Translator: Dreamscribe
Seo-ha was in an extremely weakened state.
Every cell in his body was screaming.
Because he had maintained focus for far too long, his autonomic nervous system had reached its limit. His brain, not receiving enough fuel, was overheated like a burning engine.
Even so, Seo-ha did not stop thinking.
It was a problem he had been holding onto for seven years.
Seo-ha wanted to solve it as soon as possible.
‘The inspiration I have right now may never return.’
This worry pushed him to drive himself harder.
There was no sleep, no rest.
Seo-ha’s body had already long surpassed its limit.
Scratch, scratch.
Seo-ha continued the proof.
The massive automata diagram that began on the blackboard now covered the entire wall.
Seo-ha had condensed the endlessly spreading pattern into a local rule and confirmed that the rule did not conflict in any situation.
Therefore, only one step remained.
It was to verify the completeness of the hypothesis.
Seo-ha intended to verify his theory not within a limited space, but on an infinitely expanding plane.
Scratch, scratch.
The students murmured.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway never ceased.
“Hey! Get into your classroom quickly!”
The sharp voices of the teachers, the sighs of people worrying about him,
“What is all that?”
“Oh my goodness… the entire wall is covered in formulas.”
“What on earth is he doing?”
Exclamations and whispers of disbelief burst out.
Seo-ha was aware of everything happening around him, but he focused all his attention on the proof before his eyes.
The limit was approaching soon.
He had to finish everything before that happened.
Ji-yoon stood still in place so as not to disturb Seo-ha.
And she looked around.
She was searching for the point where the structure began to take shape.
‘There it is!’
Going in deeper, she saw it.
The shapes and formulas intertwined across the entire wall formed a massive system.
‘He redefined the reduction method to create a local rule.’
And the starting point of all this was the large automata diagram drawn on the blackboard.
Seo-ha would now use that as his power source to climb the inductive ladder and extend onto the infinite plane.
She had considered herself a genius.
Because the mathematicians the world praised as geniuses weren’t all that different from her.
But the boy in front of her was fundamentally different.
‘What exactly is it?’
The geniuses she knew were those who modified existing paths to run faster or discovered shortcuts others could not see.
However, Seo-ha was leaving the first footprint in a barren land where no path existed.
The local rule he created was not merely for computational convenience.
Seo-ha had completed a new system, his own language that had not existed in the world.
Within the boundaries of the massive automata diagram, chaos was being subdued.
Now all that remained was the absolute rule.
All chaos was kneeling under the order Seo-ha had created.
Ji-yoon could not believe her eyes.
***
“Hm? What is this?”
While managing his lecture-related Instagram, Woo-hyun came across a troubling post.
Click.
[Current scene at Gifted High School]
-My friend sent me this, apparently there’s chaos at the Gifted High School right now. Some kid did this to the classroom.
(Photo attached)
└What is all that?
└Isn’t that some kind of formula?
└What’s with the wall?
└Dude, this is kind of scary ㄷㄷㄷㄷ
└Are all Gifted High School kids like that?
└Dark magic? If you stand in the middle, do you get sacrificed?
└Isn’t it obvious? It’s a demon summoning.
└Newbies, that’s a hero summoning circle from another world. If you stand there, you’ll get sucked in.
└Where is that place? I gotta get there before it’s too late ㅋㅋㅋ
└I have a friend at Gifted High School too, apparently the school is turned upside down right now. The principal and vice principal all came running out ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
“Seo-ha?”
Woo-hyun’s eyes widened instantly.
He recognized the familiar handwriting and diagram arrangement, and even though the face wasn't visible, he could tell from the back.
“This kid, what the hell is he doing!”
The classroom was a mess.
Something serious had definitely happened.
“Damn it!”
Woo-hyun sprang up from his seat and snatched the keys he had tossed onto the desk.
Without a moment to think, he burst out the front door.
Waiting for him in the parking lot was a 600-horsepower high-performance sports car.
Clatter, clunk-
He inserted the key and turned it forcefully.
Vroooom-
The sharp engine sound roared as if flaunting its performance.
Woo-hyun roughly shifted gears and stepped on the accelerator.
***
Seo-ha had entered a state of trance.
Where he walked was an endlessly unfolding plane, a vast monochrome world without light or shadow.
It was a space created from Seo-ha’s own equations.
He took a step forward.
The monsters of the graph could no longer approach him. They merely snarled from beyond the boundary, glaring at him. Seo-ha was no longer afraid of them.
“I think I understand now. You weren’t some endlessly multiplying monster.”
Seo-ha reached out his hand toward them.
Four Color Theorem, which had devoured countless mathematicians.
People had thought of this problem as a monster that brought ruin to mathematicians.
Seo-ha moved the chalk and wrote the final formula.
Then, from the spot where he stood, four colors quietly began to spread.
The colors did not collide with one another, intertwining smoothly as if dancing a preordained choreography.
Seo-ha looked around.
The harmony of the four endlessly expanding colors was breathtakingly beautiful.
The wasteland no longer existed.
The infinite plane had now transformed into a tapestry woven with order and harmony.
“So this is your true form.”
At some point, the monster was gone, and in its place stood a gentleman dressed in a neat suit.
The indiscriminate bombardment he had endured.
He had been mistaken for a monster and forcibly suppressed. But this gentleman had merely been waiting all along for someone capable of completing the proof.
Seo-ha’s consciousness drifted into the distant past.
It began when he was about seven years old.
At an age when he was still clumsy at holding a pencil, he discovered a theorem tucked in the corner of an encyclopedia.
