Chapter 25
Chapter 25
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 25
Chapter Title: Exam Day
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The day of the exam had dawned.
Yoo Seo-ha had woken early and was gazing out the window. Duck figurines were neatly lined up on the windowsill.
His gaze lingered on one of them for a long time.
'Ducky, what do you want? Do you want to destroy me?'
The duck seemed to shake its head.
Yoo Seo-ha instinctively sensed that the presence sharing his mind harbored no ill will toward him. Ducky simply loved mathematics purely and innocently.
'I think we can get along just fine together. Don't you?'
"Seo-ha, breakfast!"
Ji-hoon, fresh out of the shower, snapped him from his thoughts.
A glance at the clock showed it was already 7:30.
Seo-ha hurriedly changed and left his room.
Down in the dining hall, the entire Korean team was gathered.
'No one looks like they slept poorly.'
Professor Park examined the students' faces and nodded in approval.
Three years ago, a student expected to snag a gold medal had barely performed at half his usual level. The cause? Sleep deprivation from nerves.
The English breakfast was a hit with everyone—no complaints.
Bacon, sausage, hash browns, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, black pudding, fried bread, crispy toast, and a variety of jams.
Everyone cheerfully loaded their plates with favorites. Not knowing better, Seo-ha had ordered "Everything," only to be stunned by the mountain of food overflowing his plate.
After breakfast, they headed to the exam hall.
Delegates from every country walked in silence. Some murmured formulas one last time; others took deep breaths to ease their tension.
Stepping into the auditorium, the vast space unfolded before them.
Hundreds of desks in perfect rows made for a stunning sight. Students clutched their admit tickets and found their seats.
Seo-ha located his as well.
It was the number-one seat for the Korean team, assigned to Seo-ha.
On the desk sat a white answer sheet, pencil, and eraser. Seo-ha took his seat and scanned the room. Diagonally behind to his right sat Lui Zhen. The boy glanced his way before looking away. A faint trace of hostility hung in the air.
But Seo-ha regarded him without emotion.
In the world of mathematics, they were all just fellow travelers on the same path. No reason to dislike anyone.
'Ah, but that's not always true, is it?'
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
In the late 17th century, both were credited with inventing calculus around the same time. Modern scholars agree Newton conceived it about a decade earlier, but Leibniz developed his own independent system from scratch.
But what was it like back then?
Leibniz faced accusations of stealing Newton's work until the day he died.
'Must've been insanely unfair.'
Problem papers arrived in sealed envelopes.
The proctor eyed the clock.
"You may begin!"
The declaration echoed through the hall.
Every student opened their packet at once.
At last, it had begun.
To Lui Zhen, mathematics was both a blessing and a curse.
"You have talent in math. From now on, don't go to school."
His father's command—absolute, as a professor at Tsinghua University.
Homeschooling was illegal in China, but for elite families, private schools made anything possible.
His father was never satisfied.
No matter how stellar Lui Zhen's scores, praise never came.
Not when he won the Beijing elementary math contest. Not when, at ten, he took top prize in the national middle school event.
"Talent alone achieves nothing. A genius who doesn't work hard is worse than mediocre."
First place was simply what Lui Zhen was expected to deliver.
The year he turned fourteen,
contact with friends vanished.
Games, comics, TV—the leisure any teen deserved—he'd long forsaken. All that remained was math.
Up at dawn, at his desk till midnight. Pencil gripped till his fingers cramped, eyes strained till they blurred.
At fifteen, his routine grew even more extreme.
Selected as a national team candidate, he entered a special training camp.
In a quiet spot outside Beijing,
he lived a year with China's top 100 math prodigies.
Sixteen hours a day,
seven days a week.
No breaks.
That grind earned him first place individually at the IMO.
All of China chanted his name.
The thrill of the gold medal around his neck at the ceremony—he'd never forget it.
Suddenly, the tables had turned.
He'd once hated his talent, but now he couldn't imagine life without math.
Lui Zhen glanced at Seo-ha in the seat ahead.
'That kid?'
