Raising the Villain in Wrong Way

He stopped fighting the exhaustion and instead, surrendered to it, turning his focus entirely inward.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then... the air around Gu Zhiwei began to hum.

It wasn’t the bright, blinding, outward-projecting holy light he usually relied on. It was a deep, resonant, internal vibration.

The ambient, toxic Qi of the valley didn’t poison him; it was being sucked into his core, filtered by his exhaustion, and fused with the heavy, latent Yang energy of the bear meat.

A sharp, audible CRACK echoed from within Zhiwei’s chest.

It sounded like a pane of thick glass shattering under immense pressure.

A sudden skyrocketing pillar of pure, condensed, brilliant gold energy erupted from the Holy Son, completely blowing away the miasma fog for a hundred yards. The sheer force of the breakthrough sent a shockwave that ruffled Ji’an’s red robes.

Zhiwei’s eyes snapped open. They weren’t just golden anymore; they glowed with the light of a newly formed soul.

He had completely recovered his energy.

"I..." Zhiwei gasped, looking at his hands in absolute, staggering disbelief. He floated three inches off the ground without using a sword, the hallmark of the new realm. "I have a feeling that I’ll break through soon. I am going to become... a Nascent Soul."

The revelation hit the rest of the exhausted disciples like a bolt of lightning.

They realized exactly what the tyrannical chef had done.

She hadn’t tortured them for fun, but deliberately, meticulously engineered an environment of extreme physical duress combined with high-tier nutritional overload to forcefully crack the shells of their stagnant cultivation bases.

She had manually written the patch notes and forced the server update.

Lu Jianheng scrambled into a seated position, closing his eyes, instantly beginning the circulation process.

Hu Yanlie roared, slamming his fists into his knees, forcing his feral core to condense. After seeing them, Wen Shiru also pushed his glasses up his nose, his brain finally grasping the massive return on investment the suffering had yielded, diving deep into meditation.

Ji’an stood in the center of the chaos, her arms crossed, the harsh drill-instructor glare melting away into a soft, deeply satisfied, exhausted smile.

’Code compiled successfully,’ Ji’an’s internal supercomputer hummed happily. ’The front-line tanks have been upgraded to the current meta. The server is stable.’

Elder Viper floated down next to her, leaning heavily on his staff, looking at the erupting pillars of Qi with profound, uncharacteristic reverence.

"You are indeed a terrifying instructor, Lin Ji’an," Elder Viper murmured, shaking his head. "You broke their pride, forced them to the brink of death, and rebuilt them as true immortals. The Azure Dragon Sect has much to learn from your... culinary pedagogy."

"It’s just basic kitchen management, Elder," Ji’an shrugged, turning around and walking back toward her floating palm-leaf yacht. "You have to tenderize the tough cuts before you can braise them properly."

She hopped onto the yacht, sinking back against the bamboo rest with a heavy sigh, entirely ready for a nap.

"Zechuan!" Ji’an called out lazily, closing her eyes. "The oxen have leveled up. Reattach the plow! We have a schedule to keep, and I want to be in the Azure Dragon Sect soon!"

"Yes, Brother Ji’an!" Zechuan cheered, happily grabbing the tow rope, his abyssal void-disc flaring to life.

As the completely traumatized and utterly obedient Vanguard Retinue picked up their sleds and yokes with renewed vigor, the Labyrinth of the Beasts echoed with the sound of their suffering march.

They were the strongest youths on the continent.

And they were absolutely, completely terrified of the teenager in the red apron.

The fundamental paradox of orthodox cultivation was that the most refined, elegant, and aristocratic prodigies in the Azure Empire were, at their absolute core, unparalleled masochists.

They had spent their entire lives sitting under freezing waterfalls, being beaten with wooden bamboo swords by their strict masters, and consuming bitter, foul-tasting alchemy pills, all in the pursuit of infinitesimal gains in spiritual power.

So, the moment the sixteen elite disciples of the Vanguard Tour realized that Lin Ji’an’s tyrannical, humiliating, ox-plowing torture was actively forcefully widening their meridians and shattering their bottlenecks... their entire psychological framework pi​voted.

The Chef was no longer a bully.

He was actually a terrifying, spatula-wielding deity of extreme physical therapy!

The morning after the first breakthroughs, the atmosphere in the Labyrinth of the Beasts shifted from a miserable, groaning death march into a motivated, unhinged athletic bootcamp.

"Brother Lin!" Gu Zhiwei’s voice boomed at the crack of dawn, practically vibrating with the dense energy of his newly found energy.

Ji’an, who was currently sipping a cup of hot black-lotus tea on her hovering palm-leaf yacht, looked down over the edge.

The Golden Retriever was standing at attention in the acidic mud, already strapped into the heavy leather pulling-harness attached to a massive, eight-hundred-pound iron sled. He wasn’t crying or pouting, but beaming like a child on the first day of a summer carnival.

"I have done twenty laps around the perimeter to warm up my cardiovascular system!" Zhiwei reported loudly, flexing his broad, heavily muscled arms. "Should I add another two hundred pounds of petrified swamp-wood to the sled, Brother?! My latissimus dorsi require greater resistance to fully assimilate yesterday’s fat!"

Ji’an blinked slowly, taking a sip of her tea.

She looked past Zhiwei.

Lu Jianheng, the peerless, aristocratic Sword Lord, was not polishing his legendary blade. He had abandoned the weapon.

Instead, he was currently engaged in a brutal, bare-knuckle boxing match with a towering petrified oak tree.

"HAA!" Jianheng roared, his knuckles wrapped in crude, blood-stained linen bandages. He drove a devastating left hook into the solid wood, the impact splintering the bark. "The blade is but an extension of the self! To master the steel, one must first forge the flesh into iron! Watch my hip rotation, Martial Uncle! Is my kinetic transfer adequate?!"

"Your stance is too wide, Jianheng! You’re telegraphing the jab!" Ji’an yelled back instinctively, amused by the sudden 180-degree shift in their attitudes.