The Perfect Fortress
The night was quiet at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The air in the hallway where Einstein once walked was cold and intellectual, and rain was pattering outside the window.
As soon as Edward Kang entered his office, he downed his cold espresso in one gulp and casually swiped his MacBook's trackpad.
Thousands of unread emails were piled up on the screen.
Most of them were from self-proclaimed geniuses asking him to review their unproven hypotheses.
...Hm?
Edward Kang's thin eyebrows twitched.
An email from Korea caught his eye—a rare sight since he had cursed out the Korean academic community a few years ago.
Seohan University?
Frowning, he hovered his cursor over the email from "Seo-han Univ."
After skimming the contents, Edward Kang shook his head.
Here we go again.
It was a typical Korean university email.
Under the guise of "academic exchange," it was nothing more than a ploy to borrow Princeton's prestige and inflate their own achievements.
Sigh... What? A once-in-a-lifetime prodigy?
This damn prodigy obsession.
Shallow people who tried to package any slightly precocious child as a grand genius.
Edward Kang gritted his teeth.
Something similar had happened a few years ago.
There really was a brilliant child back then.
But instead of nurturing the prodigy, the Korean education system tried to measure them by grades and competition, pressuring them for results and leaving them deeply scarred.
The ghostwritten paper had been an embarrassingly legendary scam.
I should have been bold and brought him to the US back then...
More than ten years had passed, and that child had ultimately become a plastic surgeon.
He heard the boy had recently opened a private clinic in Apgujeong-dong and was now studying business administration.
It might be a successful life for him, but when Edward met him a few years ago, the overflowing creativity and brilliance of his childhood were nowhere to be found.
Having witnessed firsthand how the child whose genius he had personally vouched for turned out, Edward Kang now got hives just hearing the Korean word for "prodigy."
He acknowledged that Korea had a high average level of education, but his personal experience proved they were utterly incapable of nurturing high-level prodigies.
Grimacing, he was about to move his cursor to hit the delete button when the title of the attached file caught his eye.
Perturbation theory? The KAM Theorem?
Edward Kang's brow furrowed.
It wasn't some run-of-the-mill theory. It was the KAM Theorem of perturbation theory, often called a mathematical dead end.
"Ha... Have these people completely lost their minds?"
Edward Kang let out a hollow laugh.
"Those fucking crazy bastards. What kind of scam are they trying to pull using an elementary schooler as a shield?"
Korean swear words he hadn't used in ages spilled out of his mouth.
He couldn't just delete this.
He had to stop this insane scam.
Otherwise, another globally embarrassing situation might occur.
When a similar incident happened over a decade ago, he had been too ashamed to show his face.
He was completely disillusioned, but it was still his homeland.
Edward Kang clicked irritably to open the attachment.
Then, he began to examine the equations slowly.
The approach was quite novel.
It bypassed the conventional methods, focusing instead on vibrational signals and taking a topological approach.
Setting aside his anger over a scam involving an elementary schooler, his scholarly curiosity was piqued.
Hmm... The way the logic unfolds is... Huh?
Edward Kang's eyes suddenly widened, as if to swallow the white light radiating from the monitor.
The equations dancing wildly across the scanned A4 sheets ruthlessly dug up the garden of logic he had spent his entire life cultivating, coaxing entirely new sprouts to bloom.
"Ah..."
A groan of admiration escaped his lips.
Variables that should have been chaotically scattered fell into perfect order, kneeling under the single baton of the Diophantine inequality.
Energies that should have diverged and exploded curved elegantly as if trapped behind an invisible glass wall, exchanging energy among themselves.
It looked like a perfect geometric prison named stability.
"Applying the Hamiltonian... like this, here?"
Edward Kang quickly rubbed his face with both hands.
His fingertips trembled slightly.
It felt as if someone had built a transparent bridge over the abyss at the edge of the cliff where he had thrown down his pen fifteen years ago, declaring that the human brain could go no further.
It wasn't a forced approximation, nor was it a brute-force computer calculation.
It was an epic poem translating the order of mutual coexistence, which the universe had kept secret since the dawn of time, into the purest language—where lines met lines, and numbers locked with numbers.
Edward Kang sprang up and walked to the blackboard.
Then, he began to write out the marvelous equations he had just seen, step by step.
He substituted several arbitrary coordinate values, checking and double-checking.
He lost all track of time, erasing and writing, writing and erasing.
In this moment, a dimension of time entirely different from Earth's was unfolding for him.
His tirelessly moving hand suddenly froze.
