The Unwanted Genius Escapes Her Dark Fate
Seraphina was the greatest mage of her generation. Then she saw her future: betrayed, broken, and left for dead.
She woke up with a new plan: do absolutely nothing.
Trip on flat floors. Cry magical floods. Tell professors her only goal is "three meals and eight hours of sleep."
Let Elara steal her glory. Let the system target someone else. She just wants to nap.
But no one will let her fail.
The strictest professor calls her breakdown "enlightenment." The potion genius turns her scribbles into "divine wisdom." The more she acts like trash, the more they worship her.
She didn't choose to be a legend.
She chose to be useless.
Why is that so hard?
Chapters
Share
Chapter 3
The hallway outside the First-Year Basic Magic classroom smelled like chalk and nervous sweat.
Professor Alden walked beside Seraphina. He kept his voice low, adopting the tone of a grief counselor.
"You need time away from the advanced curriculum," Alden said, patting her shoulder. "I'm assigning you here as a teaching assistant. Your only job is to sit in, relax, and perhaps help struggling students like Elara. No pressure."
Seraphina's heart did a happy leap in her chest. A basic class meant nap time.
She kept her face blank. She lowered her chin and nodded slowly, acting as if the demotion was a heavy cross to bear. "I understand, Professor. I'll try not to be a burden."
Alden gave her a sad smile and walked away.
Seraphina pushed open the back door of the lecture hall.
The loud chatter inside died instantly. Fifty first-year students turned their heads. Their eyes widened with awe and fear. Seraphina Vanguard, the prodigy, the untouchable genius, was standing in their classroom.
Seraphina didn't walk to the front podium. She dragged her feet up the stairs to the very last row, pulled out a chair in the darkest corner, and slumped into it. She sprawled her legs out and rested her chin on her palm.
Down in the front row, Elara turned around. Her eyes narrowed.
Elara tapped the side of her leg, secretly activating a System Item: Aura of Pity. A faint, colorless ripple of psychological suggestion slithered across the floorboards, snaking its way up the back stairs toward Seraphina's chair. It was designed to subconsciously influence everyone in the room, making them perceive the target's aura as repressed, pathetic, and utterly broken, thereby triggering a wave of condescending sympathy. Seraphina felt the cold, invasive tickle of the mental manipulation brushing against her consciousness. It felt like a slimy bug trying to crawl into her mind.
She didn't summon a shield. She didn't fight back. Instead, she inhaled deeply, pulling every single drop of her mana inward, compressing it into the dense, heavy void of Chaos. To the outside world, she became a black hole.
The System's invisible tentacles of influence hit her absolute void and found absolutely nothing to latch onto.
Elara's blue panel flashed violently. Target Mana Level: 0. Logic Error. Target is a null.
Elara gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. She actually believed it. She thought Seraphina's breakdown had shattered her magical core.
Seraphina smirked behind her hand. She laid her head flat on the cool wooden desk and closed her eyes.
A chubby first-year boy sitting at the desk next to her nervously slid a wrapped peppermint candy across the wood.
"F-for you, Senior," he stuttered, his face bright red.
Seraphina opened one eye. She grabbed the candy, unwrapped it with one hand, and popped it into her mouth. "Thanks, kid," she mumbled around the mint.
The boy looked like he was going to pass out from joy. The other students exchanged confused glances. The Ice Queen was eating cheap candy and slouching.
The front doors banged open. Senior Professor Silas Vane marched in. He was a tall, severe man with eyes like chipped flint. He was the head of the Healing Faction, known for failing students who breathed too loudly.
Silas scanned the room. His eyes locked onto Seraphina slouched in the back row. A muscle feathered in his jaw, but he didn't call her out.
"Today," Silas barked, "we cover the absolute foundation of water manipulation. Condensing moisture from the air into a single, perfect sphere."
He hadn't even finished the sentence before Elara thrust her hand out.
A beautiful, spinning lotus flower made entirely of crystal-clear water bloomed in her palm. The first-years gasped in admiration.
Elara smiled modestly and turned her head, making sure Seraphina saw it. She wanted to spark jealousy.
Seraphina didn't even look up. She was busy using her fingernail to carve a smiley face into the wooden desk.
Elara's system panel remained dead. Jealousy: 0.
Elara gritted her teeth. She raised her hand. "Professor Silas?" she asked, her voice dripping with fake innocence. "If someone's magical core is... damaged... how would they perform this basic task?"
She looked directly at the back row.
Every single head in the classroom turned to stare at Seraphina. The silence was thick and suffocating.
Silas frowned deeply. He looked at Seraphina. "Assistant Seraphina. Since you are here, why don't you demonstrate the standard condensation method for the class?"
Seraphina sighed. She pushed herself up from the desk. Her joints popped loudly in the quiet room.
She held out her right hand. She squeezed her eyes shut. She held her breath until her face turned a splotchy, dark red. She made her hands shake violently, as if she were trying to lift a boulder.
She muttered a string of completely nonsensical words.
A tiny, muddy, brown drop of water materialized at the tip of her index finger.
It hung there for a second. Then, it dropped onto the desk with a pathetic splat.
The classroom was dead silent.
Silas's face turned the color of a bruised plum.
Seraphina opened her eyes, wiped the sweat off her forehead, and gave Silas a bright, stupid thumbs-up. "Nailed it."
You may also like
7.1
I was the top commander of a black-ops military program. After slaughtering my way through a hellish mission, I reached the extraction helicopter, trusting my second-in-command to watch my back.
But the moment our hands locked, he didn't pull me up. Instead, he plunged a syringe of lethal neurotoxin directly into my neck.
He aimed his gun at my chest, coldly stating that I was too dangerous to live. My lungs stopped, and I died in a pool of my own blood. But the endless blackness suddenly shattered. My consciousness violently forced its way into a new, broken shell. I woke up in a freezing alley, soaked in muddy rain.
