It’s an Academic Fact That Rankers Are Model Students – Chapter 157

Chapter 157: The Plight of an Unprecedentedly Perfect Daughter (2)

What surprised Yoo Seol-ha wasn’t that she couldn’t solve it.

If she wanted to, she could write down the solution right now without hesitation.

She had already solved similar problems many times.

The problem was …….

‘…… To prove this, I’m sure I have to use the epsilon-delta definition? No, for the shortest distance, I have to use the calculus of variations? This is all college-level stuff…….’

Math descriptive question number 1.

It was a problem that was difficult to solve without using college-level math.

Calculus, analysis, linear algebra, probability theory, Lebesgue integral, etc…… Yoo Seol-ha had already completed her undergraduate mathematics courses for her freshman to junior year.

From her point of view, this question number 1 could only be properly proven by bringing in college-level math.

But the reason she couldn’t do that was…….

『※However, it must be proven within the high school curriculum.』

‘No way, you’re saying I can’t do it with just high school math……?!’

She knew the mathematically clear answer, but it was becoming a wrong answer!

It felt like her cheat codes were sealed.

It was a problem that could be solved in just a few lines using higher-level math, but they were explicitly forbidden in the problem!

‘No, what am I worried about? Then I’ll just solve it with high school math.’

In an instant, she erased the bewildered expression from her face.

Yoo Seol-ha, with her cold, sunken eyes that seemed to freeze even the test paper, carefully examined the problem again.

And then she grabbed her mechanical pencil and, as always, without hesitation…….

If she just wrote it down…….

It would be done…….

‘…… Uh, how do I solve this? Is this really something that can be solved with just high school math?’

She couldn’t think of any way to solve it without using college-level math.

‘No way……! Now that I think about it, they’re giving me a college-level problem and asking me to solve it with high school math! This is ridiculous! I’m just going to……!’

She could have protested and had the problem itself overturned.

Considering Yoo Seol-ha’s eloquence and the powerful backing of the Seolha Group, it would be no big deal to make a simple math test question in a regular high school into a wrong question.

Thud. Thud.

Forgetting that she had to be quiet during the exam, she kept tapping her mechanical pencil on the desk.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

The sound, which was getting faster and faster, seemed to reveal her growing anxiety.

And at that moment.

“……!”

Something suddenly caught her eye.

Scribble! Scribble!

Kyung-joon was smoothly filling out the descriptive answer sheet!

Where did that frowning face go, the one that had been making all sorts of faces because of a headache? Kyung-joon was writing down the answers to the descriptive questions as if he were a fish in water!

Seeing that sight, Yoo Seol-ha couldn’t help but experience the biggest embarrassment she had ever felt in her life, in real time.

‘Huh? Uh? What? He’s solving it? Really? He’s going to solve it? Just like that?’

Yoo Seol-ha, who had never cared about what anyone else did before!

This was the first time she felt nervous about someone else’s actions.

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

Yoo Seol-ha thought for a moment, feeling impatient.

‘Come to think of it, that guy didn’t use any college-level math for his creativity assignment presentation either…….’

Last semester’s math creativity assignment presentation.

While Yoo Seol-ha had incorporated college-level math to make her explanation extremely rigorous and accurate but also very difficult, Kyung-joon had used only high school-level math for his entire explanation.

At the time, Yoo Seol-ha had listened to Kyung-joon’s explanation and thought it wasn’t mathematically rigorous.

But now it was different.

She couldn’t simply dismiss it as just high school-level math; it was too unsettling.

Whether he was really solving problem #1 of the written section using only high school-level math, only he would know unless she directly cheated and checked…….

‘……C, Could he really be solving it? Only using high school-level math?’

His explanation from the creativity presentation.

Her grandfather’s various meaningful remarks.

And…… the bet.

All of this combined, the sight of Kyung-joon intensely focused on solving the problem filled Yoo Seol-ha with an inexplicable fear.

