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?
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Chapter 7
The Potion Faction's greenhouse was a humid jungle of creeping vines and glowing flora. The air smelled of damp earth and crushed mint.
Cedric Mallow stood at a wooden workbench, his heavy leather apron stained with purple sap. He pushed his brass goggles up into his messy blonde hair and leaned close to a delicate, shimmering Moon-Grass sprout.
Elara stood outside the glass door. She smoothed down her pure white dress, ensuring it looked perfectly simple and innocent. She held a stack of heavy, leather-bound basic magic textbooks in her arms.
She took a breath, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
She didn't speak. She just stood near the entrance, staring at Cedric's back with wide, lost eyes.
Her system pinged. Target acquired.
Elara shifted her weight. She let the top textbook slide off the stack.
It hit the stone floor with a loud, heavy THUD.
Cedric flinched. His hand jerked, nearly snapping the fragile Moon-Grass. He spun around, his brow furrowed in annoyance.
Elara immediately dropped to her knees. She scrambled to pick up the book, her hands shaking.
"I'm so sorry!" she gasped, her voice trembling. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I just... I needed a quiet place to study. I'll leave."
Cedric's annoyance faded when he saw the panic in her eyes. He wiped his hands on a rag and walked over, kneeling to help her pick up the heavy book.
He glanced at the cover. Introduction to Mana Pathways.
"You're a first-year," Cedric said, his voice analytical but not unkind. "Are you struggling with the basics?"
Elara looked down, biting her lip. "I am. I'm so far behind. But I don't dare ask Professor Alden for help. And... and I definitely can't ask Senior Seraphina."
She paused, letting Seraphina's name hang in the humid air.
Cedric's hands stopped moving. He looked up at Elara. He had heard the cafeteria rumors. The genius who broke down. The prodigy who gave up.
"Why can't you ask Seraphina?" Cedric asked, his scientific curiosity piqued.
Elara clutched the book to her chest. She forced a tear to spill over her lashes. "She hates me. But I don't blame her! She's suffering so much. I wish I could take her pain. I wish I could heal her broken mind."
Cedric stared at Elara's crying face. His brain, wired for logic and chemical equations, immediately rejected the emotional display.
He pushed his goggles further back on his head. "Tears don't fix mana blockages, Elara. Sympathy is useless. Seraphina doesn't need pity. She needs a structural solution."
Elara's tear stopped. She blinked, thrown completely off script. What is wrong with this guy?
Cedric stood up, pacing the narrow aisle between the glowing plants. He began muttering to himself, his hands moving rapidly as he mapped out invisible equations in the air.
"Total mana suppression. Behavioral regression. Apathy." Cedric listed the symptoms. His eyes widened as a forgotten piece of lore surfaced in his mind. He remembered a passage in an ancient text on mana toxicity that he had read years ago. "When a prodigy's core outgrows their physical vessel, it creates a catastrophic backlash. The only known cure is a voluntary suppression, a 'Soul Seal,' which flawlessly mimics the symptoms of a complete mental and magical collapse."
He spun to face Elara, his eyes blazing with manic excitement. "It's not a breakdown... she's protecting herself! And by extension, us! Her core is so powerful it was likely tearing her apart, so she intentionally sealed her own soul to prevent an explosion that would have leveled this academy! She's playing the fool to keep everyone safe!"
Elara stared at him, her mouth slightly open. The sheer magnitude of his delusion left her speechless.
"That's... so brave," Cedric whispered, completely awestruck by his own fabricated narrative. The hero complex in his chest ignited like a powder keg. "I have to cure her. I need to brew a soul-stimulating elixir."
He rushed back to his workbench and began throwing dried roots into a mortar.
Elara stood up, feeling completely ignored. "Cedric? Should I... leave?"
Cedric stopped pounding the roots. He looked at Elara, his eyes narrowing with sudden purpose.
"No. I need data," Cedric commanded. "A sealed soul needs external friction to show cracks. You need to go talk to her."
Elara's stomach plummeted. "What? No! She won't talk to me!"
"Ask her a question," Cedric insisted, walking over and shoving a small, crystal vial of blue liquid into her hand. "Take this Focus Potion as payment. Go to her. Annoy her. Ask her the most complex question you can find. I need to see how her sealed magic reacts to stress."
Elara looked at the priceless potion in her hand. She looked at Cedric's intense, unyielding stare. She was trapped by her own lie. If she refused, she would lose her "kind and helpful" persona.
"Okay," Elara forced the word through gritted teeth. "I'll do it."
Cedric nodded, already turning back to his mortar. "Excellent. Don't come back until you've provoked a reaction."
Elara walked out of the greenhouse. The system panel above her head flashed a bright, mocking yellow. Strategy Deviation.
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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."