A Shared Path
The laboratory of the Department of Astronomy—the most remote outpost of Seohan University's College of Natural Sciences—was suddenly thrown into an uproar.
"This is a direct directive from the dean himself!"
At the department chair's words, Cha Seon-hyeok, a research professor and head of the lab, blinked his wide eyes in surprise.
"Clean the lab from top to bottom! Make a list of all the old equipment! They're going to replace everything!"
Cha Seon-hyeok tilted his head in confusion.
Hadn't this remote outpost always been treated like an impoverished stepchild until now?
"Why the sudden change?"
"Sigh, you gave a tour to an elementary school kid a while ago, didn't you?"
"Ah..."
"Why on earth didn't you report that?!"
Wait, did I really have to report a tour for an elementary schooler?
"Apparently, he's a kid the dean has his eye on. They tried to recruit him to the Gifted Education Center before, but they failed."
"..."
"Anyway, this is our chance. But don't overdo it. I heard his guardian is absolutely terrifying. The chair of the math department called them and got completely cursed out."
"C-cursed out?"
"Well, apparently he deserved it."
"..."
"So, if he ever comes back, try to gently win him over without making it too obvious. Got it?"
"Win him over?"
"Make him want to keep hanging out at our university. Then, when the timing is right, show him around the Gifted Education Center too, okay?"
"Ah..."
Cha Seon-hyeok swallowed hard.
I don't think he's coming back, though.
Even though the boy had taken all those dusty books, surely he would get bored of them soon.
Besides, only if the kid didn't return would Se-yeong set him up on that blind date.
Well, even if I get chewed out later, a golden opportunity has presented itself. I might as well shoot my shot...
Seon-hyeok quickly scanned the lab.
There were things that needed replacing everywhere he looked.
"Uh, the lab computers are all over five years old. When the kid was looking around, they kept lagging, and it was incredibly embarrassing..."
"Oh, really?"
"Yes! The monitors have terrible ghosting. And there's a limit to renting external servers every time we process large datasets..."
"What else?"
"Well, we should probably have an interactive smartboard instead of a regular whiteboard to look a bit more professional..."
"Whew, alright. Draw up an estimate for everything. Judging by the dean's mood earlier, he'll probably approve most of it right away."
"Yes, sir!"
Seon-hyeok's eyebrow twitched.
Surely they wouldn't take it all back after upgrading everything, right?
By the way... Se-yeong wasn't kidding, was she?
For the first time since returning to Korea, Cheol-jun was completely absorbed in books.
Until now, he had sourced most of his information from the internet.
The digital world was so vast that he sometimes found himself wandering off and getting lost.
Whenever he searched for something, other fascinating topics would constantly pop up to distract him.
In any case, he had built up his knowledge by selectively gathering whatever he needed at any given moment.
But books were different.
They offered a precise, structured path.
Without the risk of getting sidetracked, he only had to follow where the author led.
It was a beautifully paved road where understanding each step guaranteed arrival at an even more magnificent view.
At first, it took some getting used to.
Until now, Cheol-jun had always formulated a question first and then acquired knowledge to solve it.
Following a path without any initial questions felt a bit tedious.
While the joy of acquiring knowledge was immense, simply understanding and walking straight down a pre-established path left him feeling slightly unfulfilled.
So, he slightly altered his approach to understanding.
He began reading books while immediately brainstorming what kind of questions he could solve using the newly introduced concepts.
Studying this way took a bit more time, but it was far more enjoyable.
The inverse-square law? A law stating that energy or force propagating from a point source decreases in intensity in inverse proportion to the square of the distance... If the distance doubles, the intensity becomes one-fourth. If the distance triples, it becomes one-ninth... If I know the distance, I can find the actual brightness, and if I know the actual brightness, I can find the distance.
F = L / 4πd²
In this manner, he formulated questions that fit his newly acquired concepts and connected them.
Consequently, books on mathematics, physics, and astronomy lay open side by side on his desk.
He found astronomy within physical laws, recalled mathematics from astronomy books, and solved physics and astronomy using mathematical formulas.
This entire process was incredibly exhilarating.
There was another intriguing element as well.
It was the traces left behind by the people who had studied these books before him.
On the back cover or somewhere along the margins, the names of the books' owners were written.
Some names appeared frequently, while others only cropped up occasionally.
Do Seon-ju?
The name Do Seon-ju appeared quite often, written in beautiful, neat handwriting.
Drawing little hearts here and there seemed to be a habit of theirs.
There was also an almost excessive amount of marginalia.
Thanks to this, he could clearly see how this person had tried to grasp each concept.
This part would have been much easier to understand if they looked at it this way.
Wow, I didn't know you could write it like this.
Ah, they must have gotten stuck here.
Walking through the vast universe of knowledge while looking at the back of someone who had trodden the path before him made him feel completely connected, never lonely.
