A Piece of Cake

The children's eyes were full of resolve. We weren't marching off to war, and yet the air had turned over so completely on account of a single test that I couldn't get my bearings. Only a moment ago they had been chattering at the top of their lungs, and now it was as if every bit of that had been a lie.

They had only just become third-graders—second-graders as recently as the day before yesterday—but Korea's famous zeal for education burned as hot as ever. Who would have thought children with futures this bright could pour out so much killing intent? Even a murim tournament held to choose the next generation of talents wouldn't have been this fierce.

The announcement came over the speakers. Each grade seemed to be wired into its own broadcast. Test papers were passed to the back, and the children sank into the exam.

Rustle.

Only the sound of turning pages filled the classroom. Short of sitting the TOEIC or some other licensing exam, I doubted I would ever feel an atmosphere like this again—and now that I was the one actually taking the test, the feeling was strangely unreal.

The face of the first page was dressed up as a cover, with Byeolbit Elementary School, Grade 3 stamped across it in heavy block letters. The packet ran to ten pages in all. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠It felt thick, probably because Korean and English were in there too. Even so, the questions were short-answer, which was the only reason it stayed this thin; if literature passages had been included, wouldn't it have stretched to twenty pages without any trouble? A single ordinary Korean reading passage ate up nearly half a page on its own.

At any rate, I took up my pen and looked at math problem number one first. The opening question on the first page was the kind they set to lift the children's confidence—something you could more or less solve with your eyes alone. It was the same logic as that famous complaint: a 97 in math, fine, I'll allow it, but a 98—what kind of creature are you? For a student who actually studied, missing a two-point question was a harder feat than missing a three-point one.

Pen in hand, I worked carefully through multiple-choice number one. I meant to do the math first.

It really was simple multiplication. Ask anyone in college and the answer would probably jump out in three seconds; anyone who couldn't solve it would be the strange one. Seven bags, so two hundred and ten in all... What had I even expected from a third-grade problem? I didn't write out a single step. I solved it in my head and marked the answer on the card. Lately my mind had felt clearer, and perhaps because of that I sailed through the questions without a snag.

Three-digit numbers were lined up one after another. This one, too, was easy enough to do by ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠mental math. I stole a glance around the room. Each of the children was clutching a problem, groaning their way through it.

I felt like the protagonist of a reincarnation novel. The title would be something like The Protagonist Who Went Back to Elementary School Hides His Power, or The Little Kid Hides His Strength... about that. I finished the math in roughly twenty minutes and turned to Korean and English. Those were simple problems I could solve at a glance. My brain hadn't rusted yet. I worked through them with a smug little grin.

Riiing—

"Hands up over your heads! I'm collecting the cards!"

Saying so, the teacher went around and collected them herself. There weren't many students, so doing it by hand didn't take long. In my day, the kid in the very back seat had gathered the papers.

Once she had taken up the OMR cards with our answers, opened the door, and stepped out, the classroom fell into chaos. Everyone held up their test papers and compared them against the children who studied best. The ones who studied only halfway were fighting like a Greek philosophy debate, each insisting that this answer was definitely right. The kids who had built a wall between themselves and studying were checking whether the answers they had bubbled in at random matched the smart ones. It was the perfectly ordinary scenery of a classroom after a test.

I had no choice but to join that scene. Jiyu and Yumi had come to my seat with their papers in hand.

"Hana... you okay?"

"Huh? Why?"

I had finished every problem, yet Yumi was speaking as if she meant to comfort me. Had something gone wrong?

"Well... I wasn't trying to look, but you had your head down on the desk before an hour was even up..."

Aha. I had finished in under an hour. I had wondered what to do with the hour that remained, and in the middle of a test there was exactly one thing to do. I put my head on the desk and slept.

Yumi must have misunderstood when she saw that. Fair enough—from an elementary schooler's point of view, problems at this level would take a good two hours if you wanted to solve them with room to spare.

"Hana just solved what she could and guessed the rest, right, Yumi?"

Beside her, Jiyu offered a perfectly fair reason, without a shred of prejudice. Classic Jiyu.

"Even so, you can do better on the next one. Our school has so many tests that bombing a single exam won't leave you a total wreck!"

"I ran out of time halfway through and guessed the last page too!"

"Huh? No. I finished all of them."

I set the children's wrong idea straight. These were third-grade problems, after all. There was no way I had been guessing. If I had actually been a third-grader, the level might have been a little steep, but I was someone who had already finished through university. I was a fossil so old that Jiyu and Yumi couldn't begin to imagine it. From an elementary schooler's perspective, I was probably about what an ammonite looks like to a modern person.

"You finished those problems in one hour? I was so short on time... I didn't have any left, so I just guessed the last five English questions!"

"Did you really solve them, Hana?"

They were looking at me with eyes that didn't quite trust it, so I picked up the test paper.

"If we compare, the answers ought to come out, don't you think?"

"Hmm..."

On the desk lay Jiyu's paper, mine, and Yumi's. Mine and Jiyu's were clean, with no work shown, while Yumi's was nothing but writing. Jiyu seemed a long way from any interest in studying. Either that, or she was someone who had been an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠adult and turned into a child, the way I had.

"The test was really hard for me..."

As she said it, Jiyu made a small move to slide her paper away. She didn't look confident. Yumi, however, blocked her.

"Jiyu! You didn't skip studying again to read some weird book, did you?"

"I-I didn't!"

But the moment Yumi's glare locked onto her, Jiyu hung her head.

"I... I looked a little! I really did!"

"Haaah."

Yumi's deep sigh reached me. It looked as if Jiyu were slipping down a strange path.

"Korean and English were fine, but math was hard! This has to be the hardest one ever, don't you think?"

Yumi seemed gifted with language. There had been one or two Korean and English questions I myself had been unsure about. If even I was unsure, that meant an enormous level of difficulty for the third-graders here. Math, on the other hand, had come apart smoothly, perhaps because of the foundation I had piled up. I hadn't studied lately, but what Haru and Bora had drilled into me wasn't about to vanish. The problems had come out far ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠easier than the level those two had taught me.

"Anyway, did you really finish in an hour?"

"Yeah. Want me to show you?"

I held the paper out to the two of them. Seeing mine with nothing written on it, they didn't look convinced. Well, solving problems of this level by mental arithmetic wouldn't suit kids our age.

"Hana, you solved this one too? It was so hard I couldn't."

Yumi said it, tapping the problem at the very end of the math section. Jiyu's face said she had no idea what any of it was. She really did seem like a child who had walled herself off from studying.

I answered with a calm expression.

"Yeah. Want me to teach you how?"

At that, Yumi nodded.

"All right. The way to solve this problem is..."

I taught her, writing out the equations along with a careful explanation. That was math. Even a problem you couldn't grasp at a glance could be solved if someone wrote down the formula and plugged the numbers in. The trouble was how they twisted the question; write it as an equation, and it was simple.

"Whoa... you really solved it... Hana, are you a genius?"

"I'm not a genius..."

Yumi was awed. Jiyu, after watching a solution like that, only squirmed. For her, this last problem probably wasn't the issue at all. She would have gotten stuck at number one.

If I entered a gifted class at this age, I would open up a startling gap in the scores. Give it a year, though—no, half a year—and the true prodigies would catch me. I would take miserable grades and shrivel right up. I was only managing this because I had been handed a cheat that sat outside the rules. It wasn't that my head was actually built like a genius's.