At 5:40 a.m., Taejin woke to the sound of the microwave running. Someone in the dorm was definitely passing around snacks.
“Ugh, it reeks...”
Taejin grabbed his towel and trudged out into the hallway.
Before he knew it, a month and a half had passed since enrollment. From early morning, students wandered the dorm corridors like zombies. Their eyes were all bloodshot, as if they had barely slept. With towels around their necks and toiletry bags in hand, they stood in front of the shower room, waiting their turn.
Students were all on edge at this time of year, so Taejin was being careful to avoid causing any trouble.
[Shower in 5 minutes!]
Someone had written the phrase in red on a sheet of A4 paper and stuck it up, but most students finished even faster than that. These days, even shower time felt like a waste.
As soon as he finished showering, Taejin checked his laptop. The school had an intranet for the students, and it was especially useful during exam season.
Click.
[The Duck Lord has visited us again today]
-He solved all the math, physics, and chemistry problems and left. Seriously, does nobody know who he is?
└Maybe a third-year senior?
└Possible. If their college is already decided, they might have time to spare.
└I don’t think so. The solution style is totally different. He wrote exactly three lines for each problem.
└Were the answers right?
└Yep. I asked a teacher, and they said they were perfect.
└They said there was no one like this until last year. Not a senior.
└We know who he is, but in the interest of protecting his privacy, we will not say.
└If you reveal it and he disappears, we will all come looking for you.
‘The Duck Lord, huh...’
On the anonymous board run by the student council, you could choose an icon for each post. You could also design your own icon, and this suspicious individual’s signature was a duck making a wicked face.
At first, it had been nothing much.
Someone had uploaded a photo of a math problem at one in the morning, and within three minutes, a solution had been posted. From that point on, the questions began to snowball. And without fail, every few minutes, solutions and answers would appear.
All the students praised the Duck Lord’s grace.
If you posted a problem you didn’t know on the anonymous board and closed your eyes for a moment, a notification would ring. Normally, you would have had to go find a teacher or ask an older student you knew. Thanks to the Duck Lord, students were able to secure more study time.
[Duck Lord, how do you calculate energy loss in a physics collision? The formulas keep getting tangled up. (diagram attached)]
└Fix v_cm. If you look at it in center-of-mass coordinates, the collision is a symmetric reflection. Therefore, loss rate = 1−e².
└Overwhelming gratitude. May the blessings of Pythagoras and Newton be upon the Duck Lord.
Taejin chuckled as he looked at the Duck Lord’s solution.
The explanations had become kinder than before.
When students had started loudly complaining about the one-line solutions, the Duck Lord had begun adding explanations now and then. And now, they had grown to as many as three lines.
He didn’t know about the other classes, but in Taejin’s Class 1, everyone knew who the Duck Lord was. They simply didn’t say it first because he seemed to want to keep it hidden.
“But I thought this kid was only good at math. Turns out he’s insane at physics and chemistry too.”
For the first time, Taejin learned that geniuses who could not be dealt with really did exist in this world.
* * *
Two weeks ago, a visitor had come to see Seoha.
When he went to the café in front of the main gate, their meeting place, the man had already arrived.
“Teacher!”
Uhyeon was sitting there wearing large sunglasses, as if to hide his face. A large box sat beside him.
“What do you mean, teacher... I haven’t taught you anything.”
The corner of Uhyeon’s mouth rose slightly.
Though it had been a long time since he’d seen him, Seoha was just as he remembered. He had grown taller, and the country bumpkin air had faded a little. Even so, he was still polite and pure, unchanged.
“Take it.”
Uhyeon plopped a black box onto the table.
“I can’t accept something this expensive.”
Seoha saw the logo on the box and, startled, waved his hands in refusal.
“Don’t get cocky. To me, this is the same as picking up an ice cream from a convenience store. And—”
Tap, tap.
Uhyeon drummed his fingers on the table.
“I’m the one who suggested sending you to a gifted school. I should at least provide this much after-service.”
“Still...”
Seoha hesitated.
As it happened, he had been thinking of asking his family for a laptop. He had not planned on buying something this expensive, though...
Accepting it was a burden, but Seoha was also worried his parents might feel disappointed.
“You’re starting informatics class from the second semester, right? To install an IDE, handle data, and do coding tests, a laptop is essential. Are you going to go onto the battlefield without a weapon?”
Riiip.
Without another word, Uhyeon tore off the seal sticker on the box.
Now Seoha could no longer hold out.
“I’ll definitely pay you back someday.”
“Do that. Once you start earning more than me.”
Seoha sighed.
Uhyeon had ranked first in income among lecturers in South Korea the previous year. His newly launched lecture had become a massive hit, and the books sold alone numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He was more than a walking small-to-medium enterprise.
“Thank you. I’ll really use it well.”
Seoha bowed his head deeply.
That day, Uhyeon bought Seoha the most expensive Hanwoo beef in the area, fed him, and then returned to Seoul.
As Seoha was carrying the box up to the dormitory, Gibeom from his class saw him.
“Guys! Seoha bought a laptop!”
““What?””
Where had those cool, aloof people from the beginning of the semester gone?
In an instant, five or six of them came rushing out. And their eyes went wide at Seoha’s high-performance laptop.
“Seoha, leave this kind of thing to your hyungs.”
Taejin took the heavy box for him. Then they all swarmed into Seoha’s room together.
After more than a month of living and rubbing shoulders together, the students in his class had come to understand Seoha’s charm.
At first, none of them had believed it, but now they knew. Seoha had no malice.
