The old man didn’t look up. "You mean the GDZ? The solutions? You know the teachers at Gymnasium No. 1 say those books are cursed. They say if you use them, you forget how to think."

He didn't finish every problem that day, but the ones he did were his own. As he walked out into the Minsk afternoon, the heavy bag of solution manuals felt lighter—not because they were gone, but because he knew he didn't need to carry them anymore.

"I don't need to think," Maxim countered, his voice cracking. "I need to pass Physics and Calculus by Monday, or my mother will send me to work at the tractor factory before I can even say 'diploma.'"

The air smelled of old paper and the damp Belarusian spring. Behind a counter stacked high with yellowing almanacs sat an old man with spectacles thick enough to be magnifying glasses.

Maxim grabbed the books, paid his rubles, and sprinted back to his apartment near Victory Square. He spent the night in a fever dream of copying formulas. He watched the answers to complex trigonometric equations flow from the page to his notebook like liquid gold.

Maxim walked into the dim light of the "Second Chance" bookstore, tucked away in a quiet alley off Praspyekt Nyezalyezhnastsi. He wasn’t looking for a rare first edition or a glossy art book. He was a desperate eleventh-grader in Minsk, and he was looking for a ghost.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. He looked at the "Narodnaia Asveta" logo on the official exam booklet. Then, he took a deep breath. He stopped trying to remember the "Vse GDZ" page and started trying to remember his teacher’s voice.

The bookseller sighed and reached under the counter. He pulled out a stack of books bound in the familiar, austere style of the Narodnaia Asveta publishing house. The covers were clean, but the edges were softened by the frantic thumbs of a thousand students before him.