Rohan tried to close the window. He couldn't. The laptop’s fan roared as the PDF began to transform. The chapter on "Logic and Propositions" rewrote itself. Where once there were truth tables, there were now pop-up ads for shady essay mills. The chapter on "Relations" now contained a single, damning relation:

Desperation whispered a familiar phrase. He typed it into the search bar: "Discrete Mathematics By J K Sharma Pdf Free Download"

The only way to reverse the recursion, Priya explained, was to do something impossibly old-fashioned. He had to buy a legitimate copy of the book—physical or legal eBook—and read it, page by page, solving every odd-numbered problem.

The results were a digital swamp. Links with names like "fast-download-free-no-virus-2024" and "sharepdf.world." Rohan knew the risks—malware, guilt, the pale frown of his professor. But the cursor kept blinking. He clicked the third link.

Rohan tried to recall the proof he’d copied. He couldn’t. He tried to remember the definition of a bipartite graph. It was gone. He tried to recall what a tautology was. Only silence. The PDF had performed a logical operation on his brain:

For any student R who downloads an illegal copy of a text, there exists a consequence C, such that C is directly proportional to the number of pages copied."