June 3, 2025 – 7:26 a.m.

The alarm clock has been ringing wildly for more than 30 seconds, but the boy in bed still seems to have no intention of getting up, at least until his mother's screams join the incessant noise of the device. "Jin! Jin! Hurry up or you'll be late again today!"

Only then does 17-year-old Jin Kuraishi get up and turn off the alarm. Before actually getting out of bed, he takes a sip of water from the glass he usually keeps on the bedside table next to his bed.

Once up, he goes to the small bathroom, tidies his thick black hair, and after rubbing his brown eyes, returns to his room to put on pants and a shirt. When he finally reaches the kitchen, he finds his mother serving him a breakfast of cookies and hot tea. "Here you go, sweetheart."

"Thanks, Mom."

His father is also in the kitchen. Unlike Jin, he has been up for some time and is now watching television intently, where a local news program is broadcasting the day's news. On the screen is a middle-aged woman dressed very elegantly, who introduces the various reports in an authoritative voice. The volume is kept very high and fills the entire room, even capturing the attention of the sleepy Jin for a few seconds.

"Yet another robbery gone wrong during the night. Two unidentified men broke into a house in the city and, when surprised by the owners, did not hesitate to kill them with a knife. There are two victims, Mr. and Mrs. Miura, while their 15-year-old daughter was fortunately not involved."

Jin's mother, concerned by the news, expresses her thoughts. "This city has become a slaughterhouse. You can't even go for a walk anymore and be sure you'll come home alive."

"She's exaggerating as usual... Osaka is certainly not a small country town. As frightening as they are, cases like this have always happened" replies her father.

Jin takes advantage of his parents' argument to quietly leave the table and sneak towards the door, but his mother stops him before he can leave the house. "Jin! Come straight home after school... I don't trust you wandering around with your friends in such a dangerous city."

Jin snorts to show his displeasure, but lets his mother know that he will do as she says. "Okay, Mom..."

Once outside, Jin gets on his bike and starts pedaling towards school. He is a high school student in his penultimate year in Osaka. He is very successful academically, particularly in subjects such as physics and mathematics, which come so easily to him that he doesn't even have to study hard to achieve excellent results.

With this innate gift, which allows him to prepare for exams and tests in a short amount of time, Jin often prefers to spend his free time after school with his closest friends. The first is Misaki, a beautiful girl with long brown hair and big brown eyes, whom Jin has been in love with since childhood, having known her since elementary school. The second is Kenji, a very lively boy with short blond hair and blue eyes, whom Jin only met in high school, but with whom he immediately developed a great affinity.

In reality, although to a lesser extent, both Misaki and Kenji are very skilled in scientific subjects, but in their case, their academic success is due more to daily commitment than to innate talent, as in Jin's case.

On his way to school, Jin passes several homeless people begging on the streets. While stopped at a traffic light, one of them approaches him to ask for some money. "Hey, kid! Can you spare some money for this hungry old man? You see... I don't have a home or anywhere to go."

Jin rummages in his trouser pocket and finds a couple of coins to give to the elderly homeless man. "Here... take this."

Immediately afterwards, the traffic light turns green and Jin is able to set off again, while the man thanks him for his generosity. "Thank you so much, young man! God bless you!"

Within a few minutes, Jin arrives at school and parks his bike in the designated area. Kenji and Misaki are waiting for him there, and he immediately greets them. "Hi, guys!"

"Hey Jin... you're finally here" Kenji replies.

"Come on, let's go in or we'll be late again today!" concludes Misaki, worried that waiting for Jin to enter the classroom will result in yet another reprimand for arriving late to school.

Fortunately, the three students manage to arrive in the classroom a few moments before the professor enters. After the usual greetings, the physics teacher begins to write some formulas on the blackboard and explains their meaning. "Today we will discuss thermodynamic transformations and ideal gases. Let's start with an exercise. In a thermodynamic transformation at constant pressure, 3 moles of monoatomic ideal gas increase their volume from 34 liters to 78 liters, the pressure is 2 atmospheres, so what are the initial and final temperatures of the gas?" The whole class eagerly takes notes, while the professor begins to solve the problem so that everyone can understand how it works. 

"In this case, we can apply the ideal gas law, i.e.,𝑝𝑉 =𝑛𝑅𝑇 , and thus derive the temperature from the quantities already known to us."

All the students' heads rise to look at what the professor is writing on the blackboard and immediately lower again to copy the information into their notebooks. The whole thing takes the form of a strange choreography, of which the professor is the sole director, but while Misaki and Kenji, like all their classmates, take part in this collective action, the same cannot be said for Jin, who, sitting in the back row near the window, looks out towards the courtyard, completely detached from the lesson being taught at that moment.

Obviously, in that perfect synchrony of movements, a discordant note like the one Jin struck could not go unnoticed, so the professor suddenly stopped tapping his chalk on the blackboard and interrupted his explanation. 

"Hey Jin! You should pay more attention. Even if you are an excellent student, you risk jeopardizing your grades if you get distracted. These are very complex topics."

Jin, called out by the professor's words, looks up from the schoolyard and towards the teacher, but instead of being embarrassed by the reprimand, he flashes a defiant smile. "I don't think I could learn much in these conditions..."

"What do you mean?" asks the man, curious to understand the reason behind that statement. "The solution is wrong."

Jin stands up and walks over to the blackboard. Once there, he picks up a piece of chalk and begins to modify the solution to the problem, changing the value of the gas constant, which the professor had simplified to "8.314," but which Jin writes out in full, adding all the decimals and making it "8.31446261815324." Once he has finished writing the formula in its most correct version, he drops the chalk on the floor and addresses the teacher in a defiant tone. 

