"Jae-Hyun, stand up," said Mr. Lee Joon-Hyuk, the science teacher, tapping his marker against the board. The tone was sharp enough to slice through the murmurs in the room.
Jae-Hyun looked up slowly, eyes heavy with boredom rather than guilt. He rose, straight-backed but unhurried, his dark hair falling slightly over his forehead.
He hadn't been paying attention and was laying his head on his desk as he let his thoughts drift to anything but the equation on the board.
"What was the last statement I made?" Mr. Lee asked, narrowing his gaze. His tone wasn't angry—just testing. Like a man prodding at a puzzle he couldn't solve.
Jae-Hyun didn't respond. His dark eyes drifted lazily toward the board, where the unfinished equation glared back at him. A blur of white chalk, tangled symbols, and half-erased numbers.
A snicker came from the back of the class.
"Guess he ran out of batteries," someone whispered.
Around him, quiet laughter stirred—soft, nervous giggles from students who'd long given up trying to understand the strange, withdrawn boy in the back row.
Mr. Lee's jaw tightened. "Jung Jae-Hyun, I asked you a question."
This time, Jae-Hyun met his teacher's eyes—calm, expressionless, almost detached. "You said electrons move from a region of higher potential to lower potential," he replied evenly, voice quiet but steady.
A small pause.
Mr. Lee blinked. He had said that… ten minutes ago.
Mr. Lee sighed. "You can't sleep through classes, Jae-Hyun. If you don't pay attention, how do you expect to solve this?" he asked, regaining his composure.
Jae-Hyun didn't answer. He stepped forward, picked up the marker, and began to write.
His hand moved in clean, fluid motions. No hesitation. No pauses. The squeak of the marker filled the room in rhythmic strokes—symbols appearing like pieces of a language only he understood.
The students fell silent.Even Mr. Lee's scolding expression faltered as he leaned slightly forward.
In less than a minute, the board was full—every variable balanced, every unknown resolved.
Jae-Hyun capped the marker, set it neatly down, and returned to his seat without a word.
A heavy silence lingered.
Mr. Lee examined the work, his frown deepening—not in disapproval, but disbelief.Every line was flawless. Even the trick he'd added at the end to trip them up had been unraveled perfectly.
"...You were listening after all," he muttered under his breath.
Jae-Hyun didn't respond. His gaze had already wandered back to the window, where sunlight painted the edges of the glass a muted gold.
The whispers started immediately.
"Did you see how fast he solved that?""Bro didn't even blink—he just wrote like he was printing.""I thought he was asleep.""Now I kinda feel stupid."
Jae-Hyun ignored them all, his gaze fixed on the window
School was a noise he'd learned to live with. The endless repetition of lessons, the dull hum of lectures he'd long outgrown. At sixteen, everything felt slower than his thoughts—like watching a movie in half speed.
The bell rang. Students burst into chatter, scraping chairs and hurried footsteps echoing down the hall.
Jae-Hyun didn't move.
He waited for the noise to thin out before standing, collecting his notebook—a book that was mostly blank. He didn't need to write things down. Everything stayed, perfectly ordered, inside his head.
As he stepped out into the corridor, the world felt too bright, too loud.
He passed groups of students gossiping, laughing, calling each other's names. No one called his.
They didn't know what to make of him. The quiet boy who didn't speak unless asked, who never joined conversations, who never failed a test but never bragged either. The one who'd transferred in mid-semester and had already solved problems the teachers couldn't explain.
To them, he wasn't impressive. He was unsettling.
At the city library that afternoon, the silence suited him better.
The air smelled faintly of paper and dust—comforting. The walls lined with knowledge older than his teachers. Rows of shelves stretched before him like a forest he'd already mapped.
He ran his fingers along the spines: Advanced Theoretical Physics, Behavioral Psychology, Introduction to Quantum Systems.
He'd read them all. Twice.
But he still came here. Not for the books, but for the habit—for the stillness that came with reading, for the illusion that there was still something left to learn.
He pulled a random book and sank into a corner seat. The text blurred as he flipped through. Equations. Diagrams. He absorbed them like breathing—without effort, without intent.
He remembered when this used to thrill him. The rush of discovery, the spark of solving something no one else could.Now, it was just... quiet.
Jung Jae-Hyun had always been that way.
At two, he'd started kindergarten. By three, he was reading fluently. At five, he'd burned through grade-school textbooks like bedtime stories. By seven, he was solving problems written for teenagers.
By eleven, he had finished high-school material entirely—alone, without instruction.
His teachers had called him a prodigy. His mother called him her miracle.
