My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-212

Chapter: 423

“The young woman with the elven blood,” he indicated the girl who was now quietly weaving the levitating stones into a shimmering, intricate cat’s cradle of light, “is Lady Nira of Silverwood. Her control over ambient light magic is… unprecedented. But she cannot cast a simple fire spell to save her life. She is a specialist in a world that values generalists.”

“The gnome, Pip,” he sighed, as the boy’s clockwork device let out another, more alarming, puff of green smoke, “is a mechanical prodigy. He builds things. Wonderful, brilliant, and often terrifyingly explosive, things. He nearly burned down the alchemy wing last semester trying to build a self-peeling potato. The Headmaster felt it was safer for everyone if he were… isolated… here.”

Elmsworth continued down the roster, painting a picture of a class filled with brilliant, square pegs that the Academy, with its round holes, did not know what to do with. They were the outliers, the anomalies, the ones whose talents were too specific, too strange, too… disruptive… to fit the mold. Lloyd’s classroom, he realized, was not just a workshop; it was an island of misfit toys. And he was their king.

Finally, Master Elmsworth’s gaze, and with it, Lloyd’s own reluctantly drawn attention, settled on the quiet, still figure at the back of the room. The girl by the window.

“And her,” Elmsworth’s voice softened, losing its academic dryness, acquiring a new, almost gentle, note of paternal concern. “The girl by the window.”

Lloyd’s heart gave a painful, familiar lurch. He forced himself to look, to see her through Elmsworth’s eyes.

“Be gentle with her, Professor,” Elmsworth whispered, his voice heavy with a significance Lloyd didn't yet understand. “Her name is Airin. And she is… an anomaly of a different kind.”

“She is a commoner,” Elmsworth continued, his voice barely audible now. “A market girl. No noble blood, no wealth, no connections. By all the laws and traditions of this Academy, she should not be here. Her presence is… unprecedented.”

Lloyd’s mind reeled. A commoner? Here? In Bathelham? The institution was so exclusive, so ruinously expensive, that even minor barons struggled to afford the tuition for their children. How?

“She possesses a rare, raw, and utterly immense, talent,” Elmsworth explained, as if sensing Lloyd’s unspoken question. “For life magic. For healing. The Headmaster himself discovered her by chance, when she healed a guardsman’s mortal wound at the market with a simple touch, an act she could not even explain. Her innate power, he said, is greater than any he has seen in a century. But she has no formal training. No understanding of the theory. She is a font of raw, uncontrolled power, a danger to herself and others if not properly guided.”

He sighed, a sound of weary, academic frustration. “But her common birth, her lack of any financial backing… it made her admission impossible. The tuition, the fees for lodging, for materials… it was a wall she could not climb.”

Elmsworth paused, then looked at Lloyd, his expression now holding a hint of warning, of a delicate political situation he was about to step into. “She is here for one reason, and one reason only, Professor. She is the first. The very first recipient of the ‘Princess Isabella Scholarship Fund’.”

The name hit Lloyd with the force of a physical blow. Princess Isabella. The fiery, contemptuous warrior-princess he had seen in the previous life, the woman whose icy-blue eyes had held such disdain as she watched his public emotional breakdown in his previous life. His sister Jothi’s classmate. The woman who, he now realized, had almost certainly witnessed his humiliating, tearful accosting of this very same girl.

“The Princess herself established the fund just last month,” Elmsworth explained, oblivious to the storm now raging in Lloyd’s mind. “A new, radical initiative to find and sponsor common-born students of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent. A way to bring new blood, new strength, into the service of the kingdom, regardless of their station. It is a noble, if controversial, idea. And Airin,” he looked at the quiet, frightened girl at the back of the room with a mixture of pity and admiration, “is her first, hand-picked scholar. Her personal project. The Princess has taken a very, very, direct interest in her welfare and her progress.”

The pieces of the puzzle slammed into place in Lloyd’s mind, forming a new, beautiful, and utterly, comprehensively, terrifying picture.

Airin, the ghost of his dead wife, was a magical prodigy. A commoner, plucked from obscurity by the Princess. The very same Princess who already despised him, who saw him as a disgrace, a weakling, a “scum.”

