Seoha was in an extremely weakened state.
Every cell in his body was screaming.
Because he had maintained concentration for far too long, his autonomic nervous system had reached its limit. His brain, deprived of sufficient fuel, was overheated like a burning engine.
Even so, Seoha did not stop thinking.
It was a problem he had been holding on to for seven years.
Seoha wanted to solve it as quickly as possible.
‘The inspiration that’s come to me now might never return.’
That worry drove him to whip himself onward.
There was no sleep, no rest.
Seoha’s body had long since surpassed its limits.
Scratch, scratch.
Seoha continued the proof.
The enormous automata diagram that had begun on the blackboard now covered the entire wall.
Seoha bound the endlessly extending pattern into local rules, and confirmed that those rules did not collide under any circumstances.
Thus, only one step remained.
Verifying the completeness of this hypothesis.
Seoha intended to test his theory not within a limited space, but upon an endlessly spreading infinite plane.
Scratch, scratch.
The students murmured.
Footsteps in the hallway never ceased.
“You there! Get back to your classroom, now!”
The sharp voices of the teachers, the sighs of those worried about him,
“What is all that?”
“My goodness… The entire wall is covered in equations.”
“What on earth is he doing?”
Exclamations and whispers burst out as though no one could believe what they were seeing.
Seoha was aware of everything happening around him, but he devoted every nerve only to the proof before his eyes.
The limit would arrive soon.
Before then, he had to finish everything.
Jiyun stood still in place so as not to disturb Seoha.
And she looked around.
She was searching for the point where the theorem began.
‘There it is!’
Once she looked deeper, she could see it.
The figures and equations layered across the entire wall interlocked with one another, forming a vast system.
‘He redefined the reduction method and created local rules.’
And the starting point of all this was the large automata diagram drawn on the blackboard.
Seoha would now use it as a driving force to climb an inductive ladder and extend into the infinite plane.
She had considered herself a genius.
Because the mathematicians the world praised as geniuses were not all that different from her.
But the boy before her was fundamentally different from them.
‘What on earth is it?’
The geniuses she knew were people who repaired existing roads to run faster along them, or discovered shortcuts others could not see.
But Seoha was leaving the very first footprints in a barren land where no road had ever existed.
The local rules he had created were not merely a computational convenience.
Seoha had completed a language that had never existed in the world, a new system of his own.
Within the boundaries of the enormous automata diagram, chaos was being suppressed.
Now what remained was absolute rule.
All confusion was kneeling beneath the order Seoha had created.
Jiyun could not believe her eyes.
* * *
“Hm? What’s this?”
While managing the lecture Instagram account, Uhyeon noticed a post that bothered him.
Click.
[Gifted High School Right Now]
-My friend sent me this, and apparently there’s a huge commotion at the gifted high school right now. Some kid turned a classroom into this.
(Photo attached)
└What is all that?
└Isn’t he writing some kind of formula?
└What’s with the walls?
└Hey, this is kinda scary, shiver shiver shiver
└Are all gifted high school kids like that?
└Black magic? If you stand in the middle, do you get offered up as a sacrifice?
└Can’t you tell just by looking? It’s a demon summoning.
└Newbie, huh? This is a hero summoning circle from another world. If you’re there, you get sucked in.
└Where is that? I’d better hurry over before it’s too late lol
└I have a friend at the gifted high school too, and they said the whole school’s been turned upside down. Even the principal and vice principal came running out lolol
“Seoha?”
Uhyeon’s eyes widened for an instant.
The familiar handwriting and arrangement of figures. Though the face was not visible, Uhyeon could tell for certain just from the back.
“What the hell is this brat doing!”
The classroom was a mess.
Something serious must have happened.
“Damn it!”
Uhyeon sprang up from his seat and snatched the keys he had thrown on the desk.
Then, without a moment to think, he kicked open the front door and rushed out.
Waiting for him in the parking lot was a high-performance sports car with 600 horsepower.
Clatter, clunk—
He inserted the key and turned it with all his strength.
Vroooom—
The crisp engine roar rang out as though showing off its own capabilities.
Uhyeon roughly shifted gears and stepped on the accelerator.
* * *
Seoha had fallen into a trance.
The place he was walking through was an infinitely spreading plane, a vast achromatic world with neither light nor shadow.
It was a space Seoha had created with equations.
He took a step forward.
The monsters of graph theory could no longer approach him. They merely glared at Seoha from beyond the boundary, growling. Seoha was no longer afraid of them.
“I think I understand now. You were never a monster that multiplied infinitely.”
Seoha reached out toward them.
The four color theorem, which had devoured countless mathematicians.
People had regarded this problem as a monster that destroyed mathematicians.
Seoha moved the chalk and wrote the final formula.
Then, from where Seoha stood, four colors quietly spread outward.
Those colors did not collide with one another; they intertwined smoothly, as though dancing a dance promised long ago.
Seoha looked around in every direction.
The harmony of the four colors spreading infinitely was breathtakingly beautiful.
The wasteland no longer existed.
The infinite plane had now transformed into a tapestry woven of order and harmony.
“So this is what you truly look like.”
Before he knew it, the monster had vanished, and in its place stood a gentleman dressed neatly in a suit.
The indiscriminate bombardment inflicted upon him.
He had been mistaken for a monster and forcibly suppressed. But this gentleman had merely been waiting, from the very beginning, for someone to whom he could permit the proof.
Seoha’s consciousness drifted into the distant past.
It had begun around the age of seven.
At an age when he was still clumsy even at holding a pencil, he learned of the theorem tucked away in a corner of an encyclopedia.