At certain points, he could see where they had stumbled; at others, he could feel their excitement as they practically ran through the pages.
Following along and observing their journey was immensely entertaining.
In truth, the most fascinating materials were the original foreign research papers.
Rather than simply teaching him facts, reading them felt like having a conversation with someone trying to persuade him through rigorous logic.
However, while he was confident in speaking English, his reading was still a bit slow, and there were too many difficult technical terms, so he was saving them for later.
Furthermore, there were still too many concepts he didn't know to comfortably converse with the authors.
Since he began studying this way, his method of teaching his classmates at school had also gradually evolved.
Because he was constantly formulating questions in his own studies, he was naturally training himself on how to make difficult concepts easier to grasp.
"Kiddo! It's ten o'clock!"
"Okay!"
Cheol-jun looked at the open books with a lingering sense of regret, then sprang up and headed to the living room.
"Goodnight!"
"Yeah! Sweet dreams."
"Yes, sir!"
Returning to his room, Cheol-jun turned off the light and buried himself in his bed.
Then, he began placing the concepts he had learned today onto the mental map of knowledge he had constructed in his head.
Kepler's third law went under proportion and squares; the Stefan-Boltzmann law went next to the inverse-square law; Wien's displacement law went under the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Organizing them neatly like this allowed him to retrieve them instantly whenever they were needed.
Cheol-jun closed his eyes and thought of Kepler's third law.
A man named Johannes Kepler had asked, Huh? What is this? and sixty-eight years later, Isaac Newton had answered with the law of universal gravitation. Much later, someone named Do Seon-ju had walked the path paved by those two giants.
And now, he was following in their footsteps.
Though they lived in completely different eras, they were all walking the exact same path.
It felt incredibly profound.
Will I be able to pave a path like that in the future?
A path that someone else would walk hundreds of years later, marveling at the journey.
Just imagining it made his heart race with excitement.
Cheol-jun giggled softly and drifted off to sleep.
"No, seriously, yesterday he was explaining instantaneous slope by talking about how a bullet drops due to gravity the further it travels."
"Instantaneous slope... Don't tell me, derivatives?"
"He didn't use the word 'derivative.' He just explained how steeply it drops at any given point and represented it as a curve... but that's literally derivatives and functions."
"Wow, you're right... But why did that even come up?"
"He was explaining pattern recognition and ratios, and it just popped out of nowhere."
"..."
"And last time, you know the leveling system in games?"
"Oh, I heard about that too. He explained exponential functions using the experience points required per level, right?"
"Yes! That's the one! So you heard about it too, Teacher."
"Isn't it absolutely mind-blowing?"
"Rumors have already spread like wildfire among the parents. Apparently, they're getting flooded with requests to transfer classes."
"The math level of Class 5 must be insane right now."
"You know Min-jun, right?"
"Of course. I was so shocked when that kid, who used to hate studying, won a bronze medal in the school competition."
"Well, he recently entered the HME and won a gold medal in the fifth-grade division."
"Whoa... Wait, what about Cheol-jun?"
"The HME only goes up to the ninth grade. But apparently, he got a perfect score and won the Grand Prize in the ninth-grade division."
"That is truly incredible..."
"Well, it's only natural. He's a kid who teaches functions and derivatives to his friends..."
"True..."
Lately at Hanyoung Private Elementary School, whenever teachers gathered, Class 5 was the only topic of conversation.
The main subject was the thrice-weekly special tutoring sessions led by Cheol-jun.
The number of teachers wanting to observe had grown so much that they now had to draw straws to decide who got to attend.
Fifth-grade homeroom teachers were also getting headaches because students from other classes kept begging to join.
As a last resort, some tried to replicate Cheol-jun's teaching methods in their own classes, but they struggled because the flavor of his lessons was simply impossible to replicate.
"He'll probably enter the KMC or the KJMO too, right?"
"Most likely. Teacher Ko mentioned that he might even be at the KMO level already..."
"Wow, I've never seen a prodigy like him before."
"Me neither. Honestly, I think it's a first for everyone here."
Even for Hanyoung Private Elementary School, which boasted relatively wealthy and bright students compared to public schools, a genius of this caliber was unprecedented.
"By the way, spring is really gone now. It suddenly got so hot."
"I know, right?"
May.
The month of the preliminary round of the KMC, where students from all over the country who had received private tutoring and fancied themselves math prodigies gathered to make a name for themselves.
From the KMC onward, rote memorization and advanced learning were not enough; most questions demanded deep critical thinking.
Although it was a tier below the KMO, the high school division of the KMC felt almost like a warm-up for the Olympiad.
The two teachers—and indeed, all the faculty at Hanyoung—were eagerly counting down the days to this KMC, an exam they normally wouldn't have paid much attention to.
They were incredibly excited to see if Cheol-jun would pull off another legendary performance in the middle school division.