This body belonged to seventeen-year-old Eliza Wyatt. A massive wave of foreign memories crashed into my brain. Her own younger sister had just stood at the top of the stairs with a mocking smile, watching street thugs beat Eliza to death.
"Take good care of the Wyatt family's eldest daughter. Tonight is the night she finally disappears."
The endless humiliation, the cold stares of her family, and the brutal betrayal by her own blood flashed before my eyes. Why was this fragile girl treated like garbage and pushed to her death by the very people who should have protected her?
I looked down at my pale, trembling hands. The top commander was dead, but in this bleeding shell, Eliza Wyatt was very much alive. I picked up a switchblade from the bloody puddle and stood up in the storm. It was time to hunt.
9.7
Elara Voss was rejected by her Alpha on the night of the Blood Moon - cast aside as a nobody with no wolf, no rank, and no future. She ran. But fate had other plans.
In the human world, she collides with Damien Crest - cold, ruthless billionaire by day, the last living Shadowking by night. He offers her a contract marriage. She has nowhere else to go.
But ancient markings are awakening on her skin. A god is whispering her name. And Kael, the fearsome Werewolf High King, has declared across all supernatural realms that she is his fated mate.
Two kings. Two worlds. One woman who was never supposed to matter.
They all rejected her once. Now they'll burn their empires down to claim her.
7.6
He hated my gut!
I detested his arrogance!
I was supposed to be his ex-stepmother,but I hated pack politics and returned to the human community after Alpha Holt's death.
I was forced back to heal the wounds of the one that hated me the most, my stepson Adrian.
To the world he was the famous NHL golden boy of hockey and to the Frostfang pack, their feared Alpha.
But the moon goddess had another plan.
On the night he was crowned as Alpha, his father's mark faded from my neck and Adrian's mate bond burnt harshly on my skin. But fate wasn't done yet.
We were expected to team up to fight a common foe when we could barely stand each other.
Was our fate strong enough to overcome physical hatred?
8.8
Alaia Dudley spent her life playing the devoted partner, completely unaware that her fiancé Austen was sleeping with another woman.
She thought the worst he could do was break her heart, until she found herself pinned to a cold operating table.
Austen held her down with a cruel smirk while a scalpel sliced through her sternum.
They cracked her chest open while she was still fully conscious.
The agonizing pain of her heart being cut out burned into her nerve endings.
She realized then that to him, she was never a lover—just a spare organ, a boring piece of wood to be discarded the second his true love needed it.
She died in excruciating agony, choking on her own blood while the man she loved walked away with her heart.
Until her last breath, she didn't understand why she had to suffer so brutally.
Why did she waste her life begging for a monster's attention? Why did they get a happy ending while she was carved up like an animal?
But then, ice-cold water flooded her lungs, and Alaia violently broke the surface of her bathwater.
Her trembling fingers touched her smooth, flawless chest. No scars. Her heart was still beating.
The date on her phone glared back at her: it was exactly five years ago.
Tonight was the exact night Austen first took his mistress to a hotel room.
This time, she wouldn't just expose them. She would use Wall Street's most terrifying tyrant as her personal weapon to strip them of everything they had.
7.9
Cora Foster was a brilliant archaeologist, but a jagged burn scar across her face made the world treat her like a contagious monster.
During an elite excavation of a Gilded Age crypt, touching an ancient artifact triggered a terrifying memory. She remembered being Seraphina Beaumont, a socialite brutally buried alive by her vain, cruel sister, Isolde.
When the team pried open the crypt's pristine mahogany casket, they cheered, believing the mummified corpse inside was Seraphina. But Cora recognized the onyx hairpin and the angular jawline. It was Isolde. The sister who had stolen her life, mocked her agony, and left her to suffocate in the dark. Her colleagues scoffed at her forensic proof, dismissing her as a scarred, delusional liability.
Worse, the ruthless billionaire funding the expedition, Julian Montgomery, was the spitting image of Alistair—the man Seraphina had deeply loved. Why was Julian staring at her ruined face with such intense, inexplicable recognition? And why did Isolde take Seraphina's most precious silver ring to the grave?
Driven by a century of agonizing grief, Cora secretly pried the tarnished ring from the mummy's stiff, dead fingers and dropped it into her pocket.
"What are you looking at, Foster?"
Julian's deep voice vibrated inches from her ear, his cold, predatory eyes locked directly onto her half-open pocket.
8.0
Eloise Ferguson was the legitimate daughter of a powerful Senator, yet she was treated like a hysterical burden by her own family.
In her past life, her parents forced her to marry a sadistic billionaire for political funding.
When she resisted, they locked her in a psychiatric facility, drugged her, and left her to die in restraints while her "fragile" cousin Jaylene stole her life.
She never understood why her mother hated her so fiercely.
Why did her mother treat her brother Cortez and her cousin Jaylene like absolute royalty, while throwing her own flesh and blood to the wolves?
Opening her eyes again, Eloise found herself back at age twenty-two, trapped in a restroom at a charity gala.
Escaping her abuser, she used her awakened mystic abilities to look at her family's life forces.
What she saw made her blood run cold.
Thick, red biological cords connected her mother directly to both Cortez and Jaylene, intertwining in a perfect symbiotic bond.
They weren't cousins. They were illegitimate twins born from her mother's secret affair.
Eloise was the only true outsider in her own home.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. Her entire life of abuse was just a cover-up for a nest of parasites stealing her father's name and her inheritance.
But this time, she refused to be their victim.
Armed with an unchallengeable executive order she blackmailed out of the United States President, Eloise crushed the hidden microphone in her bedroom.
"Game on, Mother."