There was a reason he did not show off: he truly thought that solving problems and the like was not a big deal.
If you asked him about something you didn’t know, he would always explain it to the best of his ability. If the other person still did not understand, he would feel genuinely sorry.
On soccer days, he always fully geared up and went out to the field early to warm up. They had realized that Seoha looked forward to those days quite a bit.
For Seoha, who was not used to computers, they set up his environment at lightning speed. Then they spent a long while explaining how to use the internal network and which programs were useful for class.
“Hyungs, thank you.”
“It’s nothing.”
The students waved their hands as if it were no big deal and returned to their own rooms.
‘When will I become an adult?’
As Seoha saw it, he was always only receiving help from the people around him. If possible, he wanted to add something extra to what he had received and return it all to everyone.
* * *
After setting up his laptop, Seoha learned of the existence of the anonymous board on the internal network.
“There was a place like this?”
All kinds of minor information about the school was posted there.
[Shower room B section, stall 3 has the strongest water pressure. Hot water is late, though. (20 seconds)]
[Dryer No. 2, timer broken]
[Preparatory music room A seems to have a study group in the evening]
[Revealing the dorm supervisor’s patrol route]
[Is the cheese cat in front of the library pregnant?]
[Story of seeing Sin Uhyeon at the café in front of the school]
Through his talent exchange with Gyeoul, Seoha had regained psychological stability, and the burden he felt when using his mind had lessened. Now he could focus on research for long periods without worrying about the backlash.
‘Ah! I need to study for exams.’
Even if he did not need to study math separately, the other subjects were a different matter.
Having skipped the middle school curriculum, Seoha had huge gaps in his knowledge, and it was unreasonable to cover all of them with an encyclopedia alone.
Seoha began reading through specialized textbooks as if he were reading novels. Physics, chemistry, and biology were interesting. Perhaps because he had no interest in them, Korean and English were quite difficult to read. Still, it was an immense relief that he had studied English in advance.
Ding—
“Hm?”
A problem had been posted on the anonymous board. It was a math problem.
As soon as Seoha saw it, he posted the answer.
After doing this a few times, although he had only read basic textbooks, there was almost nothing in chemistry or physics that Seoha did not know.
Ding, ding, ding—
Notifications rang in succession.
“Whoa, jackpot!”
As it happened, he needed problem-solving practice.
Every day, the anonymous board overflowed with problems. Compiled past exams, modified past questions, even original problems someone seemed to have made. The types were all different, but since they were questions people posted because they could not solve them themselves, the difficulty was not low.
By solving them, Seoha was able to fill in the practical sense that textbooks alone lacked. And since it helped the other students as well, it was truly killing two birds with one stone.
As exams drew closer in earnest, targeted questions began to fly in.
[Duck Lord, why are sound waves and light calculated differently in the Doppler effect?]
└Sound rides a medium, while light runs straight through a vacuum, so the formulas split.
Since it would be embarrassing if his identity were exposed, he decided to maintain the concept.
[Duck Lord, I have no idea how to approach chemical equilibrium constant problems.]
└Substitute activity for concentration. From the moment the idealization assumption breaks, it becomes easy to solve.
Seoha explained the problems as kindly as he could.
Before he knew it, the anonymous board had turned into “Ask Me Anything.”
Seoha also gained a lot by answering questions. He was able to encounter countless types of problems he might never have seen if he had stayed still.
Occasionally, strange questions flew in as well.
[Duck Lord, how do I get a girlfriend?]
After pondering how to answer this question, Seoha thought of Seong Jihun, who had always had a girlfriend.
└Height and face?
└LOLOLOLOLOL
└Why’d you suddenly hit where it hurts?
└He always speaks only the truth.
Thrum—, thuuum—
He came to the music room and tried pressing the piano keys. While reading a piano primer and music theory, Seoha tried transcribing Ducky’s song, which had been as chaotic as code, into sheet music. When he did, Ducky began changing the song in accordance with the more advanced theory.
It seemed he would need more time to write a proper song and even perform it.
After dinner, he stopped by the library without thinking and found it so crowded that it was hard to find an empty seat.
‘Ah! Exam period.’
He was waiting in line to return the piano primer when his gaze landed on a group beside him. They took out a printout and whispered.
「Collection of Duck Lord Solutions」
“Hey, this is seriously well organized. Look at how they attached examples right next to the formulas.”
“They say a kid from Class 3 is a fan of the Duck Lord. Apparently, they gathered all his answers so far and bound them together.”
Seoha turned his eyes.
Here and there throughout the library, he could see students looking at the “Collection of Duck Lord Solutions.” The edges of the A4 pages were worn and dirty, as if they had been read countless times.
That night, a post that was not a question appeared on the anonymous board.
[Duck Lord, thank you]
-To be honest, after entering this school, I had a pretty hard time. I didn’t know anyone, and it was hard to ask about things I didn’t understand. But because the Duck Lord answered everything, it felt like I’d made a friend, and I was really happy. The Duck Lord is probably way smarter than someone like me, but I hope you do well on your exams too.
└If it weren’t for the Duck Lord, I think I would’ve had a mental breakdown.
└I don’t know who you are, but I’m really grateful too.
└I wanted to leave a thank-you too. Thanks, Duck Lord!
└But if the Duck Lord is a first-year, isn’t first place already decided? lol
└For real.
└Utterly untouchable.
└Shouldn’t we be paying royalties for the Collection of Duck Lord Solutions?
Dozens of messages of thanks appeared beneath the post.
As Seoha stared at the screen, his vision blurred.
He closed the laptop and struggled to calm the emotion swelling up inside him.