Ch. 6 — 06
“These days, plenty of elementary schoolers have already finished The Art of Mathematics. In the pre-med prep class for elementary students at the academy where I work, there’s a 4th grader doing differential and integral calculus. Do you not know the level of kids these days? What are you making such a fuss about?”
“No! No! Listen to what I’m saying. At first, he was literally at a 2nd-grade level.”
“How do you know that? What if he’s a kid who already finished all his advanced learning?”
“Hey. I can tell just by looking. I’m telling you, he didn’t even know what a fraction was!”
Cha Se-young spoke with intense excitement, but her friend just tipped her beer bottle with an unimpressed face.
“Make it make sense. You want me to believe a kid who didn’t even know fractions understood quadratic functions in two hours?”
“I’m telling you, it’s true!”
“You 100% got played, you dummy. Did you see the guardian’s face? ‘Our kid is amazing, right?’ Didn’t he look like that?”
“W-Well…”
She had seen it when they were saying their goodbyes after the tutoring session.
When she told him the kid was incredibly smart, he had nodded with a very proud face.
She had thought about explaining further, but his arrogant expression rubbed her the wrong way, so she pushed it to next time…
“No. It absolutely wasn’t that kind of vibe.”
“Alright, alright. I guess he’s a genius then.”
“Hoo… How do you teach kids trigonometric ratios?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’? I just tell them to memorize it. sin 30°=0.5, sin 45°=√2/2, sin 60°=√3/2.”
“Have you ever had a kid ask about something like sin 37° ?”
“Why would they ask that? It barely even appears on the CSAT. And even if it does, it’s usually just an example in the passage. Plus, you can just look at a trigonometric table, right? Or punch it into a calculator.”
“I answered like that too, you know? I said he could just look at a trigonometric table. And then he asked who made that table.”
“That’s pure grunt work. After Hipparchus first made it through manual labor, mathematicians spent hundreds of years refining it…”
“Right. But then he says this. He said at first you roughly guess it, then add or subtract the error, then add or subtract the new error. And since the error gets smaller and smaller, if you keep doing it, eventually it’ll be a perfect match. Do you know what he said after thinking about it for a second? He said it probably wouldn’t work just doing it like that. He said you’d need to write the numbers in a different format.”
Her friend, who had been bringing her beer bottle to her lips as if she didn’t care, suddenly sputtered and sprayed foam.
Wiping the beer off her face, Se-young looked into her friend’s questioning eyes and nodded.
“Exactly. A mere eleven-year-old, without even knowing what a Taylor expansion is, explained the principles of concepts like radians, series, and convergence.”
Taylor expansion doesn’t even appear in high school math.
It makes its first appearance in freshman-year college calculus for STEM majors. To explain it properly, you have to understand derivatives, and to understand derivatives, you have to understand limits. Ultimately, to explain sin 37° using Taylor expansion, you would have to bring in the entirety of high school mathematics.
Her friend wiped her foam-covered mouth with her sleeve.
Se-young might be a bit of a dummy who could get tricked, but she wasn’t the type to lie.
Her friend gaped at her blankly.
“An eleven-year-old?”
To her friend’s shocked face, Se-young nodded once again.
“Of course, he didn’t come up with the exact formula. But isn’t the mere fact that an elementary schooler approached it that way incredible?”
“Bullshit!”
“I’m telling you, it’s real!”
“Total bullshit!”
“Hah…”
Se-young eventually gave up trying to explain it to her friend.
Honestly, she wouldn’t have believed it herself if she had heard it from someone else.
“Let’s just drink.”
“It’s a lie, right?”
“Yeah. It’s a lie, bitch.”
Bringing her beer bottle to her lips, Se-young began to agonize over what she should teach in their next tutoring session.
‘Should I bring The Art of Mathematics…?’
For some reason, she felt a thrill of excitement.
*
*
*
“No, you can’t. Phones are fun, sure. But it’s an addiction. They say it melts your brain. I looked it all up. Shorts and stuff like that ruin kids…”
“……”
“Using data to watch things is limited to exactly three hours a day.”
“……”
“Hah, come on! Put that pout away, will you?”
Sitting in his chair, Cheol-jun glared at the phone on the desk without even glancing at Hyung-man.
He had been like this ever since he woke up this morning.
He had thrown a proper fit when told his phone screen time would be restricted from now on.