‘Any map on a plane can be colored with four colors.’
The thrill he felt when reading that for the first time...
Seo-ha’s young mind was filled with curiosity.
‘Is it really true? Why four colors?’
He drew maps in his sketchbook and cut and pasted colored paper, eventually confirming for himself that the theorem was indeed valid.
However, the proof method he read in the encyclopedia left him shocked.
Though he was young, Seo-ha already had a clear sense of mathematical aesthetics.
‘A proof should be the blade of logic, not primitive brute force.’
‘I’ll try it myself.’
That was his first attempt.
But it had been utterly insufficient.
That was the first time Seo-ha asked his father to buy him a math book.
To understand graph theory, he studied topology.
To examine all the cases, he needed combinatorics.
And the countless theories Seo-ha studied afterward were all in pursuit of solving this one problem.
He came to know frustration and failure.
He learned that no matter how hard he struggled, there were truths that remained out of reach.
Through that, Seo-ha realized that mathematics was not a force to break down walls, but a way to understand them and learn the very components that formed them.
So as long as he didn’t stop, one day he would reach his goal.
That belief is what helped Seo-ha grow.
Seo-ha raised his head and looked at the gentleman.
“How was my proof? Was it satisfactory in your eyes?”
The gentleman’s figure began to blur.
But Seo-ha could tell that he was smiling. The man reached out and gently patted Seo-ha’s head, as if to say he had done well.
Seo-ha smiled back at the gentleman.
Light spread outward.
All that remained was the vast order woven with four colors.
Seo-ha whispered to the departing gentleman one last time.
“Goodbye.”
Tears welled up in Seo-ha’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
“My teacher.”
***
With trembling hands, Seo-ha moved the chalk.
「...Therefore, four colors are sufficient to color any planar map.」
And just below it, neatly written short letters.
「Q.E.D.」
Seo-ha felt the strength leave his fingertips.
The chalk hit the floor with a soft ‘tok’ and broke.
In that moment, the body that had endured through sheer tension collapsed all at once, and his vision wavered.
“Ah...”
With a short moan, Seo-ha’s consciousness was cut off.
“Seo-ha!”
Ji-yoon ran out from her spot.
She reached out to catch the boy collapsing in front of the chalkboard, but there was someone faster than her.
Woo-hyun hurled himself forward and caught Seo-ha.
He firmly supported the boy who had collapsed like a bird exhausted from flight.
“Damn it, what the hell did you do! Call an ambulance, now!”
His voice trembled.
But when he heard the faint sound of the boy’s breathing, he finally let out a sigh of relief.
When the ambulance entered the school grounds, the campus was thrown into chaos in an instant.
Students clung to the windows to watch.
Those crowded in the hallway reacted as if they had witnessed a major disaster, making a commotion.
“Is Seo-ha okay?”
“I don’t know, they said he fainted.”
“They say everything written on the wall was a proof.”
“Even the teachers couldn’t understand a single thing.”
Rumors spread rapidly, one after another.
The sharp-witted principal immediately gave instructions to the facilities center.
“Seal off the seminar room. Only the vice principal and I are allowed entry. Don’t touch a single thing, not the blackboard or the papers on the walls. No cleaning is necessary.”
Facility staff quickly locked the doors and attached sealing stickers.
The next day, a few photos spread across online communities.
Walls filled with graphs and diagrams, countless sets of symbols.
The general public, unfamiliar with mathematics, began calling it a ‘summoning circle’.
But some researchers recognized what it truly was.
[The Gifted High School summoning circle, looks like the Four Color Theorem to me?]
-Seeing it in high resolution, I’m pretty sure. If it’s really been proven, this is a huge deal. Does anyone have more details?
└This is Kim Ji-yoon from KAIST. I was there. It’s definitely the Four Color Theorem. I can’t confirm whether it’s proven yet, but it absolutely must be verified.
└Is this real? There was someone working on this in Korea?
└Where will it be verified? Will the Korean Mathematical Society handle it?
└The international community needs to be involved too. We’ll need a cross-field team, graph theory, combinatorics, computational theory.
└By the way, that classroom really is a spectacular sight. I want to go see it in person.
└Professor, are you interested in the summoning circle too?
└It’s amazing. I want to try making one myself ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
***
Rrrring-
The principal’s office phone rang non-stop.
When the phone paused, the email inbox would flash, and even the fax machine, quiet for months, clicked as it spat out paper.
“Yes, that’s right. The seminar room is being preserved.”
“Ah, that might be a bit difficult. The student’s health is our top priority. There don’t seem to be any major issues, so you should be able to meet him soon. Our student is still very young, after all.”
Not only the academic world, but even the press, somehow catching wind of it, began requesting interviews.
The principal had to repeat the same words several times a day, but he couldn’t help smiling after each call ended.
“When do they say it’ll start?”
The vice principal, listening in on the call, was growing impatient.
The principal, feigning composure, peeled off a sticky note from his monitor and read it aloud.
“They say it will begin the day after tomorrow, once the student consent form is submitted.”
“Principal, this... could it really be...”
The principal raised a hand and cut him off.
“Hey now! Don’t jinx it.
I happen to know Professor Kim Ji-yoon, and judging by her expression back then, there’s no doubt. Let’s start preparing a media briefing just in case. Organize everything, Seo-ha’s exam papers and any other related documents.”
“Yes, understood.”
Once the vice principal left, the corners of the principal’s mouth curled upward.
“Hahaha! Is our school about to make an international debut?”
He jumped up and looked into the mirror.
If he wanted to look good on camera, he figured he’d better lose some weight.