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The Grötzsch graph is the Mycielskian of the five-vertex cycle graph. Take original edges $v_i{v}_{i+1}$, with indices interpreted modulo five; add $u_i{v}_{i-1},u_i{v}_{i+1}$ and $w{u}_i$ for every $i$. There are eleven vertices and twenty edges: five original, ten between originals and Mycielski shadow vertices, and five from the Mycielski apex.

Give $v_1,\dots ,v_5$ colours $(1,2,1,2,3)$, give each $u_i$ the colour of $v_i$, and give $w$ colour 4. This is a proper vertex colouring. The Mycielskian chromatic increase proves that three colours are impossible, so the chromatic number is exactly four. The Mycielskian triangle preservation proves that this is a triangle-free graph. In particular its clique number is only two, even though its chromatic number is four.

The Mycielski apex has an independent set as its graph neighbourhood, yet all three old colours are needed there in any three-colour proper vertex colouring of the subgraph obtained by deleting it. Thus a locally easy group of mutually nonadjacent neighbours can carry globally incompatible colour requirements. Absence of triangles in a graph alone cannot bound the chromatic number.

Define $M_2=K_2$ and $M_{k+1}=\mu (M_k)$ for $k\ge 2$. By the Mycielskian chromatic increase and Mycielskian triangle preservation, each $M_k$ is a finite triangle-free graph with chromatic number $k$. The first steps are $K_2,C_5$, the Grötzsch graph, and then a 23-vertex graph needing five colours. The vertex recurrence $n_{k+1}=2n_k+1$ gives $n_k=3\cdot 2^{k-2}-1$. These explicit examples show how arbitrarily strong graph coloring constraints can accumulate without any three-vertex clique.