“So. Are you not going? Should I go by myself?”
Maintaining his deeply furrowed brow, Cheol-jun stood up from his chair.
Then, he slowly pulled on his coat.
Hyung-man chuckled.
He was still doing as he was told.
The kid had been so mature that it broke his heart, but seeing him slowly act more like a child made Hyung-man feel a bit more at ease.
Finding it too cute, Hyung-man ruffled the boy’s hair, causing his lip to jut out even further.
“Let’s go, squirt.”
*
*
*
Seoul, Seocho District, Naegok-dong.
In the lobby of the National Intelligence Service headquarters, there are nameless stars.
It is a memorial honoring agents who died in the line of duty without leaving even a name behind.
Originally, the intent was to add a star every time an agent died, but the count had stopped at nineteen.
Every NIS employee knew that far more agents than those stars had dedicated their lives to the nation and never returned home.
And today, Cheol-jun learned this as well.
Hyung-man lightly patted Cheol-jun’s head before taking a step to the side.
Cheol-jun stared quietly at the stars.
One of those stars was his dad, Jae-kang.
He didn’t know much about patriotism or things like that.
He didn’t fully understand what it meant to dedicate one’s life to the nation.
He had never understood why his dad devoted his life to a job where no one would ever acknowledge him.
But facing these stars in person, he felt he could grasp the noble weight of that life.
Cheol-jun bowed his head low.
His lips trembled slightly.
Hyung-man’s hand gently, yet nonchalantly, rested on Cheol-jun’s small back.
“Dying doesn’t mean nothing is left behind. He remains vividly in the memories of everyone he crossed paths with at some point in his past.”
A rough hand ruffled the boy’s hair.
“And, he left you behind. You are the future of that star.”
Cheol-jun nodded.
He thought he understood what he meant.
“So your mind and body need to be very healthy. Because you have to live carrying that star within you.”
Cheol-jun continued to nod.
“If you stare at your phone too much, your mind and body will be ruined.”
Cheol-jun instantly stopped nodding.
And his lip jutted right back out.
He had almost upgraded him to Tier 3 reliability in his interpersonal network data for saying such cool words, but he demoted him back to Tier 4.
*
*
*
“Yeah. That’s him?”
“Yeah.”
“He doesn’t look like him at all.”
“Yeah. My sister-in-law must have been very beautiful.”
Hyung-man’s peer, NIS 3rd Deputy Director Kim Han-soo, chuckled and handed over a manila envelope.
“Severance pay, condolence money, compensation, and a special occupational pension. I went head-to-head with the Director to max it out. Start the inheritance process right away.”
Jae-kang’s mother, his only living blood relative, had passed away four years ago.
Therefore, all of Jae-kang’s inheritance belonged to Cheol-jun.
“Okay. Thank you!”
“Are the guardianship procedures done?”
“Yeah. Seok-hyun handled it cleanly.”
“Good job. What about the, uh, slush funds?”
“Even if we can’t use it right away, I’ve got about 1 billion won. There should be more scattered around elsewhere.”
“1 billion?”
“You know, the cut I secretly skimmed back during the illegal gambling ring operation in Yanbian.”
“You skimmed 1 billion won back then? You crazy bastards…”
“No, it was 100 million back then. But I threw it into crypto to launder it, and it ballooned that much.”
“Hah…?”
“Jae-kang told the kid all about it. Haha. He even threatened me with your name and phone number. Said he’d rat me out to you if I played dumb.”
“What? My phone number too?”
“Yeah, had it memorized perfectly.”
“Incredible.”
Kim Han-soo shook his head in sheer disbelief.
Hyung-man spoke up again.
“He goes on about guardianship laws and whatnot. Hah, it’s unbelievable, really.”
“Wow. Really? He’s incredibly smart?”
“Yeah. His IQ is 120.”
“But honestly, you’re more scared of us than some guardianship law anyway.”
Hyung-man scrunched his nose.
It was true; if he raised the kid poorly or messed up, everyone connected to Jae-kang would be in an uproar trying to bury him.
That was far more terrifying than the law.
They were all formidable people, after all.
“Well, that’s true. Oh, right. Do you have any connections to the Hanyoung Educational Foundation or Hanyoung Group?”
“Huh? Why the Educational Foundation?”
“I want to send him to Hanyoung Elementary School. It’s close to home.”
