Chapter 45
Chapter 45
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 45
Chapter Title: Q.E.D.
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Seo-ha was in an extremely weakened state.
Every cell in his body was screaming.
Due to maintaining concentration for far too long, his autonomic nervous system had reached its breaking point. His brain, starved of sufficient fuel, was overheating like a burning engine.
Nevertheless, Seo-ha did not stop thinking.
It was a problem he'd been grappling with for seven years.
Seo-ha wanted to solve it as quickly as possible.
'The inspiration that came now might never return.'
This anxiety whipped him onward.
No sleep. No rest.
Seo-ha's body had surpassed its limits long ago.
Scratch, scratch.
Seo-ha pressed on with the proof.
The massive automata diagram that had begun on the blackboard now blanketed the entire wall.
Seo-ha had bundled the endlessly extending patterns into local rules, confirming that they never conflicted in any situation.
Thus, only one step remained: verifying the completeness of this hypothesis.
Seo-ha intended to test his theory not in a confined space, but across an infinitely expansive plane.
Scratch, scratch.
The students murmured.
Footsteps echoed endlessly in the corridor.
"Hey! Back to class, now!"
Teachers' sharp voices, sighs from those worried about him.
"What's all that?"
"Oh my god... The whole wall is covered in equations."
"What on earth is he doing?"
Gasps of disbelief and whispers erupted.
Seo-ha was aware of everything around him, but he poured all his focus into the proof before his eyes.
The limit was drawing near.
He had to finish it all before then.
Ji-yoon stood motionless in her spot to avoid disturbing Seo-ha. She scanned the room.
She was searching for the point where the structure began.
'There!'
Deeper in, she spotted it.
Shapes and equations layered across the entire wall interlocked to form a colossal system.
'He redefined the reduction method to forge those local rules.'
And the origin of it all was the large automata diagram on the blackboard.
Seo-ha would now use it as propulsion, climbing the inductive ladder toward the infinite plane.
She had always considered herself a genius.
The mathematicians the world praised as geniuses weren't all that different from her.
But the boy before her was fundamentally unlike them.
'What makes him different?'
The geniuses she knew tweaked existing paths to run faster or discovered shortcuts others overlooked.
Yet Seo-ha was planting the very first footprints in barren wilderness where no path had ever existed.
The local rules he created weren't mere computational conveniences.
Seo-ha had forged a language that didn't exist in the world—a entirely new system of his own.
Within the boundaries of the massive automata diagram, chaos was being quelled.
Now remained the absolute rule.
All chaos knelt beneath the order Seo-ha had wrought.
Ji-yoon couldn't trust her own eyes.
"Hm? What's this."
Woo-hyun spotted a post that caught his eye while managing the lecture Instagram.
Click.
"Seo-ha?"
Woo-hyun's eyes widened in an instant.
The familiar handwriting, the arrangement of diagrams—even without seeing the face, the back silhouette alone convinced Woo-hyun.
"This kid... what the hell is he up to!"
The classroom was a disaster.
Something major had definitely gone down.
"Damn it!"
Woo-hyun bolted from his chair, snatching the keys tossed on his desk.
He burst through the front door without a second thought.
Waiting in the parking lot was a 600-horsepower high-performance sports car.
Clank, click—
He jammed in the key and cranked it fiercely.
Vroooom—
The engine snarled, proudly flaunting its prowess.
Woo-hyun slammed the gear into place and floored the accelerator.
Seo-ha was lost in a trance.
The realm he traversed was an infinitely vast plane—a colorless expanse devoid of light or shadow.
A space born from Seo-ha's equations.
He took a step forward.
The graph monsters could no longer draw near. They snarled from beyond the boundary, glaring at Seo-ha, but he no longer feared them.
"Now I understand. You weren't some monster endlessly multiplying."
Seo-ha extended his hand toward them.
The Four Color Theorem, which had devoured countless mathematicians—
People regarded this problem as a beast that ruined mathematicians.
Seo-ha wielded the chalk, inscribing the final formula.
From where Seo-ha stood, four colors quietly bloomed and spread.
These colors intertwined without clashing, flowing together as smoothly as a dance long rehearsed.
Seo-ha surveyed his surroundings.
The infinite harmony of the four colors spreading endlessly was breathtaking in its beauty.
The wasteland was gone.
The infinite plane had transformed into a tapestry woven of perfect order and harmony.
"This is your true form."
In that moment, the monster vanished, replaced by a gentleman impeccably dressed in a suit.
