My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-211

Chapter: 421

It was in the middle of this lively, productive chaos, as he moved from one debating group to another, that his gaze swept towards the back of the classroom. Towards a quiet, sun-drenched corner near the large glass windows that looked out onto the private garden.

And his world stopped. Again.

His heart, which had been beating with the steady, pleasant rhythm of intellectual excitement, gave a single, brutal, agonizing lurch, a painful, sickening stutter that stole the breath from his lungs. The vibrant, chaotic sounds of the classroom—the passionate arguments, the scratching of charcoal on slate, Pip’s clockwork device letting out another apologetic puff of purple smoke—all faded into a distant, roaring silence. The carefully reconstructed walls around his soul, the ones he had so painstakingly rebuilt after the disaster in the market, didn’t just crack; they were atomized.

There, sitting alone at a small, single desk by the window, half-hidden in the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun, trying to make herself as small, as invisible, as possible, was her.

Airin. The vegetable seller. The girl with Anastasia’s face.

She was here. In his classroom.

She was not dressed in the simple, patched cornflower-blue dress he remembered from the market. She wore the standard, dark blue uniform of the Academy, the fabric clean and well-maintained, but clearly not of the same fine, tailored quality as the other nobles’ attire. It looked… borrowed. Or perhaps a scholarship issue. Her light brown hair was pulled back from her face, not in a messy braid, but in a simple, neat bun, as if in a desperate attempt to look tidy, to fit in.

She was not looking at him. Her gaze was fixed, with a kind of fierce, terrified intensity, on the blank parchment before her. Her hands were clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles were white. She radiated an aura of such profound, almost painful, self-consciousness, of a desperate desire to simply not be seen, that it was a tangible presence in the room. A small, terrified mouse, trapped in a cage of young, confident, and very loud, lions.

Lloyd stared, his own mind a perfect, roaring blank. How? Why? How was she here? A common market girl, a seller of radishes, in a Special Category class at the most elite, most exclusive, academic institution in the entire kingdom? It was impossible. It defied all logic, all understanding of how this rigidly stratified society worked. Had the King done this? Was this another test? Another cruel, bizarre twist in the cosmic joke that was his life?

As if sensing his intense, unblinking gaze, Airin slowly, reluctantly, lifted her head. Her eyes, the same warm, gentle brown as Anastasia’s, met his across the crowded, noisy classroom.

And he saw it all again. The flicker of recognition. The widening of her eyes, not with love, but with a renewed, dawning terror. The pale hand flying to her mouth. The instinctive, visceral recoil of a small, frightened animal confronting the predator that had once, so bizarrely, so terrifyingly, accosted it.

Her composure, as fragile as his own had been in that moment, shattered. The color drained from her face. She looked down quickly, her shoulders hunching, her entire being seeming to shrink, trying to will herself out of existence, out of his line of sight.

The sight of her fear, her terror of him, was a fresh, sharp, twisting knife in the old wound of his grief. He had done that to her. He, in his moment of selfish, uncontrolled sorrow, had branded himself in her memory not as a friend, not as a potential customer, but as a source of fear. A madman. A threat.

A wave of profound, almost suffocating, melancholy washed over him, so potent it almost made him stumble. The excited chatter of his other students, the debate over ballista mechanics, the very reality of the classroom around him, all faded into a distant, meaningless hum. All he could see was her face, Anastasia’s face, etched with a fear that was entirely his fault.

He had to maintain control. He was the professor. He was Lord Ferrum. He could not, would not, break down again. Not here. Not in front of her. Not in front of them.

He forced his lungs to draw a breath, the air feeling thick, heavy, like trying to breathe water. He forced his gaze away from her, turning back to the group of students who were now looking at him with a new, questioning curiosity, sensing the sudden, strange shift in his demeanor.

Chapter: 422

He opened his mouth to speak, to continue the lesson, to say something, anything, to restore the fragile illusion of normalcy. But no words came. His mind was a chaotic, screaming storm of grief, of guilt, of a hundred thousand unanswered questions.