"Hey. Is that them?"
Gangnam Daeyoon High School.
Two middle school students walking toward the KMC preliminary testing site glanced at a bench under a tree.
Three elementary schoolers were playing a game on a smartphone.
"I think so. That smallest kid over there is the one who got a perfect score in the ninth-grade division of the HME."
"Whoa, he really is just a kid. Did he register for the ninth-grade division this time too?"
"Probably. Hey, are you going to lose to an elementary schooler?"
"As if. I got a perfect score on the HME too."
"Well, he'll be taking the test with us anyway."
"But aren't they nervous at all? Playing games right outside the testing center?"
"They're just kids."
"True..."
The two chuckled and walked past the children.
But the conversation between the kids was bizarre.
"Hey, I need 512 experience points to reach level 9."
"That's 2 to the power of 9, right? Level 8 was 2 to the power of 8?"
"Then what about level 10?"
"1,024!"
"Ah, damn, exponential functions are so brutal."
"Cheol-jun! If my HP is at one-third and I'm taking 10% poison damage per turn, how much HP will I have left after three turns?"
"Calculate it yourself!"
"If I subtract three-tenths from one-third... isn't that one-thirtieth?"
"That's why I told you not to hoard your items and use a bandage on the next turn!"
The two middle schoolers froze and blinked.
Are they actually playing a game?
"Hey. It's him. The small kid from earlier."
"Is he heading to the middle school division after all? Since he's alone, the other kids must have gone to the elementary division."
"Huh? Wait, is he? He's walking right past it."
"Isn't that the high school division? No way, is he taking the tenth-grade test?"
"No, he just walked past the tenth-grade rooms too."
"Oh my god, eleventh grade?!"
"Just how far ahead has he studied?"
"Holy crap... That is legendary."
The two middle schoolers swallowed hard.
The KMC eleventh-grade testing room didn't actually contain many actual high school juniors.
More than half of them were younger students.
This was because students who excelled at math were typically two or three grade levels ahead of their peers.
Yet, even among them, an exceptionally young-looking boy sat right at the front.
In the quiet room, the other students' gazes repeatedly drifted to the back of the boy's head.
Sitting in the front row, Jeong-u glanced back before placing his writing utensils on his desk with a solemn, composed expression.
As expected, I'm the youngest!
Though he feigned composure, seventh-grader Choi Jeong-u was secretly basking in a deep sense of superiority.
Last year, as a sixth grader, when he won the Grand Prize in the ninth-grade division of the KMC, two articles about him had even popped up online.
Unfortunately, he had failed the first round of the KMO, but he chalked that up to a simple lack of experience.
Honestly, he was confident he could solve those problems with flying colors now.
In any case, Jeong-u's goal this year wasn't something as minor as the KMC.
Ultimately, the pinnacle of mathematics in Korea was the KMO.
Therefore, solving eleventh-grade KMC problems should be a walk in the park.
If I place in the eleventh-grade division too...
How many online articles would be written about him this time?
Although he pretended not to care, Jeong-u secretly craved the attention.
Having his friends' parents look at him with envy, seeing his own parents swell with pride, and watching his photo and articles appear online—even if he had to write a few comments himself because the comment section was too bare—was an intoxicating feeling.
That was why he had skipped the tenth-grade division entirely and jumped straight to the eleventh grade.
It was the only way to command even more attention.
And if I make it to the second round of the KMO this year...
The corners of Jeong-u's mouth curled upward.
He had already drafted his interview responses in his head.
Just then, the classroom door slid open with a rattle.
Lost in his grandiose fantasies, Jeong-u hadn't bothered to look up, but the classroom suddenly erupted into a flurry of whispers.
He turned his head to see what the fuss was about.
"Hello!"
A tiny kid was bowing politely.
Jeong-u blinked.
Did he get the wrong room?
"Um, sweetie, this is the eleventh-grade testing room."
An older girl, who had clearly harbored the same thought, spoke gently to the child.
"Yes! I know!"
The little boy beamed and pitter-pattered into the room.
Jeong-u stared blankly at the elementary schooler.
When their eyes met, the boy gave a bright smile and nodded, prompting Jeong-u to nod back reflexively.
"Ah, here it is!"
The boy sat down right next to Jeong-u and began pulling out his writing utensils.
The quiet classroom suddenly buzzed with excitement.
It hadn't been nearly this noisy when Jeong-u had walked in...
Oh my god, he said "hello"!
He's so cute!
But is he really taking the high school test?
He said he knows this is the high school room.
Look at how round the back of his head is.
Did you see his eyes? They're so big and round!
I should buy him a carton of milk later.
Jeong-u glanced sideways with a slightly displeased expression.
What was so cute about him?
He had been just as cute when he was in early elementary school...
Wait, maybe not?
In any case, Jeong-u's mood had soured considerably.