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 8
The library was a cavernous space filled with the smell of old paper and dust motes dancing in the late afternoon sun.
Deep in the restricted section, hidden behind a towering shelf of ancient grimoires, Seraphina was sprawled across a velvet sofa. A massive copy of Aetherian History covered her face. She was snoring softly, a small bubble of spit forming at the corner of her mouth.
Elara stood at the edge of the aisle. She clutched a piece of parchment so tightly her knuckles ached. Drawn on the paper was a High-Tier Energy Convergence Array-a magical diagram so complex it looked like a spiderweb drawn by a madman.
Fifty feet away, hiding behind a marble pillar, Cedric Mallow gave Elara a frantic thumbs-up.
Elara wanted to scream. She took a deep breath, plastered on a hesitant smile, and walked over to the sofa.
She stomped her heel against the stone floor, hoping the noise would wake Seraphina naturally.
Seraphina didn't flinch. The snoring continued.
Elara gritted her teeth. She reached out and poked Seraphina's shoulder. "Senior?" she said, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. "Senior Seraphina?"
Seraphina jerked awake. The heavy history book slid off her face and crashed onto the floor. She rubbed her eyes, smearing sleep across her face, and glared at Elara.
"What?" Seraphina grumbled, her voice thick with sleep. "Are you here to flood the library? Because I don't have an umbrella."
Elara's eye twitched. She swallowed her rage and held out the parchment.
"I'm sorry to bother you, Senior," Elara said softly. "But I found this array in a book, and I can't understand the central convergence node. It keeps blocking the mana flow. Could you... look at it?"
Seraphina squinted at the paper. It was a seventh-year level diagram. A first-year had no business looking at it. This was a trap.
Seraphina shifted her gaze past Elara's shoulder. In the distance, she saw the edge of Cedric's brass goggles peeking out from behind the pillar.
Ah, Seraphina thought. A setup.
She could easily point out the geometric flaw in the third rune ring. But that would prove she was still a genius. She needed to be an idiot. A confident, unhelpful idiot.
Seraphina sat up straight. She snatched the parchment from Elara's hands and stared at it with intense, exaggerated concentration. She furrowed her brow and nodded slowly, as if unlocking the secrets of the universe.
Elara watched her, a smug feeling rising in her chest. Seraphina was going to fail.
"I see the problem," Seraphina announced loudly.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a thick, cheap red quill.
"The problem," Seraphina said, pointing the quill at the incredibly delicate, intricate center of the array, "is that these lines are way too skinny. The magic is getting stuck because the pipes are too narrow."
Elara stared at her. "The... pipes?"
"Yeah," Seraphina said confidently. "And it's black ink. Magic hates black. It gets lost in the dark."
Before Elara could process the sheer stupidity of the statement, Seraphina pressed the thick red quill directly onto the center of the parchment.
She didn't draw a rune. She didn't trace a line. She just scribbled violently in a circle, creating a massive, ugly red blob that completely obliterated the core of the array.
"All that talk of 'resonance' is just nonsense the old mages invented to make themselves sound clever and overcomplicate the basics. Magic isn't that complicated. Keep it simple. Thick red lines. Trust me."
Elara looked at the ruined parchment. Her brain short-circuited. This wasn't magic. This was the logic of a toddler with a crayon.
"You ruined it!" Elara hissed, dropping her sweet act for a fraction of a second. "That has nothing to do with geometric resonance!"
Seraphina waved her hand dismissively. She shoved the ruined parchment back into Elara's chest, grabbed her history book, and flopped back down on the sofa. She threw the book over her face.
"Now go away. I'm busy." Within three seconds, the snoring resumed.
Elara stood frozen. She looked at the ugly red blob. She felt completely, utterly humiliated. Seraphina wasn't just broken; she was a moron.
Elara turned around to look at Cedric, expecting to see him shaking his head in disappointment.
Instead, Cedric was leaning out from behind the pillar. His eyes were wide behind his goggles. He was staring at the red blob in Elara's hand with the ravenous hunger of a starving man looking at a feast.
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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."