Chapter: 424

The two critical, most dangerous, plot threads of his new life—the angry, powerful Princess who held a grudge against him (this knowledge came from previous life), and the impossible, heartbreaking ghost of his dead wife—were not just parallel lines. They were now inextricably, dangerously, woven together. And he, Professor Lloyd Ferrum, was standing right at the center of their beautiful, terrible, and almost certainly, explosive, intersection.

He looked at Airin, at the fear in her eyes, a fear he himself had caused. And he looked, in his mind’s eye, at the cold, contemptuous, icy-blue gaze of Princess Isabella.

This, he thought, a wave of profound, almost cosmic, despair washing over him, is not going to end well. This is going to end very, very, badly.

---

Lloyd took a deep, steadying breath, ruthlessly shoving the tangled knot of Airin, Anastasia, and Isabella into a heavily fortified mental box. He locked it, sealed it, and kicked it into the deepest, darkest corner of his mind. He would deal with that particular Pandora’s Box of emotional and political horror later. Right now, he had a class to win over.

He turned from Master Elmsworth, offering the tutor a brief, dismissive nod that he hoped conveyed ‘thank you for the information, now please let me handle my incredibly strange class of misfits’. Elmsworth, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, the sudden, cold focus emanating from Lloyd, wisely took the hint, offering a small, nervous bow before retreating to the relative safety of the doorway.

Lloyd walked to the front of the classroom, his footsteps echoing slightly in the sudden, expectant silence. The students, their earlier debate forgotten, were all watching him, their expressions a mixture of curiosity and challenge. He picked up a piece of charcoal from the long wooden tray beneath the massive slate board. The charcoal felt cool, solid, real. A grounding presence.

He did not begin with an introduction, a syllabus, or the usual tedious platitudes about the importance of knowledge. He began with a question.

“Which is more powerful,” he asked, his voice calm, clear, carrying easily to every corner of the workshop-like room, “a single, Transcended knight, or an army of one thousand common soldiers armed with simple longbows?”

The question was so unexpected, so outside the bounds of their standard academic discourse, that it was met with a moment of baffled silence.

Then, Borin Ironhand, the blacksmith’s son, snorted a laugh. “Is that a trick question, Professor? A Transcended knight, obviously. One of them could slaughter a thousand longbowmen before they loosed a second volley. They are a force of nature.”

Several other students nodded in agreement. It was the obvious, common-sense answer, grounded in the realities of their world.

“Is it?” Lloyd replied, a faint, almost challenging smile on his lips. He turned to the slate board and, with a few, swift, clean lines, he began to draw. He did not draw a knight. He did not draw a bow. He drew… a diagram. A flowchart.

On one side of the board, he wrote ‘TRANSCENDED KNIGHT’. Beneath it, he began to list the components, the resources, required to create and maintain such a being.

“Our knight,” Lloyd began, his voice taking on the patient, didactic tone of a lecturer, “requires a sword. Not just any sword. A master-forged blade of high-grade steel, likely imbued with a Spirit Stone. What is the cost of such a weapon?” He looked at Borin.

Borin frowned, thinking. “A true masterwork? With a decent, low-level Spirit Stone? Five hundred Gold Coins. At least. Probably more.”

Lloyd wrote ‘500+ GC - Weapon’ on the board. “He requires armor. Full plate, articulated, also likely master-forged. The cost, Borin?”

“Even more,” Borin admitted. “The sheer amount of steel, the craftsmanship… seven, maybe eight hundred Gold.”

Lloyd wrote ‘800+ GC - Armor’.

“He requires training,” Lloyd continued, his charcoal stick scratching against the slate. “From childhood. Decades of it. At an institution like this one. What is the total cost of tuition, lodging, materials, and private tutelage for a single student to complete the full course of study at Bathelham?” He looked at Master Elmsworth, who was still lingering by the door, now looking intrigued.

Elmsworth cleared his throat. “A difficult sum to calculate precisely, Professor, but a conservative estimate, for a full twelve-year course of study for a noble of high rank, would likely exceed ten thousand Gold Coins.”

Lloyd wrote ‘10,000+ GC - Training’.