‘Afraid……?’

What was she afraid of?

Eighteen years of her life, always being number one.

At the thought that it might all crumble away, thud.

She unconsciously let go of the mechanical pencil she was holding.

But immediately after.

Grip.

She gripped the dropped mechanical pencil again.

‘……I can’t accept it.’

Scratch.

‘I can’t accept it. I can’t accept it.’

Scratch, scratch.

‘I can’t accept it. I can’t accept it. I can’t accept it……!’

Scratch, scratch, scratch!

Her mechanical pencil began to move faster than ever before.

Tiny letters, difficult even for ants to avoid, densely filled the answer sheet like falling snow.

‘What? High school-level math? College-level math? I don’t need any of that! It’s just a useless distinction! Math is just math! Axioms, premises, hypotheses, proofs, theories, laws! That’s all there is to math, that’s it……!’

It’s obvious that you shouldn’t use college-level math in a high school exam, especially if it’s a written section.

Just imagine writing down an all-purpose formula from college-level math on the answer sheet and saying, ‘I solved it with this~’.

You might get points for the answer, but you wouldn’t get any points for the solution process.

However, there was actually one way to use advanced math in a high school exam without any problems.

Scratch, scratch, scratch!

Whether it’s college-level math or graduate school-level math!

Starting from the very basics, all the way to applications!

All she had to do was prove everything without a single mistake!

So, the method Yoo Seol-ha used to solve math problem #1 of the written section was mathematically very rigorous and accurate……

‘I’ll just prove everything!’

……and brute-force.

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

“Everyone, put your writing utensils down. I’ll collect the answer sheets from the back.”

The exam was over.

“Huff, huff……!”

Yoo Seol-ha had just managed to finish her exam just in time.

Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, which usually didn’t sweat even in the summer.

But her expression showed she was relieved.

‘Anyway, I solved all the problems. I finished marking too. It’s a bit disappointing that I couldn’t review it…… but it’ll be okay.’

Her essay answer sheet, especially the answer space for question number 1, was a sight to behold.

It was almost completely black, as if it had been colored in with tiny letters.

“Huh……?!”

A student who was collecting answer sheets from the back was startled as if he had seen something he shouldn’t have when he saw Yoo Seol-ha’s answer sheet.

He was surprised by two things.

First, the appearance of the answer sheet itself looked like a spell to summon a devil.

‘That’s Yoo Seol-ha’s answer sheet…… so that might be the answer…… Is that real?’

And the second thing was that the devil-summoning spell might actually be the answer to essay question number 1.

If it had been anyone else’s answer sheet, he would have just skimmed over it, thinking there was no way that could be the answer. But this time, it was a little different.

“Wow, did you solve essay question number 1?”

“No, I couldn’t write anything down?”

“Me neither. Heh heh.”

Essay question number 1 was notorious among the other students for being impossible to solve.

Perhaps that’s why everyone seemed to believe that Yoo Seol-ha’s devil-summoning spell-like answer sheet might actually be the answer.

“I saw Yoo Seol-ha’s answer sheet while I was collecting them, and it was crazy.”

“I saw it from the side too. Is that really the answer? Yoo Seol-ha didn’t get it wrong, did she?”

“No, but this time, essay question number 1 was a really crazy question. Kim Chul-soo was writing like crazy too. But the bell rang while he was writing, so he probably didn’t finish it all.”

“What about Park Young-hee?”

“She wrote 『Unfuck|ngbelievable』 in English in huge letters on her answer sheet.”

“『Unfuck}ngbelievable』 Hahaha. What does that translate to exactly?”

“Park Young-hee said it means 『This is so fuck|ng unbelievable.』”

“Puahaha. That’s hilarious.”

“Wow…… so in the end, Kim Chul-soo and Park Young-hee couldn’t solve it, and only Yoo Seol-ha solved it?”