“Really? Private schools are good. Let’s see. Hanyoung Educational Foundation… I don’t know about the foundation, but I can probably find a connection to Hanyoung Group through a friend of a friend.”
“Okay. Look into it for me.”
“Got it.”
Hyung-man patted the manila envelope.
Then, he stood up from the sofa.
“I’m taking off.”
“Yeah. Raise the kid well.”
“Will do!”
*
*
*
The car leaving the NIS drove for quite a while.
Cheol-jun hadn’t said much the entire time.
Hyung-man wondered if he was still sulking, but looking at his face, that wasn’t it.
He was staring quietly at the scenery outside the window, seemingly organizing his thoughts.
After driving down the highway for a long time, the car exited toward Daejeon.
A few minutes later, they entered a large parking lot.
“Alright, let’s get out, squirt.”
“Okay.”
Hyung-man pulled a white flower basket from the backseat.
Daejeon National Cemetery.
White tombstones stretched endlessly across the wide expanse of grass.
Cheol-jun walked silently, following Hyung-man’s back.
Hyung-man came to an abrupt halt.
“Hah, looks like someone else came by already.”
A white flower basket sat in front of the tombstone.
Hyung-man placed the basket he had brought right next to it.
Then, he scrunched his nose.
“Tch. I should have bought a bigger one.”
The flower basket Hyung-man brought was slightly smaller.
“Go on, say hello. It’s your grandmother.”
Cheol-jun blinked his round eyes as he looked at the tombstone.
Yoo Ok-hee
196X. 04. 10 – 202X. 11. 05
Bereaved Family of a Person of National Merit
“Do you know how to bow?”
Cheol-jun gave a small nod.
Dad Jae-kang would rarely tell stories about his childhood.
But when he did, this person always appeared.
In those stories, his grandmother was always the main character.
He had said she was warm and affectionate, but strict, someone who couldn’t stand injustice, and always helped those in need.
He was told she had passed away about a month before he first met Dad Jae-kang in Yanbian.
One day, his dad had said something.
That maybe, in order to save Dad Jae-kang, his grandmother had sent Cheol-jun to him back then.
Bowing twice, Cheol-jun offered his thanks.
Thank you for bringing Dad Jae-kang into the world,
And thank you for allowing Dad Jae-kang and me to meet in Yanbian back then.
Sweeping his hand over the top of the tombstone, Hyung-man smiled brightly.
“Mother! Your grandson! Your grandson! You worried so much, but look. Jae-kang sent you such a pretty grandson. The kid is incredibly smart. Presidential material. Rest peacefully, and I’ll come back again!”
Hyung-man straightened his back and gently stroked Cheol-jun’s hair.
“You know, I took really good care of your grandmother, alright? Actually, no. I just went over when I was bored and ate all her food, but hah, I really miss her spicy kimchi stew. Anyway, your grandmother was like a mother to me, too. Do you know how hard it is to be buried here? Even my parents didn’t meet the criteria so they’re in a columbarium, but your dad was an incredibly amazing person. So even while your dad was alive, she was exceptionally treated as the bereaved family of a Person of National Merit. That’s a huge deal, you know? Your dad was incredibly cool, wasn’t he?”
“Yes…”
Cheol-jun answered while staring blankly at the tombstone.
He liked the feeling of Uncle Hyung-man’s rough hand moving gently over his head.
He liked the familiar, affectionate tone he used when speaking to his grandmother just now.
And he liked hearing him say his dad was an amazing person.
It was a day fulfilling enough to instantly promote him from Tier 4 to Tier 2 reliability.
“Alright, shall we go? The sun’s setting. It’s getting cold.”
“Yes.”
On the way back,
Uncle Hyung-man’s back looked a little more trustworthy and dependable.
*
*
*
“Excuse me, I’d like to consult with you about…”
Seeing the tutor’s serious face, Hyung-man narrowed his brow.
“Hmm?”
“Well, I’m being cautious about this, but he’s a little different from normal kids.”
“Haha. He sure is. Our Cheol-jun is incredibly smart.”
“Uh, him being smart isn’t the issue…”
Hyung-man twitched an eyebrow.
“Why? Can he not keep up with the curriculum?”
“No! No!”
“Then?”
Cha Se-young swallowed hard.
“…He’s too fast.”
“Hmm?”
Hyung-man tilted his head in confusion.