Chapter 191
He did not take notes greedily, but with the precision of a surgeon, extracting only the essence, only the ideas that would become the backbone of his presentation.
In this silence, the teamwork the teacher had intended was something he was discovering in its purest form.
An intense and flawless collaboration between himself and the greatest minds ever recorded by humankind.
The permission to present alone was not an act of mercy, but a quiet acknowledgment—a channel granted by the teacher to allow his river of solitude to be transformed into strength.
Ilux understood it not as a dispensation, but as a higher challenge.
His grade would not be reduced, but the conditions were clear: the presentation had to be complete, coherent, and delivered from this very seat, without complication.
That meant his understanding had to be perfect, his mastery of the material absolute, and his confidence had to be born from the depth of knowledge, not from applause or assistance from peers.
This challenge, instead of burdening him, set him free.
He did not need to unify different speaking styles, did not need to compromise on perspectives, did not need to fill awkward pauses.
His stage began at this wooden table.
His audience was the empty space before him, and perhaps the teacher observing from afar.
Every difficulty had to be anticipated and crushed here, now, within this merciless process of construction.
Every sentence he wrote in his notebook was a brick, laid carefully to build an irrefutable monologue.
Time inside the library seemed to undergo distortion.
The wall clock ticking on the wall appeared to slow its pulse, while the world inside his head spun at the speed of light.
Pages were turned, notes accumulated, and a structure began to emerge from the initial chaos.
From time to time, he stopped and gazed out the window at the morning sky growing ever brighter.
That gaze was not an escape, but a necessary vacuum in which ideas could settle.
In those pauses, he could feel the weight of the trust that had been placed in him—the teacher, with all her burdens and demands, had seen something in him.
Perhaps it was not pity for the absence of friends, but an acknowledgment that there exists a kind of work that can only be done in absolute solitude.
Ilux drew in a deep breath, and the scent of old paper and wooden dust felt like pure oxygen to his mind.
He leaned forward again, his pen resumed its dance.
He was not merely preparing a presentation.
He was assembling an argument, a defense, proof that solitude was not a dysfunction, but a legitimate—indeed powerful—modus operandi.
And when the shadows on the floor began to stretch, his stack of notebooks was already densely filled with neat, upright handwriting.
A roadmap had been completed.
From that silent seat, he was ready to speak to the world.
'Focus, Ilux. Don't ramble. These words are interconnected, not standing alone.
She always says that understanding without direction will only give birth to noise.'
"Ilux."
'Why am I thinking about that again?
Is it because I've been here too long? Or is there another factor?'
Fiiiih!
'Silence does like to replay things that were never asked for.'
"Ilux…."
'No. Impossible.
That tone… too calm. Too flat.
Too—'
"Ilux—"
'That voice must be hers. There's no mistaking it.'
Fhhhh!
'Not a twisted playback of memory, not an imagination running out of strength.
I know the difference between a voice that arises in my head and a voice that truly calls out to me.'
The depth of his concentration, like an oceanic trench, was suddenly disturbed by a foreign frequency—or rather, one far too familiar.
A voice.
Not the hiss of paper, not the ticking of the clock, not the electrical hum of the library lights.
It was a voice calling his name, or at least, that was what his most unrestrained sense of hearing perceived.
Its tone, if it was indeed real, sliced through the silent space like a cold, refined blade, carrying a resonance that had once filled every classroom, every corridor, every brief piece of advice during breaks.
Ilux frowned behind the lenses of his glasses, the fingers holding his pen freezing mid-air above the dot in the middle of a word.
His entire body, which a second earlier had been submerged in the world of text, now tensed, becoming an antenna trying to recapture a sound wave that might never have existed.
His heart, which usually beat with the calm rhythm of a librarian, began to pound harder inside its cage without permission.
He reflexively shook his head faintly, an attempt to dispel the illusion.
Surely this was nothing more than an echo of memory grown too deep, a voice replayed by unconscious longing, or a side effect of eye fatigue after hours of staring at tiny letters.
Yet another conviction, deeper and more stubborn, whispered something different.
His mind might try to rationalize it, but the vibration in the air felt far too real, far too alive to be mere imagination.
That voice—clear, direct, without excessive emotional inflection, yet carrying undeniable authority—was a hallmark impossible to misidentify.
It was a voice that could command without ever raising itself, that could explain the most complex concepts in the simplest sentences, and that always left behind a pocket of silence meant for understanding to settle.
The voice of a young woman of sixteen, to whom age was merely a number, because her maturity surpassed everyone else in the academy.
A voice belonging to a figure whose beauty was not merely facial aesthetics, but a cold light radiating from discipline and intelligence.
A voice attached to a teacher who, through her firmness and flat reactions, became both magnet and legend.
A primadonna not because of hollow popularity, but because of an aura of absolute competence that silenced everyone—those who admired her and those who envied her alike—when she spoke.
The name burned in his mind before it could be spoken, a mantra filling his entire consciousness.
Aldraya Kansh Que.
The vibration of those three syllables alone was enough to awaken every memory he had deliberately buried beneath stacks of books and routines.
Was it possible?
Could a shadow manifest as a voice?
Had she returned?
Those questions thundered in his head, creating chaos amid the orderly structure of his notes.
He slowly lifted his gaze from the notebook, eyes magnified by his glasses sweeping the library with careful movements, full of both hope and wariness.
He searched for a slender silhouette with perfect upright posture, a hairstyle always impeccably neat, or even just a flash of that sharp, tranquil gaze.
But all he found were silent bookshelves, groups of students absorbed in their tasks, and the morning light growing increasingly golden.
There were no signs.
The voice had vanished, leaving behind a space that suddenly felt quieter, emptier, than before.
Could it have been merely an echo from the corridor, or the voice of someone who happened to share a similar timbre?
Or was it the final call of his memory—a reminder that no matter how deeply he tried to bury the past beneath book pages, Aldraya's shadow would never truly leave?
Ilux remained seated, his body feeling fragile.
That familiar voice had shaken the foundation of the calm he had only just built, opening a small crack through which longing and old questions flowed in, disrupting what had once been a pure current of logic.
'Strange… usually her tone is flat. Cold. Like a straight line without any vibration.
She never lets emotion leak—neither joy, nor anger, nor indifference.
But what I just heard… was different.'
Tsuuuuf!
To be continued…