The Limits of a Cheat Skill
Jeong Hanna watched Nam Doyun solve the problem with eyes full of interest. Perfect. There wasn’t a single unnecessary step in his calculations. Even the way he approached the problem was excellent.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook. “Let me see…”
She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “Ah, here it is.”
The page she’d opened contained the exact same problem Doyun had just solved, along with her own solution. Hanna placed her notes beside his and began comparing them side by side.
There’s no difference at all?
The methods were identical. Even the time it took us was about the same.
Doyun had spent roughly thirty minutes on the problem. She had taken about the same amount of time when she first solved it. Was this really possible? She had never once seen him studying.
Hanna stared at him blankly. Is this guy a genius?
She honestly hadn’t expected him to be able to solve it at all, let alone do it this flawlessly.
I’m going to have to change my plans.
Originally, she had only planned to teach him enough to barely escape the retention policy. No matter how hard she taught him, innate talent mattered more than anything. She had thought that much would be sufficient from her perspective.
How should I approach this now?
But her thinking had completely shifted. Nam Doyun’s genius was on another level entirely. Even Choi Min-hye, sitting right there, was undoubtedly an incredible prodigy. Yet Doyun made even someone like her look ordinary.
Hanna looked at him and said, “Then… would you try solving this one?”
This time she showed him a problem of much higher difficulty than the previous one. There’s no way he’ll be able to solve it even if I explain it, but let’s try teaching him anyway.
This was a question she herself hadn’t understood at first, not even after looking at the full solution. Still… somehow, I feel like if it’s Doyun…
Her expectations and worries were mixed in equal measure.
“Sure. I’ll give it a shot.”
“To solve this, you need to use Taylor’s series. If you substitute π for x in this equation, and then for e to the power of π…”
Hanna continued her explanation for a full twenty minutes. At some point, Choi Min-hye gave up trying to follow along. It was simply beyond what her brain could process.
Hanna glanced at her. I wasn’t planning to explain this to her originally. She had assumed Min-hye wouldn’t understand it anyway, so she hadn’t intended to bother. But somehow, she felt like Doyun might actually get it.
“I understand.”
Doyun spoke up after listening to the entire explanation.
“Then would you like to try solving it?”
“Yeah. Got it.”
Doyun began scribbling the solution on his practice sheet. Hanna watched with a small smile. The approach he was taking, the calculation process—everything was flawless. Before long, he had solved the problem perfectly.
“The answer is 236, right?”
“Yeah. That’s correct.”
Hanna smiled. It feels good to teach someone who actually gets it.
Teaching a student who understood every word as soon as it left her mouth was far more enjoyable than she had expected. At first, she had only started this to get an early look at the author’s next work. But now, she was genuinely starting to enjoy it herself.
“Then how about this one? I’ll explain it, so listen carefully.”
This time she launched into an explanation of even greater complexity.
“This is a wave function. The key is expressing it using differential formulas. Here, c represents the speed of light, and u stands for the wave function…”
Choi Min-hye couldn’t understand a single thing from the very beginning. She shook her head helplessly. But Doyun nodded as he listened, then began writing out the solution on his sheet.
A moment later, he said, “The correct answer is 260, right?”
“Oh. Yes, that’s right. You understood this one too?”
Once again, the answer he had written was correct.
“Wow. You’re seriously amazing.”
Hanna couldn’t hide her admiration.
“Haha, thanks for saying that.”
“Alright. At this rate, I think you’re fully prepared for the high-difficulty questions.”
“Huh?”
Doyun looked confused.
“Everything we’ve done so far was high-difficulty preparation.”
“Th… this was all high difficulty?”
“Of course. If this isn’t high difficulty, what is?”
“Ah…”
“From now on, we’ll move on to basic problem preparation.”
“Basic problems?”
“Yeah. Whether it’s a high-difficulty question or a basic one, they’re all worth the same four points.”
I got too excited and started with the hard ones. I should have begun with the basics.
High-difficulty and basic problems were both worth four points. Therefore, it was far more efficient to start with the basics. The effort required to correctly solve one high-difficulty question was much greater than what was needed for a basic one, yet the score was identical. It only made sense to focus on the basics first.
She had simply gotten carried away by Doyun’s genius and taught him the advanced material first.
“Then I’ll start teaching you the basic problems now. This should be obvious for you, of course.”
Hanna placed a problem in front of him.
On a number line, two points D and F are in motion. The velocity of the two points t seconds after departing from the origin is given by V(D) = s(t) = pt (t > 0)...
