Chapter 226

Translator: Dreamscribe

The morning after he was discharged.

Seo-ha sat at the desk in his room for the first time in a long while.

Warm April sunlight streamed in through the window. The lilacs he had planted with his family in their garden swayed in the breeze, carrying their sweet fragrance toward him.

Whoosh-

Seo-ha closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the wind.

“Mm. Home really is the best.”

He picked up a pencil and rolled it between his fingers for a long while. During his hospitalization, no one had brought him a pen or paper. It felt as though equations had risen all the way to his throat, like water in a reservoir just before the dam burst. But now that he actually tried to write, he had no idea where to begin.

‘Should I wait a little?’

His body had not fully recovered yet.

He had no desire to overdo it and end up back in the hospital. Seo-ha went out onto the wooden porch, closed his eyes at ease, and sank into thought.

Seo-eun was packing with only one day left before the IMO.

Her brother was back home.

She hated having to leave without getting to enjoy the precious everyday life that had finally returned. But once she resolved to win a gold medal this time and give it to her brother as a gift, her heart felt considerably lighter.

When she opened her door and stepped out, she saw her brother sitting on the porch.

His back was straight, his eyes closed. Sunlight rested on the side of his face, accentuating the light and shadow of his profile.

‘What is he thinking about?’

He had always been like that, ever since they were little. Even in the middle of a noisy place, it somehow felt as though the air around her brother alone flowed differently. Seo-eun loved seeing him like that, yet at the same time, it left a faint chill in one corner of her heart.

‘It would be okay for him to rest a little....’

As if he had been born into this world with a mission from God, he never stopped thinking for even a moment. Even while the whole world noisily called out her brother’s name, he showed not the slightest interest in it.

Recently, Seo-eun often found herself encountering the traces her brother had left behind.

At the orientation she attended for the first time after passing the second-round exam, the professor in charge of the national team wrote a name on the blackboard.

‘Yu Seo-ha.’

“I doubt there’s anyone among you who doesn’t know this name.”

Soft laughter spread through the lecture hall.

“Before we get to the problems today, I’d like to talk a little about the mathematician Yu Seo-ha. That’s because some of the problems you’ll be solving from now on are things he left behind.”

The professor handed out the materials.

Problem 6 from that year’s IMO.

“This is considered one of the most difficult problems in the history of the Olympiad. That year’s problems were unusually difficult. Only three students even managed to solve all the way through Problem 5.”

The lecture hall fell silent.

“It’s astonishing even when you look at it now. Let’s take a look together.”

Seo-eun looked at the blackboard.

The equations were not unfamiliar to her. It was the style of derivation her brother preferred. He grasped the core of the problem at once, then expressed the solution in the simplest possible language. It looked easy, but it was an approach one could only take if the answer was already known before writing down the equations.

“What makes this approach remarkable is how broadly it can be applied. It explains, all at once, every problem with even a slightly similar structure. In other words, the solution to a single problem became a small theory in its own right.”

Murmurs of admiration spread through the lecture hall.

Seo-eun had grown up hearing stories about her brother more times than she could possibly count. On the news, at school, and even from complete strangers she had never met before.

And yet there were still things like this that she was only now discovering.

“What I want to tell all of you is this. Don’t try to memorize this solution. It wouldn’t work even if you did. Just follow it once. Try tracing what Yu Seo-ha was seeing.”

Her hands paused as she packed.

[Special Assistant Yu Seo-eun]

Treasure No. 4.

She gently stroked the name badge her brother had personally made just for her.

Nearly every student who participated in the IMO hoped to join Team Apex. She now understood just how difficult that was.

People capable of exchanging ideas with her brother as equals.

‘I wish I could become someone he can rely on too.’

So first, the gold medal.

Then she would give it to her brother as though it were no big deal.

Seo-ha, who had been sitting on the porch, opened his eyes.

The fresh scent of trees and flowers. He looked at Seo-eun and spoke in a gentle voice.

“Have a good trip. Give Professor Park my regards.”

“Okay!”

She had never wanted to solve math problems this badly before.

***

Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Professor Clara Wyss in the molecular biology laboratory rubbed her bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes as she looked back and forth between the microscope and the monitor.

Cancer, the disease that had tormented humanity for thousands of years.

She had spent years tracing its operating mechanism, but reality had always led her to a dead end.

The reason was simple.

Cancer cells constantly changed and resisted treatment. Even when a drug entered the system, they recognized it, rerouted their pathways, and survived.

‘There has to be a principle behind it.’

Clara had entered this field when she was twenty-one, the year her mother died of pancreatic cancer. Her mother had died less than six months after being diagnosed. Clara still remembered what the attending physician had told her at the time.

“I’m sorry, but there isn’t much we can do for her.”

She could not understand it.

Humanity had landed on the moon more than half a century ago, yet it could still be this powerless in the face of disease. So she decided she would find the answer herself.

She had been an exceptional student.

She majored in mathematics as an undergraduate while reading doctoral-level papers on biochemistry. By the time she graduated, she had received offers from both MIT and Stanford.

But she chose Johns Hopkins. It was where the greatest volume of cancer research data and clinical samples were gathered.

Twenty years had passed since then.

Clara had spent most of her youth in front of a microscope.

Her friends married and had children, while her own time remained frozen inside the laboratory. She checked cultured cells at three in the morning and read papers until she fell asleep. At some point, she became aware of the changing seasons only through the color of the leaves on campus.

She had published more than sixty papers during that time. Her work had also been cited in international journals an extraordinary number of times. Younger researchers praised her as a pioneer. But Clara knew all too well that she had not yet come anywhere close to the essence of the problem.

“What else am I supposed to do here?”

