The Villain Professor's Second Chance-Chapter 662: Tales of The Long Ears (4)

Twilight bled through the canopy like the world was exhaling its last golden breath. The branches overhead stretched impossibly wide, their surfaces etched with ancient runes that pulsed faintly, as if the trees remembered magic even in sleep. Light trickled down in slow, dappled beams, catching on suspended motes of glowing pollen. The air was syrup‑thick with age and mana—a brew of sap, rotting illusions, and the iron tang of old blood magic.

Draven stood still.

He let the hush cling to him. In the distance a leaf drifted loose, spiraling through a shaft of light before landing without a sound; even that small motion felt intrusive. His pupils narrowed, then widened, cataloguing the smallest shifts—how each breath stirred the pollen, how the rune‑bands across the branches brightened with the rise of his heartbeat and faded when he steadied.

The moss underfoot clung to his boots in velvet coils, warm with life. Runes glowed faintly through its weave, throbbing to a rhythm just shy of audible. Every breath he drew vibrated in his chest like a plucked string. To his right, a broken statue lay face‑down, its marble arm jutting into the air like a snapped limb. Crystalline lanterns, long extinguished, hung cracked from trees, shards embedded in bark as though the forest had grown around their failure.

He pivoted, scanning for symmetry. Abandoned elven groves were built like hymns—one stanza of architecture answering the next. But here the lines were wrong: columns misaligned, pathways swallowed by roots, runic glyphs half‑erased as if something had tried to bite words out of stone. It wasn't time's erosion; it was sabotage.

Who desecrates a lullaby forest? he wondered. And why leave the melody humming in the bones?

He blinked slowly, eyes adjusting not to light, but to memory. This place didn't exist on any map. Not anymore. Yet here it stood, untouched and rotting in silence. As if the world itself had forgotten to delete it. Somewhere deep in his consciousness, the Prime's memories fluttered—feather‑light hints of a song sung once at the edge of a battlefield, notes too faint to parse. He pressed the thought aside. Later.

His fingers twitched.

The air here—it remembered.

Mana swirled around him in curling trails, flickering soft blue and pale gold. They reminded him of river current under moonlight—visible only if you knew to squint. He tracked them with his gaze. They didn't drift like residue from a single caster. They layered and tangled, like echoes caught in a loop. A dozen pathways, overlapping. Not human. Not even elven. Something else—older, raw, half‑wild.

"Not people," he muttered, voice barely louder than the hush of leaves. A rune in a nearby root flared at the sound, then dimmed, as if eavesdropping.

He crouched, brushing his gloved fingers over the moss‑veined earth. The mana clung, hissed softly. Beneath the warmth he felt a prickle, as though tiny jaws nipped at his skin—defensive wards keyed to a bloodline long dead.

"Creatures. Dozens of them. But… the weave is elven."

He lifted his hand and sniffed. A faint scent of singed feathers and cold quartz lingered, the calling card of spirit‑beasts forged as living guardians. Their auras hadn't dispersed; they'd been siphoned. Harvested. His jaw knotted. Demons ate memories first, flesh second. If they'd been here, every rune would taste of corrosion. Yet the glyphs still pulsed—wounded but stubbornly alive. That meant interference, not consumption.

He stood. His eyes slid sideways to Laethiel.

The boy hadn't moved. Still as stone beneath the cradle of roots where Sylara had settled him. Strands of silver‑white hair fanned across the moss like spilled moonlight. His breath was too even, his limbs too still—no restless twitch, no dream‑shiver. Every part of him lay posed, almost ceremonial, chest rising and falling at an impossible tempo: one inhale every nine seconds, one exhale every nine seconds. A mortal child would suffocate in that rhythm.

Draven stared for a long moment, not blinking.

"That's no boy," he thought. "And certainly no child."

He let his gaze slip into the spectrum beyond sight. Threads of mana rose from Laethiel's sternum—delicate silver, fracturing into violet shards before recombining in impossible knots. It wasn't the chaotic swirl of a wounded mage; it was a pattern, a clockwork. The boy was a keystone, still trying to regulate the grove's broken symphony even while unconscious.

Subtle dread stirred in Draven's gut—not fear for himself, but calculation. If the Seed had shaped a living avatar, it meant the grove's fail‑safes were collapsing. And if this avatar was dying, something far worse would move in to fill the vacuum.

His hand hovered by his side. Not touching a weapon. Just aware—ready to draw if this living keystone shifted into something less docile.

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Then he turned and walked away, without a word.

He moved like a shadow across broken flagstones, letting his senses fan outward. Where did the corruption start? Which root, which song‑line? Answers lay ahead, not here. And he trusted Sylara—for all her mercenary pragmatism—to keep the boy breathing until the next decision.

Sylara didn't notice at first.

She knelt beside Laethiel, fascinated. Everything about him was a contradiction. His limbs were delicate, almost fragile—but his skin shimmered faintly, like pearl‑dust under moonlight. His ears were longer than any elf she'd ever seen in a book, pale hair falling like silver thread across his brow. And his mana…

She wasn't a mage. She didn't have to be.

She could feel it.

Like a lullaby wrapped around her senses. A song hummed into her bones, soft and slow. Each measure poured into the next, smoothing the frayed edges of her nerves. Her heartbeat slowed. Her breath, once quick from the earlier battle, settled into the same nine‑beat cadence as the sleeping figure. She could hear something, faintly. Not sound. Not exactly. More like emotion sung through magic—wonder laced with grief, triumph painted over cracks of terror.

Colors shifted at the edge of her vision—tender greens, mournful blues, flashes of newborn gold. She felt tears prick her eyes without sadness prompting them. Memories that weren't hers drifted across her mind: a mother singing by starlight, a city carved of living wood, a promise sworn on polished crystal. She swayed, caught in the undertow of borrowed nostalgia.

She leaned closer.

Her hand reached out, fingertips inches from his cheek—drawn not by curiosity alone but by a visceral need to touch the melody, to prove it was real. Somewhere far away she registered Vyrik's restless growl, felt the chimera nudge her calf, but the sound blurred, muffled by that impossible song.

"Sylara."