He remembered her soft voice, the way she smiled even when tired from work. The scent of cooking oil on her hands, the warmth in her eyes when she said, "Don't go too far ahead, Jae-Hyun. The world doesn't always like people who are too different."
He hadn't understood then. He did now.
At home, the apartment was small but clean. His younger sister's laughter echoed faintly from her room, the TV murmuring a movie theme. Their mother, tired from her shift, was stirring soup on the stove.
"Welcome back," she said, smiling despite the exhaustion. "How was school?"
"The same," he said simply, slipping off his shoes.
"Did you talk to anyone this time?" she teased gently, though her tone held that familiar thread of worry.
He didn't answer, just poured himself water and leaned against the counter.
Her smile faded a little. "Jae-Hyun… I know it's boring. But you can't keep pushing people away."
"I don't," he replied quietly. "They just leave."
She sighed, turning back to the stove. "You're too much like your father sometimes."
He glanced at the photo hanging near the fridge—his father, smiling, hand resting on his mother's shoulder. That picture had been taken before the illness, before the bills, before his father's family stripped away the assets they had left.
He'd watched his mother fight through everything. That was why he stayed in school, why he didn't argue, why he played the role of an ordinary student. Because it gave her peace.
His mother worried about him more than she ever said aloud.
Despite his brilliance, Jae-Hyun had never been easy for others to handle. Teachers called him "difficult" because he refused to participate in group activities or answer questions he already knew the answers to. He didn't see the point.
He'd changed schools more times than he could count. Every transfer followed the same pattern—he'd stay silent, keep to himself, and sooner or later, someone would decide that made him weak. They'd push. Sneer. Shove. Until the day he fought back.
And when he did, it was never small.
Broken noses, bruised egos, disciplinary reports. Each time, the story was the same: the quiet kid snapped. No one cared about the days that led up to it—the whispered taunts, the stolen notebooks, the cornering in hallways. The teachers never saw those parts.
By the third school, his mother had stopped asking what happened. She just held his wrist gently when she cleaned the cuts, eyes heavy with sadness rather than anger.
"Jae-Hyun," she'd whisper, "you're too strong for a world that doesn't know what to do with strength."
It wasn't a compliment. It was a warning.
There was the time he'd learned to paint. One summer, out of nothing but curiosity. Within a month, his sketches looked like photographs. Within two, he could paint light and shadow so precisely it made his mother cry. He stopped after that—it didn't feel like an achievement anymore.
Then came languages. French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, English, Russian, Italian. Each one learned faster than the last, until he could switch between them effortlessly in his head.
When that wasn't enough, he taught himself to code and hack. It began with simple scripts, then algorithms, then network manipulation. By fourteen, he'd broken into systems he wasn't supposed to touch—military networks, encrypted communications, major tech infrastructures. Not out of malice. Just curiosity. Just to see if he could.
He'd left no traces. Not even the best firewalls could tell he'd been there.
Sometimes, he wondered if that was what he really loved—not learning, but breaking limits.
Back in his room, his desk was a mosaic of books, sketches, and notebooks written in different scripts. A half-finished physics formula sprawled across a page beside an anatomy sketch and a code window open on his laptop.
He sat down, eyes flicking across the glowing screen. Lines of code streamed smoothly beneath his fingers, mechanical and perfect. It wasn't work—it was rhythm.
When the code compiled successfully, he leaned back, closing his eyes.
Silence.
That same familiar hollowness returned—the feeling that no matter how far he went, everything around him was still slow, still predictable, still beneath what his mind wanted to chase.
The next morning, he was back in class.
Mr. Lee's voice filled the room, animated as ever. "This problem requires understanding, not memorization. I need volunteers to come solve this."
No one moved.
Then, after a pause, he said again, louder: "Jae-Hyun."
A ripple of whispers spread across the room.
Jae-Hyun stood up without protest. Walked forward. Picked up the marker.
The problem was harder this time—an intentional test.
He read it once. The solution unfolded in his head before his hand moved.
When he was done, he stepped aside quietly.
Mr. Lee stared at the board for a long moment, then back at him.
"…Do you ever struggle?" he asked softly, half-amused, half-bewildered.
Jae-Hyun met his gaze, his expression calm. "Only when I pretend to."
A ripple of laughter broke out across the class—but Mr. Lee didn't join them. He watched the boy return to his seat, a faint chill settling under his skin.
There was something about Jung Jae-Hyun—something that made even brilliance feel dangerous.
The genius everyone envied sat in silence, staring at a world that no longer surprised him.
And somewhere deep down, beneath the calm surface, a quiet thought began to stir—
a longing for something he couldn't yet name.
Maybe what he really wanted was someone who understood him without needing him to explain — someone who just… got him.