“Jihun, don’t be nervous. Just take your time.”
Young Seong Jihun sat in the examination room chair and took the test paper.
His expression was calm as he turned the pages one by one.
The doctor watching him quietly whispered to his parents.
“Most children get very nervous in an environment like this, but Jihun is remarkably composed.”
At the doctor’s words, his mother smiled proudly.
“Yes, sometimes I think our child is almost too smart. To the point that it worries us as parents, you know? Why, not long ago...”
“Ahem. Hm.”
“Parents...”
The doctor clicked his tongue inwardly.
But seeing the boy sit there with his mouth firmly shut, focused on the test paper, he certainly did seem far from ordinary.
Thirty minutes later, Jihun put down his pencil.
“I’m done.”
The person administering the test checked the clock with a surprised expression.
“Already? Usually it takes over an hour.”
Jihun shrugged.
A few days later, the couple and their child returned to the hospital to hear the results.
The doctor looked over the chart and exclaimed in admiration.
“Jihun has an exceptionally high level of intelligence.”
The faces of the couple, who had been sitting there tensely, brightened at once.
“We thought so. Specifically, how high is it?”
“IQ is a relative index with 100 as the average. The range between 85 and 115 is considered normal. About 68% of the population falls within that range.”
“Then our child is...”
“155. That places him in the top 0.01%. To put it simply, it means one person in ten thousand.”
“Really?”
Jihun’s mother covered her mouth in surprise.
“Generally, 130 or above is classified as gifted, and 145 or above as genius level. Jihun’s score is far higher than that.”
The doctor gave a long explanation about what a high IQ meant and what precautions they should take, but the couple heard none of it. All that mattered to them was the fact that their child was a genius among geniuses.
Even at a young age, Jihun found life enjoyable.
Wherever he went, he was loved, and whatever he did, he did well.
He was tall, with a handsome face on top of it all.
Life on easy mode.
That was the nickname his friends had given Jihun, brimming with envy.
And at a time when it seemed there was nothing in the world he could not accomplish if he set his mind to it, he met her.
“What? I’m second place?”
One year after entering the gifted education center,
he experienced second place for the first time in his life.
But the shock was unexpectedly small.
“Well, of course. One in ten thousand.
Every year, dozens of kids like me must be born.”
If two people had equal talent, then it was only natural that the one who worked harder would win.
But...
Are we really equal? Unlike you, I barely study.
The child who took first place was truly the incarnation of effort.
To a degree he could never imitate.
Even so, there was not a large difference in their actual scores, so Jihun remained at ease.
He thought that if he simply put his mind to it, he could beat Sujeong at any time.
“Hey! Seong Jihun! You’re first again this time?”
His middle school friends crowded around Jihun in the classroom.
“You played games with me the whole exam period! Why are you first?”
“I know, right? I just took it casually.”
Jihun smiled awkwardly.
Giving it your all was not cool.
What he liked was beating opponents who struggled desperately with minimal effort, and watching them fall into despair.
That was the privilege of people with exceptional brains.
But at the Math Olympiad, where the gifted gathered, his old way of doing things no longer worked.
Watching Im Sujeong beat him out and be chosen as a Korean representative was not enjoyable at all.
And so, after another year, after effort he could be proud of, he arrived here.
But...
“Hehehe!”
Seoha was placing duck figurines on the windowsill beside his bed.
One,
two,
three.
Ducks with different expressions.
For some reason, he rested his chin on his hand and stared at them. Occasionally, he let out an incomprehensible little laugh.
“I lost to a little kid like this and got selected...”
When the little kid solved the problem through mental arithmetic, everyone, including Jihun, was greatly shaken.
“Ah, maybe not Im Sujeong?”
Not long after, she was the one who gave the second answer.
The rest were a mess.
They floundered about and wasted quite a bit of time.
A sense of self-loathing surged over him.
But it was fine. He was only in his first year of making an effort.
Just as he had done until now, he could surpass this little kid too. When that time came, today’s humiliation would become nothing more than a handful of memories.
While Jihun was burning with fighting spirit, Seoha got down from the bed and rummaged through his bag. Then he took something out and approached him.
“Um, would you like one of these?”
A glossy orange dried persimmon.
Jihun stared blankly at Seoha in disbelief.
“Why dried persimmons?”
“My parents picked and dried them themselves. They packed them for me to share at the dorm.”
Seoha’s face was filled with pride. As if he were handing over something precious.
He did not think Seoha had made that kind of expression even after solving the problem first.
“Uh... yeah. Sure. Thanks.”
Jihun smiled awkwardly and picked one up.
The dried persimmon was far softer and moister than he had expected. When he took a bite, sweetness spread through his mouth.
“It’s good.”
“Right? I really like these. My mom has made them for me since I was a baby.”
Seoha bit into a dried persimmon and wore a blissful expression.
“Does he have no wariness, even though we’re supposed to compete for representative selection? Well, it has nothing to do with me.”
Jihun set up his desk.
His suitcase was packed full of past problem books. Problems he had to start working through in earnest from today.
“Steel yourself.”
Jihun decided to do the very best he could during winter school.
The schedule here was simple.
They woke up at dawn, did light calisthenics, and ate breakfast together.
In the morning, they attended two hours of lectures, and after lunch, they were given time to solve problems in the afternoon. After dinner, it was back to individual study.
Everyone’s faces were hollow, as if they were not sleeping properly.
Except for one person.
Scratch, scratch.
Today as well, while solving problems in the room, Jihun observed Seoha from the corner of his eye.
“What book is he reading?”