The indiscriminate barrage unleashed upon him—
He had been mistaken for a monster and brutally subdued. But this gentleman had simply been awaiting, from the beginning, someone worthy to receive the proof.
Seo-ha's mind drifted back to the distant past.
It began around the age of seven.
Still clumsy even holding a pencil, he stumbled upon the theorem tucked in the corner of an encyclopedia.
'Any plane map can be colored with four colors.'
The thrill of first reading those words...
Young Seo-ha's mind brimmed with curiosity.
'Is it really true? Why four?'
Drawing maps in his sketchbook, cutting and pasting colored paper, Seo-ha confirmed the theorem held true.
Yet the proof method described in the encyclopedia plunged him into shock.
Child though he was, Seo-ha's aesthetic as a mathematician was already resolute.
'A proof must be the blade of logic, not primitive violence.'
'I'll do it myself.'
That marked his first attempt.
But it fell woefully short.
That was when Seo-ha first begged his father for a math book.
To grasp graph theory, he delved into Topology.
To tally cases, he needed combinatorics.
Every theory he'd studied since was solely for solving this one problem.
He learned frustration and failure.
He discovered truths forever out of reach, no matter the struggle.
In that crucible, Seo-ha realized mathematics wasn't the power to shatter walls, but to comprehend them—to know the very elements composing them.
Thus, if he never stopped, he would surely arrive someday.
This conviction had nurtured his growth.
Seo-ha lifted his gaze to the gentleman.
"How was my proof? Did it satisfy you?"
The gentleman's form grew hazy.
Yet Seo-ha knew he was smiling, extending a hand to pat Seo-ha's head in approval of his fine work.
Seo-ha smiled back at him.
Light radiated outward.
All that lingered was a vast order woven in four colors.
Seo-ha whispered his final farewell to the departing gentleman.
"Goodbye."
Tears welled in Seo-ha's eyes, tracing down his cheeks.
"My teacher."
Seo-ha moved the chalk with trembling hands.
"...Therefore, the coloring of all plane maps is sufficient with four colors."
And beneath it, neatly inscribed short words.
"Q.E.D."
Seo-ha felt the strength drain from his fingertips.
The chalk struck the floor with a tok and snapped.
In that instant, the tension sustaining his body unraveled at once, his vision blurring.
"Ah..."
With a faint groan, Seo-ha's consciousness faded.
"Seo-ha!"
Ji-yoon bolted from her seat.
She reached for the boy collapsing before the blackboard, but someone was faster.
Woo-hyun hurled himself forward, catching Seo-ha.
He securely cradled the one slumping like an exhausted bird.
"Damn it, what the hell did you do! Call an ambulance, now!"
His voice trembled.
Yet at the faint sound of the boy's breathing, he exhaled in relief.
As the ambulance rolled into the school grounds, pandemonium erupted.
Students clung to windows, gawking.
The hallway crowd raised a clamor like survivors of a catastrophe.
"Seo-ha okay?"
"Dunno, passed out."
"They say everything on the wall is the proof?"
"Even teachers couldn't make sense of it."
Rumors proliferated wildly.
The sharp-eyed principal immediately issued orders to the admin center.
"Seal the seminar room. Access limited to me and the vice principal. Don't touch the blackboard or a single paper on the walls. No cleaning."
Admin staff rushed to barricade the doors and affix sealing stickers.
The next day, photos proliferated across online communities.
Walls crammed with graphs, diagrams, and myriad symbols.
The math-illiterate masses dubbed it a "summoning circle."
But discerning researchers pierced its veil.
Ring ring ring—
The principal's office phone rang incessantly.
When calls paused, emails blinked; even the long-dormant fax whirred, spitting paper.
"Yes, that's correct. The seminar room is preserved."
"Ah, that's tricky. Student health comes first. No issues reported, so you'll meet him soon. Our student's quite young."
Not just academia—even media, sniffing the story, flooded in with interview requests.
He repeated the same lines dozens of times a day, but each call's end brought a smile.
"When does it start?"
The vice principal, eavesdropping, grew restless.
Feigning composure, the principal peeled a memo from his monitor and read.
"Day after tomorrow, once student consent is filed."
"Principal, this is really..."
The principal raised a hand to silence him.
"Whoa there! Deny everything.
I know Prof. Kim Ji-yoon a little—her expression said it all. Let's prep a media briefing. Gather all of Seo-ha's test scores and other materials."
"Yes, sir."
As the vice principal departed, the principal's grin stretched ear to ear.
"Hahaha! Is our school making its international debut already?"
He sprang up, eyeing the mirror.
To shine on camera, he'd probably need to shed some pounds.