“It’s like he made that problem only Yoo Seol-ha could solve.”

“I knew it from the time he gave us that weird homework about math being about creativity and imagination, but now he’s doing this in the exam too.”

“Oh, Kyung-joon, you’re here?”

Kyung-joon had gone out to drink water as soon as the exam was over.

He pushed his way through his friends and sat down in his seat.

“Is your head feeling any better?”

“Kind of…… It’s a little better after drinking cold water.”

As soon as he returned to his seat, Kyung-joon began to organize his desk and pack his bag.

“Aren’t you going to check the answer sheet?”

“No. I didn’t do it last time either. I’m just going to go home.”

At Cheongshin High School, checking the answer sheet was optional.

He was planning to go straight home after the closing ceremony.

And he was going to lie down on his bed and put ice cubes on his head and rest.

‘I was too blinded by the 400% creativity…… The gap is too big, so my head hurts like hell…… Damn it.’

As Kyung-joon was packing his bag, a friend next to him asked,

“Oh, yeah. Kyung-joon, did you solve essay question number 1?”

“Yeah, I did.”

Kyung-joon answered casually to his friend’s question about whether he had solved essay question number 1.

“Huh?”

“Wow, really?”

His classmates were inwardly surprised by Kyung-joon’s casual answer that he had solved it.

After all, even Kim Chul-soo and Park Young-hee couldn’t solve it, but Kyung-joon said he did.

But they weren’t as surprised as they were when Kyung-joon had ranked second in the entire school.

They could vaguely guess the reason from his friend’s next words.

“That’s amazing. Then you’ll probably get second place again this time like last time.”

“Probably. I’ll probably be second again. Sigh.”

Kyung-joon didn’t seem very satisfied.

To be precise, it was dissatisfaction stemming from not having done his best.

And if it was due to a failure to control his condition rather than laziness, the sense of self-reproach would be even greater.

‘Ah…… I overdid it on the ‘boost’. I should have known that the bigger the gap, the bigger the headache…… Damn it.’

The item Kyung-joon called the ‘boost’ was the 『Crazy Coffee Pod』.

Kyung-joon had drunk almost dozens of coffee pods to prepare for this midterm exam.

For several days, he had spent almost the entire day under the influence of the +400% creativity buff in the game.

As a side effect, his other intelligence had been reduced by 50% during that time, but he had managed to offset it with the help of the Thinking Herb Tea and the original Study Villa buff.

As a result, on the day of the midterm exam, he suddenly suffered from a terrible headache.

That was why he went straight to the nurse’s office after the Earth Science exam to get some aspirin.

‘But thanks to that, I was able to solve essay question number 1 relatively easily.’

All sorts of thoughts had come to him while his creativity was boosted by 400% in the game.

Even Teemo had initially dismissed them as nonsense and suffered quite a bit, but those seemingly useless thoughts had accumulated and, when he looked back later, had become surprisingly good ideas.

Based on the ideas he had come up with at that time, he had tried to create and solve various application problems, and lo and behold, essay question number 1 on this math exam was almost identical, just with a few changes to the content.

‘Teemo said it was college-level stuff and told me to just skip it, and at the time, with my intelligence-drained brain, I insisted that I could somehow solve it using high school-level math…… I can’t believe that pointless effort helped me like this.’

It was truly a case of ‘you never know what will happen in life’, and Kyung-joon had experienced it firsthand.

Of course, it wasn’t a complete happy ending.

“If you solved essay question number 1, you must have solved everything else too.”

“Well…… I’m not sure about the rest.”

“Huh? You didn’t solve it?”

“No, I solved it.”

He had solved everything, but the question was whether he had solved it all correctly.

His headache had been so bad that he had just plowed through the problems on autopilot, and when he blinked, as if he had gone into a trance, all the problems were solved.

He had a vague memory of it, but perhaps that was why he felt even more uneasy.

‘Is my brain being rewired?’

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