"That's correct."

"There's no need to write all those decimals, Jin... the simplified version is more than enough for an exercise like this. Besides, who's to say you didn't just write random numbers?"

"I would expect a physics teacher to know the gas constant, but if you don't remember it, you can always check it on the internet..."

The professor turns pale and appears helpless, since he does not actually know the entire value of that constant by heart, so, fed up with his student's arrogance, he explodes in an angry shout at Jin. "Go to the principal! Now!"

About an hour later, Jin returns to class, but the lesson has changed, as has the teacher. It is now literature class, and the teacher, seeing him arrive after the lesson has started, understands what happened earlier. "Jin... you ended up in the principal's office again?"

"Yeah."

"Come on, go back to your seat, we've already started the lesson." 

"Yes, sir."

Jin sits back down at his desk. Misaki, who is sitting next to him, asks him how the lecture went. 

"Hey Jin, what happened?"

"Nothing much... the principal obviously agreed with me. It's not my fault that teacher doesn't know as much about physics as I do, he should be fired for his incompetence."

"But it took you a long time to come back."

"The principal tried once again to convince me to skip my last years of high school and go straight to university."

"Of course you should... it's almost frustrating to see how bored you are in class because of the banality of the topics covered. University lectures would be much more stimulating for a genius like you," says Kenji, turning from the desk in front of him toward Jin's.

"No, I'm fine here. I like the atmosphere in our class and I love being with you guys... I don't want anything to change."

Misaki blushes a little when she hears these words, while Kenji doesn't give up and leans closer to his friend's ear and whispers something so that their friend can't hear. "Could it be that you're afraid of university students? You know, I've heard that they're all nymphomaniacs, and for someone like you who's never had a girlfriend, all those women being so available can be scary."

Hearing those words, Jin not only blushes, but throws himself back in his chair, as if to physically distance himself from the words Kenji has just whispered to him. "You're crazy! Where do you hear such nonsense?! And you don't have much experience yourself!"

"Look, I have a lot of experience!"

"The 2D girls in video games and manga doesn't count!"

"Hey... don't insult anime girls. If we're making that visual novel together, it's because you're obsessed with this stuff too."

"Yes, but unlike you, I can distinguish reality from fantasy!"

"You're insensitive, you should accept the principal's proposal and I could come visit you in that harem of sexy female students every now and then."

"What harem? You live in a distorted reality. You have no idea what a real university is like, those magazines have gone to your head."

The two stare at each other, inches apart, as if neither wants to give in to this unlikely verbal battle, and that's when Misaki steps in. "Um... excuse me... w-what exactly are you guys talking about?"

Jin and Kenji turn to Misaki and answer in unison. "Guys' stuff!"

At this point, the literature professor intervenes, taking advantage of the small group's total distraction to get within a few inches of them without them noticing. "Ohi... this isn't a bar, you can't make such a racket!"

"S-sorry, professor," the three say simultaneously, lowering their heads.

"Pay attention!" concluded the professor before returning to the blackboard and continuing the lesson he was teaching. "Let's pick up where we left off. So... Gustave Le Bon was a French psychologist and sociologist who, in his essay 'The Psychology of Crowds', attempts to explain how human beings change their behavior within a group. In fact, according to the author, if a person joins a larger group, they feel invincible and may commit acts that they would never have committed alone, such as burning down a shop or killing someone. Such actions are difficult for individuals to carry out, but within a crowd, the individual's sense of responsibility is totally absent."

Kenji seems to be captivated by the lesson and raises his hand to ask a question. The professor notices and lets him speak. "Yes, Kenji."

"Professor, how many people are needed to form a crowd?"

"According to Le Bon, a crowd does not need to be large; even half a dozen individuals are enough to constitute one."

At this point, Kenji intervenes again. "But if we imagine a crowd made up of a few individuals, all of whom are highly educated... well... perhaps this irrationality would disappear."

"You're wrong. According to Le Bon, even if the crowd consisted of a few knowledgeable individuals, it would still retain the characteristics of ordinary crowds, where the powers of observation and critical thinking possessed by each of its members disappear."

Kenji is fascinated by the teacher's answer, but he hears Jin snickering behind him. "The teacher just told you that you were wrong."

"Shut up, Jin! We're not all geniuses like you."

"Quiet down back there!" the teacher yells at the two boys.

At this point, Jin starts writing some incomprehensible characters on a piece of paper that don't seem to belong to any language, then throws it to Misaki, who reads it and looks at Jin a little bewildered, but in turn writes something in similar characters and throws it back to him. Jin adds another message and this time throws the note to Kenji, but the teacher notices and intervenes, confiscating it. "What are you doing now? Let's see what's so interesting here." Once he opens the note, the teacher realizes that there is only a series of meaningless characters on it, which makes him hesitate for a moment. "What is this stuff? Anyway, stop distracting yourselves!"

As soon as the teacher walks away, Kenji leans back in his chair and starts whispering to Jin. "I managed to read the message before the teacher took it away from me. You guys want to go to the old factory after school, right?"

"Yes, the abandoned one just outside of town. We can easily get there by bike." 

"But why go to a place like that?"

"We might find something interesting."

"Okay, we don't have anything better to do anyway." Kenji says, just before the teacher calls the students back to order.

"Hey, you at the back! This is your last warning! Stop chatting and pay attention to the lesson!"

"Excuse me, Professor!" The three reply in unison once again.