Monday mornings at Wolven High were usually a blur of sleepy students dragging their feet through the hallways, dreading the start of another week. The sun filtered through the high windows, casting long, dusty beams of light onto the linoleum floors.
**Xavier**, the Student Council President and the school's undisputed top scholar, walked through the corridor with his usual brisk pace. His uniform was immaculate, his tie perfectly knotted, and his face set in a mask of cool detachment.
But beneath the surface, his mind was in turmoil.
He hadn't slept well. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the back of a black sedan disappearing into the twilight. He saw the license plate: **Capital V-00001**.
The red lettering burned in his memory. Having lived in the Capital with his grandfather for several years, Xavier knew the unspoken language of power. That plate didn't just mean money. It meant authority. It meant the kind of power that could rewrite laws and erase people from existence.
And **Ren**, the girl everyone dismissed as a delinquent from the countryside, had climbed into that car as if it were a taxi.
"Xavier!"
A sweet, eager voice broke through his thoughts. Xavier blinked, bringing himself back to the present.
**Faye** was standing by his desk, clutching a stack of music books to her chest. She was smiling, that practiced, perfect smile she reserved for teachers and useful people.
"I was looking for you," Faye said, placing a notebook on his desk. "Here are the math notes you asked to borrow. Oh, and I wanted to tell you... I passed my Grade 9 violin exam this weekend. The judges said my technique was flawless."
She tilted her head, waiting. She needed this. After the humiliation of the Speech Contest, where Ren had crushed her with a single, lazy performance, Faye was desperate for validation. She needed Xavier, the school's prince, to acknowledge her worth.
Xavier looked at her. Usually, he would have offered a polite compliment. He would have praised her diligence. But today, looking at Faye's eager face, he felt nothing but a strange sense of hollowness.
"Congratulations," Xavier said simply. His voice was flat.
He didn't pick up her math notes. Instead, his eyes drifted over her shoulder, looking toward the back of the classroom where the rowdy students of **Class 9** usually gathered.
Faye's smile faltered. "Is something wrong? You seem distracted."
"I have to collect the physics homework," Xavier said, standing up. He grabbed a clipboard and walked past her, leaving her standing there with her music books and her unacknowledged achievement.
Faye turned, watching him go. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped her books. Why? Why was he looking at Class 9? Was he looking for *her*?
***
The atmosphere in Class 9 was, as always, chaotic.
Paper airplanes flew through the air. Someone was playing loud music from a phone speaker. **Joey**, the class clown, was sitting on top of his desk, spinning a basketball on his finger while recounting his weekend gaming exploits.
In the midst of the noise, **Lily** sat at her desk, her head in her hands. She looked like she was in physical pain.
"Why is physics so hard?" Lily groaned, chewing on the end of her pen. "This derivation makes no sense. The teacher skipped like five steps!"
Xavier walked into the room. The noise level dropped slightly—even the troublemakers of Class 9 respected the Student Council President, mostly because he had the power to give them detention.
"Homework," Xavier said, tapping his clipboard. "Pass it forward."
He walked down the aisle, collecting the messy stacks of paper. When he reached Lily's desk, he paused.
Lily was staring at a black notebook. It wasn't a standard school-issue exercise book. It was a high-quality, leather-bound journal.
"I can't do it," Lily whimpered, looking up at Xavier. "I'm going to fail the midterm. This question about angular momentum is impossible."
Xavier looked down. "Let me see."
Lily pushed the black notebook toward him. "Ren gave me this. She said it would help, but... it's like reading a foreign language."
Xavier picked up the notebook. The leather felt cool and expensive under his fingers. He opened it to the page Lily was looking at.
His breath hitched.
The handwriting on the page was nothing like a high school student's. It was bold, sharp, and aggressive. The strokes were like iron hooks, tearing into the paper with a kind of arrogant confidence. It was the handwriting of someone who didn't just write; they commanded.
But it was the content that made Xavier's blood run cold.
It was a diagram of a variable mass system—a rocket ejecting fuel while in a gravitational field. This was the final question of the last mock exam. The question that no one in the entire school, not even Xavier, had solved completely.
On this page, however, the solution was laid out in five lines.
Just five lines.
The writer hadn't used the standard, cumbersome high school methods. They had used a Lagrangian mechanic approach, a method taught in university theoretical physics courses. The logic was so clean, so elegant, that it made the problem look like simple arithmetic.
There were no wasted words. No scribbled corrections. Just pure, unadulterated genius flowing from the pen.
"Who wrote this?" Xavier asked. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—hoarse and urgent.
Lily blinked, surprised by his intensity. "Ren. Well, Ren gave it to me."
"I know she gave it to you," Xavier said, flipping through the pages.
He saw derivations for quantum mechanics, notes on thermal dynamics, scribbles about astrophysical anomalies. Every page was a treasure trove of knowledge that far exceeded the high school curriculum.
