Tsk tsk! It’s exactly the opposite.”
Su-jeong narrowed her eyes in mockery and shook her head.
“Huh?”
Su-jeong looked at him pitifully, as if saying, ‘Oh, what should I do with this poor little lamb!’
“They’re checking if you don’t know what they know.”
Seo-ha tilted his head, still not quite understanding.
“To show off… maybe?”
“No? It’s more like a way to protect themselves.
‘Even Yu Seo-ha, who’s supposedly amazing at math, doesn’t know this- but I do!’ That kind of thing. If they can secure even a tiny piece of evidence that there’s at least one area they know better than you, they can preserve a minimal sense of dignity.”
Su-jeong blushed slightly, as if embarrassed by her own words.
At one point, even Su-jeong had felt similar emotions toward Seo-ha. But in front of an exceptional human, all people become equal. She had realized and accepted that early on.
‘Is he the pitiful one, or are the kids in the same grade the unlucky ones…’
Staring at a tree you’ll never climb doesn’t just hurt your neck, it wounds your heart too. Su-jeong knew a few boys who had gone dark from envying her.
If only they could show overwhelming skill like she had done to Seo-ha, it would be easier on everyone…
It would be nice if seeing his IMO 1st place achievement would be enough for them to accept it, but the bloated egos of Gifted High School students didn’t easily allow them to acknowledge someone else’s superiority.
‘Was I like that too?’
Probably. She had seriously believed there wasn’t a person in the world she couldn’t beat.
Her face burned with embarrassment.
On top of that, there was something about Seo-ha that strangely made people angry.
Especially that face of his that seemed to say, ‘I’m different from you guys. I don’t even know what jealousy is’.
“Why don’t they return greetings?”
Seo-ha asked Su-jeong something that had been bothering him.
"They were all wearing earphones, right?"
“I... think so.”
Su-jeong nodded as if she understood.
“That’s like an unspoken rule at this school. It means ‘I’m busy doing something else right now, so I won’t greet you or respond to your greeting.’”
Su-jeong stirred her cola with a straw and laughed.
“Selfish, right? Skipping even the most basic courtesy just to protect their own world. They hate having their flow interrupted while solving problems. That’s just how the kids here are.”
“Oh!”
His question was answered.
Seo-ha’s respectful gaze satisfied Su-jeong.
“That’s why I was so worried, you know? How hard must it be for a kid who smells like the countryside to survive in a place like this?”
It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly interesting.
Seo-ha expressed his thanks to Su-jeong repeatedly and returned to school.
On the way back to the dormitory, he organized his thoughts.
So the members of this place were...
“They have strong self-awareness and are selfish. They have no interest in others and are extremely individualistic. There is a possibility they may show exclusivity toward people who didn’t come from the same statistical population group.”
The more he put it into words, the more absurd it sounded.
Seo-ha, who had never had major issues with social relationships before, now faced a significant challenge here.
Contrary to what Seo-ha thought, the students in his class actually had a subtle interest in him. It was just that their way of showing it was slightly distorted.
On the surface, everyone opened their workbooks as if nothing was going on, scribbling formulas on their tablets. But their eyes kept drifting toward Seo-ha, who sat in the very front row.
Of course, each of them had different thoughts.
‘Is he really on another level?’
‘Maybe he’s actually not that different from me?’
‘Just because he’s good, doesn’t mean much.’
‘He seems like someone who’s going to make it big later, should I try to befriend him now?’
‘Mom once told me to bring him over sometime…’
‘There was a rumor that he’s the genius Shin Woo-hyun mentioned.’
‘I’ve got a really hard problem. Should I ask him?’
‘Ah, maybe I should’ve said hello earlier?’
While everyone was lost in their own thoughts, math class began.
Creak.
Teacher Park entered the classroom.
Today was his first lesson with this class.
After agonizing all night, he concluded that he first needed to accurately assess Seo-ha’s ability.
“Today we’ll have a pop quiz.”
“On the first day?”
“What’s the scope?”
“Does it count toward our grades?”
Various reactions erupted from the students.
The exams at the Gifted High School were notorious for their difficulty.
Last semester, the school’s top student had an average score of 57, while the lowest had 46.
But Teacher Park designed this quiz so that the class average would be around 30, in order to properly evaluate Seo-ha’s skills.
It was different from the IMO.
Because they had to solve many problems within a limited time, proficiency was critical.
Shff-
Teacher Park began distributing the test papers he had prepared in advance.
The test was four pages long with a total of ten questions.
Next to each question, there was a small note labeled “key keyword”: invariant, expected value, rationalization, symmetry, limit structure, graph connectivity, pigeonhole, generating function.
The students’ eyes scanned that part first.
Key keywords, not hints to the answers, but a guide to indicate how they should approach the problem.
‘Without those, it would be way too difficult…’
“Time is 35 minutes!”
At Park Sung-dae’s announcement, the classroom instantly fell silent.
"I'll look at the flow of the solution rather than the correct answer."
Scratch, scratch.
Pencils began moving all at once.