There was no shortage of data.

Maps of genetic mutations in cancer cells, protein expression patterns, time-series data on immune responses. Advances in microscopy had even made it possible to track the movements of individual cells in real time. And yet-

“I just can’t figure it out.”

There were too many variables. Which mutations caused the cancer, and which were merely the result?

Cancer was smarter than she was.

Even within a single tumor, the cells evolved in different directions. It was as though the tumor itself were a miniature ecosystem. Block one route, and another cell survived. Cut off a pathway, and they created a new one.

Clara stared at the simulation results displayed on the monitor.

Millions of pathways.

Protein reactions branching without end.

“Is interpreting all this truly beyond the reach of human beings?”

She leaned back in her chair.

What if someone could describe this problem mathematically? What if the mutation patterns of cancer cells could be modeled mathematically, and the conditions under which they crossed a critical threshold could be expressed as equations?

If there was even one possibility, it lay in the new model of computation Yu Seo-ha had proposed.

But this would not be easy either.

She knew because she had studied mathematics in the past. Just what kind of mind would it take to integrate the countless variables within a cell into a single rule?

Just thinking about it would not get her anywhere.

Clack, clack.

[To : Director Yu Seo-ha, Team Apex]

Her fingers moved faster as she typed the email. But the answer she had hoped for never came.

***

Dean’s Office, MIT Department of Mathematics.

Trickle.

Dean Whitman took out his tea set with practiced hands and brewed tea.

‘Someone capable of influencing Yu Seo-ha.’

She had come to MIT.

She had sent an official request under the name of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but Team Apex had responded with an automated message. It instructed her to submit collaboration inquiries through her institution and follow the official procedure.

‘Well, of course.’

How many collaboration requests must he receive?

There was no way he could seriously consider every proposal. So she had decided to appeal to personal connections. She knew it was a rather crafty move, but Clara was that desperate.

“What brings a biologist here?”

Tap.

Dean Whitman asked as he handed her a teacup.

His voice was mild, but his gaze was sharp. The atmosphere suggested that if she said anything foolish, he would throw her out immediately.

She realized that if she wanted to reach Seo-ha, she first had to convince this man.

“Dean Whitman, have you ever lost someone precious to you to cancer?”

He nodded.

“Of course. My mentor also died of cancer.”

She took the materials out of her bag.

It was a thick stack of papers filled with simulation results and equations.

“I’m trying to discover how cancer cells operate. And what you see here is the result of twenty years of failure.”

“That must have been difficult.”

Clara paused for a moment.

“I’m not afraid of failure. Not if I gain even one thing from it. The problem is that I haven’t gained anything, and now I don’t even have another method left to try.”

Whitman put on his reading glasses and flipped through the materials.

“This is an enormous amount of data.”

A rueful expression spread across her face.

“At first, I thought the problem was simply that there were too many variables. I thought that if I fed in enough data, eventually everything would fit together. So I spent all these years accumulating data. Like a fool.”

“You concluded that the Turing Model could not provide the answer.”

She nodded.

“The Turing Equation requires the diffusion coefficient and reaction rate to remain fixed constants. Cancer cells change. And they do so actively in response to external stimuli.”

Tap.

Whitman placed the materials down on the desk, then stared directly at Clara.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

Gulp.

Clara swallowed nervously.

But she soon set down her teacup and looked Whitman straight in the eyes.

“Please arrange for me to meet Seo-ha.”

“....”

“We need a new kind of mathematics capable of describing the mutation patterns of cancer cells. I believe Seo-ha’s Computation Theory may hold the answer.”

The dean shook his head.

“Professor Clara.”

Whitman took off his glasses and placed them on the desk.

“Do you know how many collaboration requests Seo-ha receives?”

“....”

“MIT alone receives dozens every week. Pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, physics institutes, computer and semiconductor engineering, even aerospace. Everyone expects Seo-ha to solve the problems in their fields. And most of them probably aren’t wrong. Seo-ha really could solve them.”

“Th..then!”

“But!”

The dean cut her off with a cold expression.

“The problem is that there is only one Seo-ha. And the problems people bring him are famous unsolved problems in their respective fields. I am certain that one day, he will become a mathematician who leaves behind immortal achievements. Without question, he will. As long as he doesn’t get distracted by pointless matters.”

Clara’s face tightened with anger.

“Does the problem I brought seem that trivial to you?”

“It isn’t important enough.”

“Is there any problem more important than human life?”

“That would depend on the person. I’m sure even you could think of at least one value more important than life itself.”

Dean Whitman had received requests like this countless times.

University professors, chairmen of massive corporations, even major political figures had approached him. But he had never introduced a single one of them to Seo-ha.

“Seo-ha’s 13-Step Hypothesis is still nothing more than an idea on paper.”

Since the announcements from Harvard and MIT, more people had begun taking the hypothesis seriously.

But it was still only a storm in a teacup.

The world Turing had built was vast and solid beyond measure.

“I have no intention of denying that. It hasn’t been proven yet, after all. Even for Seo-ha, it will probably take many years.”

“What if I could shorten that time?”

Whitman’s expression turned interested.

“Go on.”

“I’ve spent twenty years collecting data. Don’t you think it would be the ideal subject for testing Seo-ha’s hypothesis?”

A long silence followed.

“...I’ll write you a letter of introduction. But remember this. It guarantees nothing. Convincing him will be entirely up to you.”

She nodded.

“That’s enough.”

On her way out through the university gates.

Clara gently stroked the letter tucked safely against her chest as though she were handling a precious treasure.

*****

If you enjoy this novel, please review and rate it at Novelupdates. Thanks! 😊

To receive the latest update notifications or report mistakes, join our Discord server linked below.