"I mean, who *wrote* it?" Xavier demanded, looking up. "Is it a professor? A researcher from the National Institute?"
"Give it back."
A cool, raspy voice came from the doorway.
Xavier turned. **Ren** was walking into the classroom. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed. Her uniform shirt was untucked, her hair was a messy bun, and she was holding a plastic bag of soy milk with a straw in her mouth.
She walked over to Xavier, reached out, and plucked the notebook from his hands.
"Ren," Xavier said, blocking her path. He was staring at her with a mix of suspicion and awe. "Where did you get that notebook?"
Ren sat down in her chair, kicked her legs up onto the desk, and took a sip of soy milk. "A neighbor."
"A neighbor?" Xavier repeated, incredulous. "You expect me to believe a random neighbor wrote university-level physics derivations for you?"
"He's a doctor," Ren said, shrugging. "He was bored. He scribbled some stuff to stop me from failing."
Xavier stared at her.
A doctor? Bored? Scribbled?
She was talking about this masterpiece of logic as if it were a grocery list.
***
The commotion had attracted attention. Students from the hallway were peering in.
**Faye** had followed Xavier. She stood in the doorway, watching the scene with growing unease. She saw Xavier standing over Ren, his face flushed with emotion. She saw the intensity in his eyes—an intensity he never showed her.
Jealousy flared in her chest, hot and ugly.
She walked into the room, her heels clicking loudly on the floor. She put on her best smile, a mask of concern and superiority.
"Xavier?" Faye asked softly, stepping between him and Ren. "What's wrong? Is my sister causing trouble again?"
She glanced at the black notebook on Ren's desk. It looked worn, the pages filled with messy, sprawling ink.
Faye let out a small, dismissive laugh.
"Oh, is that what this is about?" Faye said, shaking her head. "Ren, I told you before. If you need help with physics, you can just ask me. You don't need to use these... messy scribbles. Xavier, don't waste your time trying to decipher that. It's probably just nonsense."
She turned to Xavier, her eyes shining. "If you need good notes, you can use mine. My handwriting is very neat. I use color-coded pens for formulas and definitions. Everyone says my notes are the best in the grade."
Faye waited. She expected Xavier to agree. She expected him to praise her organization, her diligence, her neatness. Neatness was a virtue, wasn't it?
Xavier looked at Faye.
For the first time, he really looked at her.
He saw the perfect uniform. The neat hair. The desperate need for approval.
And then he looked at the black notebook. The messy, chaotic, brilliant scrawl that contained the secrets of the universe.
He realized something profound in that moment.
Faye was the perfect high school student. She followed the rules. She colored inside the lines. She was safe. She was mediocre.
But the owner of that notebook—and Ren, who treated it so casually—they were operating in a different dimension.
"Neatness?" Xavier echoed, his voice low.
He looked at Faye with a sudden, chilling indifference.
"Faye," Xavier said. "Your notes are neat. But they are... shallow."
Faye froze. The smile dropped from her face as if she had been slapped.
"Shallow?" she whispered.
"You copy what the teacher says," Xavier said, turning away from her. "You memorize. You regurgitate. But this..." He pointed at the black notebook. "This is understanding. This is genius. You can't compare the two."
The classroom went silent.
**Joey** let out a loud snort of laughter from the back.
"Damn," Joey shouted. "Did you hear that? 'Your notes are shallow!' The President just roasted the top student!"
Faye's face turned crimson. Tears welled up in her eyes, humiliation burning her throat. She looked around, seeing the mocking grins of the Class 9 students. She looked at Xavier's back.
And finally, she looked at Ren.
Ren hadn't even looked up. She was flipping through a comic book, drinking her soy milk, completely ignoring the drama unfolding around her.
"Let's go, Faye," one of her friends whispered, pulling her arm. "Don't stay here."
Faye fled the room, her heart pounding with shame and hatred.
***
Xavier stood there for a moment longer. He looked at Ren.
"The neighbor," Xavier said quietly. "Is he the one who drives the car with the Capital plate?"
Ren paused. Her hand stopped turning the page of her comic.
She looked up slowly. Her dark eyes met his. There was no fear in them, only a cool warning.
"You ask too many questions, Classmate Xavier," Ren said. "Curiosity killed the cat."
Xavier felt a shiver run down his spine.
"And satisfaction brought it back," Xavier countered, though his voice lacked conviction.
Ren smirked. "Not this time."
She put her headphones on, effectively ending the conversation.
Xavier turned and walked out of the classroom. His hands were shaking slightly.
He walked down the hallway, the noise of the school fading into the background. His mind was racing.
Ren wasn't just a girl from the countryside. She was a puzzle wrapped in a mystery, protected by a dragon. And Xavier, the boy who had always been the smartest in the room, suddenly felt very, very stupid.
He realized that the gap between him and Ren wasn't academic. It was existential. He was climbing a ladder, trying to reach the top. But Ren?
Ren was already flying.
**[Chapter 36 End]**