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Chapter 334 - Chapter 334 - Eyes Of An Observer

It was the third lecture this week on Golemcraft Theory, and no one in the room seemed particularly awake, not the students slumped over their slates, not the flickering lights that dimmed with every breeze, and certainly not the man at the front of the hall.

Professor Vellichor was speaking, but only barely. His voice had a rhythm, slow and even, like reading from memory rather than thought. He gestured to the chalk diagram behind him, a loose schematic of a rudimentary guardian construct, but he didn't look at it.

I sat three rows back, right side of the hall. Close enough to see the slight crease between his brows. His eyes weren't on us. Not really. They flicked past the benches, past the diagrams, past even the golem core he'd placed on the pedestal. Like whatever he was seeing wasn't here.

"Note the runic overlap in the binding glyph," he said, tapping the board. "It's an efficiency method. Old school. Crude, but effective."

Silence followed. A few scribbles, a cough, someone shifting in their seat.

He didn't fill the silence.

Not like usual.

Usually he asked questions. Posed challenges. Made someone, often enough myself, stand and argue the merits of line-symmetry versus logical pairing in motion enchantments. 

Today, nothing.

The same as yesterday, and the day before.

I wrote down the glyph, but my eyes drifted back to him. There was something strange in watching a person stand in the middle of the thing they loved so much the past few months and now look like they'd rather be anywhere else.

It made me wonder: what could pull someone like that away from their own words?

We all knew Vellichor was different, of course. Always present. Sharp. Restless. His mind felt too fast for this place, like he was constantly building things far beyond the things any of us students could imagine. 

But that energy was gone.

He looked tired in a way books couldn't explain.

He paused mid-sentence at one point, staring at the stone core like he'd forgotten what it was. Just for a second. Then he blinked, cleared his throat, and moved on.

"The sequence here," he said, his voice dry, "is unstable under stress. A flaw. It collapses under prolonged duress."

"Was he talking about the golem? Or himself?" I asked myself.

I shifted in my seat. Around me, others doodled or half-listened. No one else seemed to notice. Or care. Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe that was just how scholars got when the semester year ended.

But even him?

And why did it feel like whatever it was... it wasn't finished with him yet?

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