"Just one peek," he whispered to himself, reaching for his phone. He typed the familiar words into the search bar: GDZ (Ready Homework) Lvova 6th Grade.

But as he reached the final paragraph, he stopped. The GDZ explained why a certain prefix changed based on the following consonant. It mentioned a rule he remembered Mrs. Petrova mentioning last Tuesday, something about "living language" and the "music of words."

Within seconds, the solution appeared. It was all there—the neatly drawn diagrams, the perfectly placed commas, and the explanations for every tricky vowel. Dima began to copy. His pen flew across the paper, mimicking the "perfect" student.

He looked at the copied text and then at the textbook. He realized that the GDZ wasn't just a way to escape work; it was like a map. If he just followed the path blindly, he’d never learn the terrain.

Dima sat at his desk, staring at the thick blue spine of his 6th-grade Russian textbook by S.I. Lvova and V.V. Lvov. Outside, the golden light of autumn was fading, and the sound of his friends playing football echoed through the courtyard.

Dima didn't sweat. He didn't look for a screen. He picked up the chalk and wrote, knowing exactly where the letters belonged, because he hadn't just finished his homework—he had actually understood it.

He looked at his notebook. Exercise 242 was a beast—a complex analysis of morphemes and sentence structures that seemed written in a secret code. Every time he tried to identify a suffix, his mind drifted to the goal he had missed during gym class.