Raising the Villain in Wrong Way

"The spicy hotpots. The hangover soups you brew for the elders. They are a revolutionary asset. A market disrupter. I have been analyzing your yield, and the potential for a continental monopoly is staggering."

He leaned his face so close that his spectacles almost brushed against her cheek.

"But I do not just want a monopoly on the soup, brother Ji’an," Shiru whispered, his breath fanning across her ear, heavy with dark, double meanings. "I want an exclusive contract. A... total merger. I want to liquidate the boundaries between us and acquire every single asset you possess, until you are entirely, exclusively operating under my conglomerate."

He smiled, a dark, obsessive curve of his lips. "Why waste your talents feeding golden retrievers like Zhiwei, when you could be yielding dividends solely for me? Sign the contract, brother Ji’an. Let me take over. I’ll pay the price for your life, hmm?"

The dialogue was smooth.

The delivery was impeccable.

In a trashy, toxic BL novel, this was the exact moment the submissive protagonist was supposed to flush bright red, tremble under the domineering aura of the calculating CEO, and weakly capitulate to his dark desires.

Lin Ji’an was not a submissive protagonist.

She was a transmigrator who had spent her teenage years on Earth working the fry station during the Friday night rush.

She had dealt with creepy, entitled restaurant managers who thought cornering girls in the walk-in freezer was a valid flirting strategy.

She wasn’t embarrassed.

She wasn’t having a gay panic.

She was overwhelmingly disgusted.

The idea of this calculating, manipulative sociopath viewing her as an "asset" to be acquired, using his proximity and his wealth to pressure her, made her stomach churn.

The cold gold of the abacus pressing against her waist didn’t feel like a romantic gesture; it felt like a brand.

"A merger?" Ji’an repeated, her voice deadpan, completely devoid of any trembling or fear.

She looked him dead in the eyes.

Her gaze was not the frightened look of trapped prey. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

It was the terrifying, dead-eyed stare of a woman who had just decided to commit workplace violence.

"Allow me to offer a counter-proposal," Ji’an whispered.

She didn’t use her hands. She didn’t try to push his arm away from the bookshelf.

Instead, Ji’an lifted her right boot, which was currently heavily reinforced with compressed Dao of the Iron Wok kinetic mass, and brought her heel down with the raw force of a falling meteor directly onto the instep of Wen Shiru’s left foot.

CRUNCH!!!

The sound of the delicate bones in his foot violently fracturing echoed loudly in the quiet aisle.

"GHK—!" Shiru choked, his jade eyes bugging out of his head.

The smooth, seductive, calculating facade shattered instantly into an expression of absolute, agonizing shock.

The golden abacus slipped from her waist as his body involuntarily spasmed, his knee buckling under the sudden, excruciating pain.

Ji’an didn’t stop there.

As Shiru folded forward, gasping for breath, Ji’an grabbed the lapels of his immaculate green silk robes with both hands.

She violently shoved him backward, throwing him entirely off balance.

Shiru crashed into the opposite bookshelf, books and jade scrolls raining down on his head in a chaotic clatter as he slid down the wood, clutching his pulverized foot, his silver spectacles knocked entirely askew.

Ji’an stood over him, towering over the fallen merchant heir.

She reached down, brushing her hands off on her gray cloak as if she had just touched something unspeakably filthy.

"Listen to me very carefully, Wen Shiru," Ji’an sneered, her voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly cold register, devoid of any young-master theatrics.

This was the raw, unfiltered fury of Lin Ji’an.

"To hell with your bullshit! I am not a commodity, nor an asset. And I am absolutely, unequivocally, not for sale!"

She took a step forward, leaning down, pointing a finger directly at his face.

"Do not ever corner me again," Ji’an warned, her silver-flecked eyes burning with dark, absolute hostility. "Do not ever press your stupid, gaudy jewelry against me, and do not mistake my tolerance of your presence for weakness. I put up with you because Gu Zhiwei is my friend, and he is too stupid to realize you are a venomous snake."

Shiru looked up at her, panting through the pain, his chest heaving.

"If you ever cross the line with me again," Ji’an promised, her voice a deadly whisper, "I will not let you off for Zhiwei’s sake. I will take that golden abacus, and I will force-feed it to you, bead by bead, until you are calculating your own medical bills from the inside out. Are we clear?"

For a long, tense moment, the only sound in the aisle was the distant, echoing hum of the library’s protective arrays.

Wen Shiru sat on the floor, surrounded by fallen books.

His foot was radiating agony.

His pride, built on centuries of untouchable merchant superiority, had just been ruthlessly trampled into the dust by a cook.

A normal man would have been furious.

A normal man would have drawn a weapon or sworn bloody vengeance.

But as Shiru looked up at the furious, blazing, completely untouchable figure standing over him, the pain in his foot suddenly faded, eclipsed by an entirely different, infinitely darker sensation.

She hadn’t blushed, hadn’t cowered.

She looked at his wealth, his power, and his seductive trap, and she had literally stomped on it with absolute, unyielding disgust.

She was a wild, feral, untamable force of nature that refused to be put in a cage.

The sheer, overwhelming rejection didn’t deter him.

It acted as gasoline on the fire of his obsession.

Shiru’s breathing slowed.

He reached up with a trembling hand, slowly pushing his silver spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

He didn’t apologize or yell at her.

Instead, a slow, dark, and utterly unhinged smile spread across his handsome face.

The look in his jade eyes was no longer calculating.

It was raw, naked, and terrifyingly obsessive.