Wait...
This equation was real.
No matter how he twisted and analyzed it, even he, with his mathematical perfectionism, could not find a single error or a single logical leap.
Who on earth did this?
Edward Kang stared blankly at the monitor.
The discovery of this proof alone is undoubtedly a monumental achievement, so why on earth would they use an elementary schooler as a front?
As his thoughts reached this point, Edward Kang's eyes trembled.
This proof was not a discovery that could be casually brushed off as merely "impressive."
It would undoubtedly draw immense focus from the mathematical community.
Even if the Korean mathematical community was a stagnant pool consumed by authority and capitalist networks, they weren't that stupid.
They wouldn't tell a lie that would be exposed the moment it was presented to the academic world.
"...It's not a scam?"
Goosebumps broke out all over his body.
An actual elementary schooler...?
Edward Kang closed his eyes tightly and fully savored the thrill.
A moment later, he slowly opened his eyes and picked up his phone with a trembling hand.
"I have something to verify... I know it's dawn. Stop whining and get over here right now. Pack some underwear and socks. It's going to take a few days."
Though his doubts hadn't completely vanished, the corners of Edward Kang's mouth curled up ever so slightly.
"Chul-juuuuun!"
Min-jun ran over with a flurry of footsteps and threw his arm around Chul-jun's shoulders.
"Still can't go to the PC bang today?"
"Nope!"
"Is it fun hanging out at the university?"
"Yeah!"
Ha-rang chimed in, catching up to them.
"You've been going there really often lately. What do you even do there?"
"Oh, I check if the stars are spinning properly."
"Really? With a telescope? Or that big antenna-looking thing?"
"Well, we get data from those, but we don't look through them directly."
"Data?"
"Yeah. It's like an ID for stars or galaxies."
"I know that one! Andromeda?"
"Yeah. That's where Ha-rang's mind goes sometimes."
"Yeah, didn't ask."
"So?"
Chul-jun chuckled, looking at the two of them.
Min-jun suddenly looked at Chul-jun's head.
He thought Chul-jun used to come up to his chin, but now he was near his nose.
"Oh! Chul-jun! You grew taller!"
Chul-jun lifted his chin slightly.
"I'm 135 centimeters now!"
"Oh!"
"Hehe."
"But why do you check on the stars? Don't they just float up there fine on their own?"
Chul-jun knit his brows slightly.
"Well, these Japanese misters keep insisting that the stars in space are going to crash into each other and get totally smashed."
"Smashed? Whoa, that sounds so cool! When?"
"Sometime soon?"
"Oh! How soon?"
"In about a million years?"
"Ah...?"
"In astronomy, that's considered soon. But they won't get smashed."
"Really?"
"Yeah. From what I saw, they don't crash. They just gently dodge each other, moving up and down, spinning beautifully forever."
"Ooh! I don't really get it, but it sounds cool. Is that what you play at the university?"
"Yeah! With the math teachers, physics teachers, and astronomy teachers. It's super fun!"
Instantly, Min-jun and Ha-rang grimaced.
"That sounds so boring..."
"Agreed. Just hearing about it makes me want to sleep."
"No, it's really fun! Do you guys want to come with me?"
The two of them quickly shook their heads.
"Nope!"
"Pass!"
At his friends' firm rejection, Chul-jun crinkled his nose.
It really is fun, though...
In front of the College of Natural Sciences' small auditorium, Professor Yoo Min-seok spotted his senior, Go Chang-ho, and waved vigorously.
Go Chang-ho grinned and quickened his pace.
"Hey, long time no see."
"Wow, you actually came, senior?"
"Chul-jun invited me to watch... But is this like that Mozart thing from before?"
"What? Chul-jun didn't tell you?"
Go Chang-ho knit his brows slightly.
"Well, I heard he was participating in some astronomy paper..."
Yoo Min-seok let out a hollow laugh.
"Sigh... He really didn't explain it properly, did he?"
"Why?"
"He didn't just participate. Chul-jun directed the whole thing."
"Huh? Directed?"
"Yes! From the initial idea to the conceptual framework, Chul-jun laid it all out, and he did the final review too. Thanks to that, the graduate students in the College of Natural Sciences were completely ground to dust. Actually, the professors were ground down right along with them. Even the dean participated."
"..."
"To begin with, it was a study refuting a Japanese astronomy paper published in Nature."
"...Nature?"
Go Chang-ho's eyes widened.
So this wasn't just Seohan University putting on a grand show to win over a prodigy?
