Raising the Villain in Wrong Way

He had sacrificed something to enact a forbidden soul-summoning ritual to bring Ji’an’s soul from Earth into this realm. The Tower was the nexus. It was the cosmic router that had connected the two universes.

"He... he is involved with the Stargazing Tower?" Ji’an asked, her voice dangerously quiet, fighting to keep her tone casual.

"Indeed," Elder Viper nodded, completely unaware of the psychological bomb he had just dropped on her. "The Seers of the Tower are recluses. They chart the threads of fate, karma, and cosmic anomalies. Only those who have touched the absolute pinnacle of the martial apex, the Star-Level Cultivators, are permitted entry. Yan Zhaoge consults with them. Some say he helps maintain the thermal arrays that power their astrolabes."

Elder Viper took a sip of his tea, oblivious to the Chef’s internal meltdown. "If you are to meet him, Martial Uncle, tread carefully. A man who converses with the weavers of fate is not a man you wish to anger."

Ji’an sat perfectly still.

The annoyance about unpaid internships and recipe critiques completely vanished, replaced by a looming, terrifying shadow of cosmic conspiracy.

’How did I meet someone from the Stargazing Tower so soon?’ Ji’an’s mind raced, her transmigrator paranoia flaring to maximum capacity.

The continent was massive.

The Vanguard Tour was supposed to be a standard diplomatic fetch-quest. Yet, out of all the sects, all the elders, and all the prodigies... the one man who decides to teleport into her pavilion and initiate a dialogue tree is a deity directly connected to the very location where her brother sacrificed his soul to summon her.

’Is it a coincidence?’ Ji’an gripped her knees under the table, her knuckles turning white. ’No. In a web novel, there are zero coincidences. The author doesn’t introduce an endgame NPC with ties to the protagonist’s origin story by accident.’

If Yan Zhaoge was involved with the Stargazing Tower, did he know about the soul-summoning ritual? Did he know she was an anomaly from another universe? Did he recognize her soul signature when he was critiquing her plum wine?!

’How much does he know?’ Ji’an panicked, staring blankly at her compendium. ’Did Master Jiu Zui set this up? Is my master also a part of the conspiracy? Am I just a pawn being moved across a thermal-array chessboard?!’

"Martial Uncle? Are you well? You have grown quite pale," Elder Viper noted, leaning forward with genuine concern. "Has the miasma breached your internal filters?"

"No, I’m fine, Elder," Ji’an choked out, abruptly standing up from her stool. She hastily shoved her notes and her stylus into her spatial ring. "Just... a sudden revelation regarding my yeast activation times. I need to go inspect the barrels. Thank you for the tea."

She didn’t wait for a response.

Ji’an practically fled the Elders’ Pavilion, her red boots clicking a frantic, erratic rhythm against the obsidian tiles.

***

Ji’an wandered through the toxic courtyards of the Azure Dragon Sect, completely zoned out.

Her brain was a chaotic corkboard covered in red string, frantically trying to connect the dots.

Lin Feng died at the Stargazing Tower. I woke up in this body. Shen Zechuan looks exactly like Lin Feng, but has no memories and was locked in the abyss for five years. Yan Zhaoge is from the Iron-Stove Monastery, knows Master Jiu Zui, and hangs out at the Stargazing Tower.

It was a tangled web of plotlines that she had desperately been trying to avoid by focusing on cooking. But the plot was actively hunting her down.

’I need answers,’ Ji’an thought, rubbing her temples, a migraine blooming behind her eyes. ’I need to know what happened at that Tower.’

As she rounded a corner into one of the secluded, outer courtyards bordering the deep miasma chasms, the sharp, hissing sound of bubbling acid brought her back to reality.

She stopped, blinking the fog from her eyes.

She had wandered into the Caustic Springs, a series of deep, glowing green pools filled with highly concentrated, naturally occurring acid that the local alchemists used to dissolve failed experiments.

It was a restricted area.

And standing right at the edge of the most volatile acid pool, looking completely relaxed and entirely out of place, was Shen Zechuan.

The abyssal prodigy was supposed to be doing specialized combat drills with the other boys in the geyser canyons.

But because Zechuan’s power scaled on a fundamentally different, universe-breaking metric, he had apparently finished his designated tasks early and wandered off to fool around.

He was currently engaged in the most absurd, physics-defying game of solitary recreation Ji’an had ever witnessed.

Zechuan was holding a handful of smooth, flat obsidian skipping stones.

He pulled his arm back, stuck his tongue out slightly in concentration, and whipped a stone across the surface of the bubbling green acid.

Skip. Skip. Skip.

Normally, the stone would sink and dissolve. But right before the stone hit the acid for the fourth skip, Zechuan casually flicked his left wrist.

A void-portal that was no larger than a teacup opened directly in the path of the stone. The rock vanished into the abyss.

Half a second later, a second portal opened directly above Zechuan’s hand, and the rock dropped neatly back into his palm.

"Four skips!" Zechuan cheered to himself, catching the rock. "A new personal best! The acid viscosity creates excellent surface tension!"

Ji’an stood there, watching the most terrifying, overpowered entity in the Vanguard Retinue using the legendary, reality-shattering Void-Devouring Mantra to cheat at skipping rocks by playing catch with himself through a wormhole.

The ridiculous, golden-retriever innocence of the scene clashed with the heavy, cosmic conspiracy currently weighing down Ji’an’s soul.

He looked so happy. He looked so unburdened.

He looked exactly like the older brother she missed so desperately.

Before her rational brain could engage its filters, the emotional turmoil inside her boiled over. The question she had been terrified to ask, the mystery she had been circling for weeks, bypassed her vocal cords and tumbled out into the open air.

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