Like the other students, Seoha did not let go of his book even after returning to the room.
It was certain, however, that he was not working through past problem books.
Sometimes smiling, sometimes looking pained, he scribbled formulas into a campus notebook.
Jihun wondered if he was solving difficult problems, but the pages had been colored here and there with colored pencils, and no matter how he looked at it, it was not a past problem set.
And yet during class, there was nothing he did not know, and during problem-solving sessions, he stood out as well. Every professor who met Seoha adored him. No one openly showed it, but Jihun was more sensitive to this sort of situation than anyone.
Because those were the gazes he himself had received from teachers since childhood.
Seoha closed his notebook and took out another book.
This time, Jihun clearly saw the title.
[Biography of Niels Henrik Abel]
“He’s reading a biography of a great man?”
Was this teabagging?
Jihun was confused.
He was reminded of himself, never missing first place in the entire school even while playing games with his friends all night.
Anger surged up inside him.
“I’m not someone you get to treat like that.”
But if he brought it up, he would only look even more pathetic.
Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Seoha glanced up at him. Then he fumbled through his bag and took something out.
“Would you like some peanuts? We grew them in our vegetable garden, and my mom roasted them for me to eat while studying.”
Plump peanuts filled both his hands. No matter how Jihun looked at it, Seoha’s face was offering them out of pure goodwill.
Because Jihun himself had often engaged in deceptive flexing before, he could tell for certain. Still, he decided to test him once.
“Seoha, can you explain this to me? I don’t understand it.”
Jihun accepted the peanuts and opened his notebook.
It was a problem he had been unable to solve all evening.
Seoha glanced at the problem, then picked up a pencil and began writing formulas on a blank sheet of paper.
“This problem becomes easy if you use symmetry.”
Scratch, scratch.
As Seoha’s pencil moved, the problem that had seemed complicated at first glance transformed into a simple form. Naturally, as if an entangled skein of thread were being unraveled.
“Here, if you use substitution... it becomes like this.”
Jihun followed Seoha’s fingertips with startled eyes. The problem he had been stuck on for more than three hours was solved in an instant.
And yet Seoha showed no sense of superiority at all.
Watching him, Jihun was swept up in a strange emotion. A complicated feeling in which jealousy and awe were tangled together.
“Seoha.”
“Yes?”
“Do you not think of us as competitors?”
What on earth was this child thinking? No matter how hard he tried, Jihun could not understand his way of thinking.
Seoha tilted his head. His expression said he truly did not know.
“If you win a competition, does that mean you learn what you don’t know?”
“...What?”
“There are a lot of things I want to know. There are still tons of proofs that haven’t been solved too. I’d do anything for that, but...”
A way of thinking far too different from the way he had lived.
Through the mirror named Yu Seoha, Jihun saw his true self, which he had hidden deep in his heart.
The cowardice that had hidden behind talent as a shield.
The laziness that found relief in enjoying a sense of relative superiority.
In truth, he had wanted to make an effort.
He had simply been afraid of challenging himself.
Even though he had come to winter school determined to finally do his very best, Jihun actually knew.
He had already drawn one foot back so he could run away from this place at any time. Because he thought this was not everything in life.
“Am I really special?”
More than this child before his eyes?
Jihun corrected his posture.
No matter how pathetic a person he was, just once, just one time, he would go all out.
That was what he decided.
He could always pull his foot back afterward.
* * *
A week had passed since winter school began.
The professor lounge.
Beyond the window, the snow-covered campus spread out at a glance.
“What do you think of the kids this year?”
Kim Jiyun asked Professor Park Cheolmin as she set down her cup.
Since a few days ago, she had been visiting this place occasionally to observe winter school.
“They’re better than I expected. A few of them definitely stand out. Sujeong was always good, but she’s become much better than last year.”
As Sujeong, whom he had high hopes for, grew just as he wished, Professor Park could not hide his joy.
“She’s really diligent, unlike how she looks.”
“To be honest, I think we can have some expectations for this year’s IMO.”
Winning would be difficult, but perhaps they could aim for second or third place.
“But you’re not mentioning the important thing.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on. You know. Yu Seoha.”
Professor Park’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Has the rumor already spread? How on earth do you know Seoha?”
“I have my ways.”
“To be honest, I’m being extremely cautious. Our country has never properly raised a genius before.”
Leaving aside China and Japan, even Vietnam had produced a Fields Medalist, but the Korean mathematics community had not produced a single one.
“I think differently. I believe a genius will bloom under any circumstances.
Abel left behind great achievements even when he didn’t have bread to eat that day and was dying of tuberculosis, didn’t he? If someone couldn’t be raised, then that means they simply didn’t have talent at that level to begin with.”
“I think so too. I’m just afraid I’ll get my hopes up for nothing and end up disappointed.”
“I guarantee you, Seoha isn’t at that level. I gave him an algebraic geometry problem, a field considered among mathematicians to be one of the most difficult theories, and he solved it without hesitation. In particular, his mathematical intuition for numbers is truly...”
Everything else could be acquired through training to some degree, but mathematical intuition alone belonged purely to the realm of talent.
Jiyun had seen that in Seoha.
“I know, I know. Even though he hadn’t heard the lecture, he caught a single wrong sign on the board. Thanks to him, I have one less thing to worry about this year.”
“You mean the IMO?”
“Yes. Even if Korea doesn’t place high in the team rankings, an individual first place has symbolic meaning.”
“I can’t be certain about anything else, but that much is definite.”
The two professors simply could not imagine anyone at the high school level who was mathematically superior to Seoha.