‘Any map on a plane can be colored with four colors.’
The thrill he felt when he first read those words…
Young Seoha’s mind filled with curiosity.
‘Is that really true? Why four colors?’
Drawing maps in a sketchbook and cutting out and pasting colored paper, Seoha came to know that the theorem was true.
However, the proof method he read in the encyclopedia shocked him.
Though Seoha had been young, his aesthetic as a mathematician was already firm.
‘A proof should be the blade of logic, not primitive violence.’
‘I’ll try it myself.’
That was his first attempt.
But he was far from capable.
At that time, Seoha asked his father for the first time to buy him mathematics books.
To understand graph theory, he studied topology.
To consider the number of cases, he needed combinatorics.
Even after that, the countless theories Seoha studied were all for the sole purpose of solving this problem.
He came to know frustration and failure.
He came to know that there were truths no amount of struggling could place within reach.
In that process, Seoha realized that mathematics was not the power to break down walls, but the means to understand walls and the very elements that composed them.
Therefore, if he did not stop, he would surely arrive someday.
That belief made Seoha grow.
Seoha lifted his head and looked at the gentleman.
“How was my proof? Was it satisfactory in your eyes?”
The gentleman’s form blurred.
But Seoha could tell that he was smiling. Saying he had done well, the gentleman reached out and stroked Seoha’s head.
Seoha looked at the gentleman and smiled with him.
Light spread outward.
What remained was only a vast order woven from four colors.
Seoha whispered to the gentleman as he departed for the last time.
“Goodbye.”
Tears welled in Seoha’s eyes. Then they ran down his cheeks.
“My teacher.”
* * *
Seoha moved the chalk with a trembling hand.
「…Therefore, four colors are sufficient for the coloring of every planar map.」
And beneath it, short letters were written clearly.
「Q.E.D.」
Seoha felt the strength leaving his fingertips.
The chalk struck the floor and broke with a “tok.”
At that moment, the body that had endured on tension alone loosened all at once, and his vision shook.
“Ah…”
With a short groan, Seoha’s consciousness cut off.
“Seoha!”
Jiyun ran from her place.
She reached out to catch the boy collapsing in front of the blackboard, but someone was faster than her.
Uhyeon threw himself forward and caught Seoha.
And he firmly received the boy as he crumpled powerlessly, like a bird exhausted from flight.
“Damn it, what the hell did you do! Call an ambulance, now!”
His voice trembled.
But at the faint sound of the boy’s breathing, he finally let out a sigh of relief.
When the ambulance entered the school grounds, the school instantly became a scene of chaos.
Students clung to the windows to watch.
The students gathered in the hallway made a great uproar, as though they had witnessed a major disaster.
“Is Seoha okay?”
“I don’t know, they said he fainted.”
“I heard everything written on the walls is a proof.”
“They said even the teachers couldn’t understand any of it.”
Rumors spread one after another.
The quick-witted principal immediately gave an order to the maintenance office.
“Seal off the seminar room. Only the vice principal and I will be allowed entry. Do not touch a single thing, not the blackboard and not even the papers attached to the walls. No cleaning is necessary.”
The maintenance staff hurriedly blocked the entrance and attached sealing stickers.
The next day, several photos spread through online communities.
Graphs and diagrams covering the walls, a collection of countless symbols.
The general public, unfamiliar with mathematics, called it a “summoning circle.”
But a few researchers recognized what it truly was.
[The Gifted High School Summoning Circle Looks Like the Four Color Theorem, Doesn’t It?]
-Now that I’ve seen it in high resolution, I’m certain. If it really was proved, this would be an incredible event. Does anyone know the details?
└This is Kim Jiyun from KAIST. I was there. It is the four color theorem. I can’t presume the result of whether the proof is valid, but it absolutely needs to be verified.
└Are you serious? There was a mathematician in Korea researching this?
└Where will this be verified? Will the Korean Mathematical Society handle it?
└Overseas scholars should participate too. A cross-field review involving graph theory, combinatorics, and computational theory is absolutely necessary.
└In any case, that classroom really is a spectacle. I want to go see it in person.
└Professor, are you interested in the summoning circle too?
└It’s cool. I want to make one too lolol
* * *
Ring ring ring—
The phone in the principal’s office rang without pause.
When the phone stopped, the inbox flashed; even the fax machine, which had been quiet for months, clacked as it spat out paper.
“Yes, that’s correct. The seminar room is being preserved.”
“Ah, that’s a little difficult. The student’s health comes first, you see. They say there’s nothing especially wrong, so you should be able to meet him soon. Our student is very young, after all.”
Not only academia, but also media outlets, having somehow caught the scent, sent in interview requests.
He had to repeat the same words several times a day, but every time the call ended, the principal found himself smiling.
“When do they say it’ll begin?”
The vice principal, who had been listening to the call, was growing impatient as well.
The principal, pretending to be dignified, peeled off a memo he had stuck in front of the monitor and read it.
“They say it will begin the day after tomorrow, as soon as the student consent form is received.”
“Principal, could this really be…”
The principal raised a hand and stopped him from speaking.
“Ahem! Don’t jinx it.
I know Professor Kim Jiyun somewhat, and judging from her expression back then, there’s no doubt. Let’s prepare a press briefing in advance for now. Organize everything as well, including Seoha’s exam and the other materials.”
“Yes, understood.”
When the vice principal left, the corners of his mouth ascended.
“Hahaha! Is our school about to make its international debut already?”
He sprang to his feet and looked in the mirror.
If he wanted to look good on camera, it seemed he would have to lose some weight.