He had found his ghost. Again. And she was sitting in the back row of his classroom.

The brilliant, innovative first day of Professor Lloyd Ferrum’s tenure at the Bathelham Royal Academy, the day that was supposed to mark the beginning of a new, intellectual revolution, had just become a personal, private, and utterly, comprehensively, agonizing, hell. And the lesson, it seemed, was only just beginning.

The classroom buzzed with a chaotic, electric energy. The initial, skeptical silence had been shattered by Lloyd’s opening gambit about ballista design, and now the students, a motley collection of geniuses and misfits, were engaged in a spirited, almost feral, debate. The hulking blacksmith’s son, Borin, was loudly arguing the merits of forged steel versus cast iron for the torsion arms, while the gnome, Pip, was frantically sketching a diagram of a multi-stage gear system that looked both brilliant and suicidally dangerous. The air was thick with the scent of charcoal dust, ozone from Pip’s sputtering contraption, and the heady aroma of intellectual revolution.

Lloyd stood at the front of it all, a quiet, almost invisible conductor, letting the orchestra of chaos play its symphony. He felt a flicker of genuine, almost forgotten, joy. This was the thrill of the think tank, the pure, unadulterated pleasure of watching brilliant minds collide, of seeing new ideas spark and flare in the crucible of debate. This, he thought, a faint, genuine smile touching his lips, I can do. This feels like home.

But his gaze kept drifting, drawn by an irresistible, painful gravity, to the back of the room. To the quiet, sun-drenched corner by the window. To her.

Airin. The ghost with Anastasia’s face.

She sat utterly still amidst the surrounding chaos, a small, terrified island of silence in a sea of boisterous intellectualism. She had not spoken a single word. She had not moved. Her gaze was fixed on the blank parchment before her, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap they had to be numb. She was trying, with every fiber of her being, to be invisible. But to Lloyd, she was a supernova, a blazing, heart-stopping focal point that made the rest of the room fade into a muted, irrelevant blur.

He had to get a grip. He was a professor now. He had a class to teach. A role to play. He couldn't let his personal, interdimensional, soul-crushing grief derail his very first day on the job. He forced his attention away from her, back to the passionate, ongoing debate about siege engine mechanics.

“An interesting point, Borin,” he interjected, his voice calm, steady, betraying none of the turmoil raging within him. “But have you considered the shear stress on the pivot point? Your forged steel arm might be stronger, but if the axle housing can’t handle the increased torque…”

As he began to steer the conversation, to gently guide their chaotic energy towards a more structured analysis, he felt a presence at his elbow. It was Master Elmsworth, who had been lingering near the doorway, observing the strange, unorthodox first lesson with an expression of profound, almost fearful, fascination.

“Professor Ferrum,” Elmsworth murmured, his voice a low, conspiratorial whisper, his gaze flicking around the room at the eclectic collection of students. “A most… energetic… start to the semester.”

“They are a lively group,” Lloyd conceded, his eyes still carefully averted from the corner by the window.

“Indeed,” Elmsworth agreed. He leaned closer, his expression becoming more serious, the excitement replaced by a tutor’s ingrained sense of responsibility. “If I may, Professor, a brief word of introduction? So you might better understand the… unique composition of your new class.”

Lloyd nodded, grateful for the distraction, for the anchor of practical information in his sea of emotional chaos. “Please, Master Elmsworth. I would appreciate the insight.”

Elmsworth began to subtly indicate various students, his voice a low, running commentary. “The large lad arguing so passionately about metallurgy,” he whispered, gesturing with his chin towards Borin, “is Borin Ironhand. Son of the Master Blacksmith of the Royal Armory. A genius with metal, they say, but utterly hopeless at theoretical magic. The Academy’s standard curriculum has no place for a boy who thinks in terms of tensile strength and heat-tempering, rather than mana flows and incantations.”