“This one is simple. Just differentiate, plug in the values, then integrate in reverse to find the time t when the distance is maximized. The formulas you need for this are…”
“Ah…”
“See? It’s easy, right? It should be about ten times simpler than the problems you solved earlier. At your level, you could probably solve it while doing something else.”
“Uh…”
“Want to try solving it?”
Hanna’s eyes sparkled as she waited for Doyun to pick up his pen and start writing on the practice sheet.
But Doyun didn’t move his hand toward the desk at all.
He was breaking out in a cold sweat.
Skill 7: Advanced Intelligence — Allows perfect comprehension of highly complex and difficult concepts. LV1. (The amount that can be understood is determined by the user’s unique ‘mana’ within the body.) However, it only applies to difficult and complex content. It does not work on simple concepts.
It wasn’t activating. It was probably because of that line about only understanding difficult and complex content. Which meant it wouldn’t trigger for easy material.
But this shit isn’t easy for me at all!
To him, it was complete alien gibberish. Yet the skill still refused to activate.
So it decides for itself?
It seemed the system’s own subjective judgment determined what counted as “simple content,” not his.
This is getting troublesome.
If the skill wouldn’t activate, he wouldn’t be able to understand even the basic example problems from this point on.
Looks like this skill is finally hitting its limit.
Advanced Intelligence determined how much he could comprehend based on his unique mana reserves. And right now, he could feel that his mana was nearly depleted. That was only natural after listening to her explanations for several hours straight.
With a scrape of his chair, Nam Doyun stood up without hesitation. It was cleaner to end things here than to reveal how incompetent he was at the basics. If he dragged this out any longer, he would only end up disappointing her.
“Huh? You’re not going to solve it?”
“Sorry. Something urgent came up.”
“What? Suddenly something urgent… what do you mean—”
Hanna looked dazed. Then she continued, “If you just practice the basic problems a little more and get the hang of the solving methods, you could get a perfect score. You can already solve most of the high-difficulty ones, can’t you?”
“...”
The problem was that he couldn’t solve the basic examples. And even if he tried to explain that, she wouldn’t believe him.
“Sorry. It’s really urgent.”
“Hey! I was just starting to enjoy tutoring you and you’re leaving?”
“The time we agreed on is already up anyway. I’ll head out now.”
When he checked the clock, the tutoring session had indeed run overtime.
“Y-You’re really going? If you just master the basic examples you could get a perfect score on the test. Why would you—”
The written exam was held over two days. Today was the first day.
“Alright, everyone please take your seats. The exam will begin shortly.”
Yulia stood at the front of the room.
“Yeees—”
The students answered, but their eyes were completely lifeless. A single glance was enough to tell that many of them had pulled all-nighters.
Yulia scanned the room. Hmm. Very good. I’m quite satisfied.
One of the things Yulia enjoyed most was seeing her students looking exhausted. It meant they had studied that hard the night before.
Then her eyes landed on one particular student.
It was Nam Doyun.
Yulia frowned. Why does he look so refreshed?
Doyun’s eyes were bright and full of energy. He looked like he had slept well the previous night and was in excellent condition.
How arrogant.
In the previous entrance exam, Nam Doyun had scored dead last in the theory section. And yet here he was again, instead of studying hard, he had slept soundly and shown up like this?
Fine. Let’s see how this turns out.
“I will now distribute the test papers.”
Yulia began handing out the exams. Soon every student had one on their desk.
“The exam begins now.”
All the students immediately buried their heads in their papers and began solving the questions with fierce concentration.
Yulia glanced at Doyun. At least he’s pretending to work hard.
He was scribbling something down. But that was all it would amount to. There was no way that guy could understand any of the content on this test.
The exam wasn’t easy enough for someone who had placed last on the entrance exam to comprehend. Especially the high-difficulty questions—she had made them brutally hard.
To crush students who tried to game the system by only studying easy problems and skipping the hard ones—the so-called “cost-performance” study method—she had increased the point value of difficult questions and lowered the value of easy ones.
He probably studied that way, of course.
From Doyun’s perspective, the optimal strategy would have been to get all the easy questions right and miss all the hard ones. But this time, that strategy wouldn’t work. She had made the difficult questions worth so many points that even acing all the easy ones wouldn’t save him from retention.
I looked down at the test paper. I immediately flipped to the back and scanned the high-difficulty questions first. Surprisingly, the solution approaches for each problem began floating up in my mind. All I had to do was write them down.
Scratch. Scratch.