He had assumed the graduate students were just playing along with Chul-jun and pretending to write a paper, but Nature?
Even as an elementary school teacher, Go Chang-ho knew all too well the symbolic weight that the name Nature carried.
And a paper refuting one published there?
...Chul-jun did?
Having a research paper published in Nature was practically an official declaration that human knowledge had advanced a step further. To refute that...
"Anyway, today is the day we put the final period on that journey."
"The final... what?"
"It's the day Chul-jun does the final verification of the thousands of pages of calculations that the math, physics, and astronomy professors and graduate students have slaved over for days."
"...Verification?"
"Oh, come on. You were a science major once too, senior, why are you so slow to get this? Dozens of adults carried bricks and poured cement according to the precise blueprint Chul-jun drew up! And today, Chul-jun climbs to the top of that massive fortress wall to stamp his seal of approval, declaring it perfect."
Yoo Min-seok put it in easy-to-understand terms, but Go Chang-ho's jaw only dropped further.
Of course, he knew Chul-jun was incredibly smart.
But to this extent?
Just yesterday, during PE class, Chul-jun had gotten huffy when his friends teased him for being super fast but having terrible footwork at soccer.
The same Chul-jun who had played rock-paper-scissors to win an extra sausage at lunch, only to lose all his sausages to Min-jun and stand there in utter despair?
"Senior! Senior? Earth to senior! Wow, you've completely zoned out."
Yoo Min-seok, waving his hand in front of the dazed Go Chang-ho's eyes, shook his head.
"Hello, Professor Yoo. May I ask who the gentleman next to you is...?"
The graduate students waiting at the entrance asked. Yoo Min-seok spoke up on behalf of the still-dazed Chang-ho.
"Ah, he's Chul-jun's homeroom teacher."
The graduate students' eyes went wide.
"The... the Harvard guy!"
"Yeah, that's him."
"Ah, you can sit in the VIP section right at the front."
"Ha, we have something like that?"
"Not officially, but it's empty anyway."
"Haha. What's that? There's another young kid over there too."
"Oh! He's from the Gifted Education Center. Apparently, he's a close older brother figure to Chul-jun. He's been hanging out in the lab since last week."
"Is that so? Keep up the good work, everyone. Senior, let's go in!"
Led by Min-seok, Go Chang-ho stepped carefully into the small auditorium and gasped at the sight before him.
Not only the main screen at the front of the auditorium, but also five large whiteboards lined up along the sides were completely covered in dense, black equations.
It looked like a massive mathematical mural.
In the very center of this vast forest of equations stood the tiny Chul-jun.
And around him, people who appeared to be professors were sitting or standing in relaxed postures.
Behind them, graduate students stood in a circle, staring at Chul-jun with hollow, exhausted eyes.
The atmosphere was completely different from the music school's auditorium back then.
But everyone was holding something in their hands.
Wait... puffed rice?
With so many people gathered around the stage crunching on puffed rice all at once, it almost felt like a grand orchestra.
Chul-jun was moving his head very slowly, scanning the whiteboards.
Walking right up to the stage, Go Chang-ho quietly observed Chul-jun's face.
His eyes had always been bright, but today they seemed even brighter.
It was a gaze filled with wonder and sparkle, as if he were admiring a beautiful masterpiece hanging in an art gallery.
To Chang-ho, it was merely a chaotic jumble of black symbols and numbers, an incomprehensible mess of alien gibberish.
But he could tell that in Chul-jun's clear eyes, it looked entirely different.
No one in the auditorium dared to speak, except for when they crunched on their puffed rice.
Even the professors of Seohan University, one of South Korea's most prestigious institutions, were holding their breath, waiting only for the verdict of the small child at the center of the stage.
Each of them held their puffed rice preciously in one hand.
Go Chang-ho's gaze drifted to Chul-jun's profile.
A serene smile spread across Chul-jun's lips, melting like spring snow.
...
A face filled with deep emotion, perhaps awe or inspiration.
The eleven-year-old boy who had just been fretting over losing his sausage side dish to Min-jun at lunch was nowhere to be found.
Crunch. Crunch.
Even the rhythmic sound of crunching puffed rice echoing from various corners of the auditorium, breaking the silence, sounded like a bizarre hymn of praise sung by adults to Chul-jun.
Go Chang-ho swallowed hard, feeling a thrilling shiver run down his spine.
"Senior. Want some?"
Yoo Min-seok held out some puffed rice he had gotten from somewhere.
Taking it, Go Chang-ho also joined the hymn.
Crunch.