A strange rumor had swept the Chinese team since yesterday.
A twelve-year-old boy had topped Korea's selection.
He checked—it was true.
'What was I doing at twelve?'
Under his father's hellish home training back then,
he'd been nowhere near IMO level.
'Monster? Maybe in Korea. That kid would never pass China's prelims.'
China's math history youngest IMO entrant? Fifteen.
Yet the timid Do Kyung—who wouldn't even meet his eyes—had shown confidence. It nagged at him oddly.
Envelope-opening sounds echoed through the hall.
Lui Zhen carefully slit his open and pulled out the problems.
Number theory. A field he'd ground through endlessly.
But as he read, something distracted him.
He stole a glance back at Seo-ha.
'Already?'
Not even two minutes in, and the boy was scribbling answers.
'Focus. Solving fast doesn't mean high score. Lucky guess on a familiar problem.'
In number theory, key was smart substitutions. If solutions existed under the conditions, a systematic hunt was possible.
Lui Zhen jotted cases on scratch paper, seeking patterns. Plug in small numbers, spot the trend—that's basics.
But no leads emerged.
'Problems got harder?'
Unfamiliar type.
No matter. He'd faced this before. If standard theorems failed, brute force it.
Candidates swirled in his mind. Time-consuming, but solvable.
Flip.
'Huh?'
Page-turning sound.
'No way!'
Yoo Seo-ha had already moved to problem two.
'Skipped 'cause it's hard?'
But no frustration on the boy's face. A smile, even?
Too long in competition had him overthinking his rival.
Seo-ha was in high spirits.
'Great problem quality!'
Reading problem one set his heart racing. The elegant pattern hidden in the integer array jumped out instantly.
Complex like a cipher at first glance, but piercing the core revealed a stunningly simple, perfect structure.
A problem masquerading as number theory unraveled under Seo-ha's mathematical intuition.
He picked up his pencil and began calculating. Rebuilding the algebraic framework, unearthing the hidden pattern.
Extending integers to a number field, reinterpreting conditions there. Seemingly chaotic relations snapped into crystal-clear structure.
'Amazing.'
Perfect order amid chaos.
Seo-ha loved the moment of discovery.
Problem two: combinatorial geometry.
Relations between points and lines on a plane.
Each such problem let him glimpse the setter's mind. This one truly loved math.
Point placements satisfying conditions, birthing perfect symmetry.
Light on hints, but pure joy for Seo-ha.
Shapes shifted and resized in his mind, meshing with the given points and lines. He found a match.
'Projective geometry?'
Points and lines morphed into conic sections.
One of 19th-century math's wonders.
Solving, Seo-ha's face fell glum.
'Even mathematicians 200 years ago discovered stuff like this...'
Studying math and its history, he'd marveled at millennia of achievements. A fierce desire burned: to join that legacy.
'Gonna uncover tons of unknown stuff from now on.'
He steeled himself.
"Haa..."
"Damn."
"Ugh."
Sighs like groans rose from across the hall.
Outlier committee chair Marcello watched, nodding in satisfaction.
'Now this is a real exam.'
Marcello was a pure math professor at Cambridge. Thirty years deep in research, he'd just taken IMO chief setter this year.
He deeply worried about IMO's changes over the last decade-plus.
'Too easy.'
Perfect scores exploded from the 2010s. Once a once-a-decade rarity, now annual. Two years back, bad difficulty control led to over ten—threatening the Olympiad's prestige.
Global math education improved, sure. But Marcello saw more.
Decades of past problems analyzed, patterned by coaches. Students memorized like formulas.
Skilled tricks over creative thought.
Drilled recall over intuition.
Past IMO champs left legacies—like Grigori Perelman proving the Poincaré conjecture, a Millennium Prize Problem.
But now?
Was this the right test?
Marcello wondered.
He felt sorry for most participants.
His values weren't kind to them.
'The Mathematical Olympiad must sift true talent.'
Finding seeds of real mathematicians—that was IMO's founding purpose.
Time to return to roots.