npm local prefix always set to current working directory

I've been searching for a while to try to find the answer to this. I've tried everything I've found that makes sense and more. Nothing has worked. Here's the breakdown:

• I'm on linux (12.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE r371270 NFSN64 amd64)
• I've installed a package called hexo-cli using npm.
• My home directory is /home/private
• My global npm install directory is /home/private/.npm-global
• My npm prefix -g location is: /home/private/.npm-global
• When my cwd is /home/public/ and I execute hexo, hexo runs
• hexo then fails to find itself because it's using the npm prefix (this is my guess)
• When I type npm prefix it always returns my cwd
• I have checked /home/private/.npmrc file. A grep "prefix" /home/private/.npmrc returns:
• prefix=/home/private/.npm-global
• There are no other lines or entries returned from the grep
• npm config set prefix=/home/private/.npm-global only modifies the global prefix, not my local prefix

How do I get my local prefix var to be /home/private/.npm-global?

Edit:

Here is the output of my terminal when running hexo:

[username /home/public]$ hexoERROR Cannot find module 'hexo' from '/home/public'ERROR Local hexo loading failed in /home/publicERROR Try running: 'rm -rf node_modules && npm install --force'

Edit #2:

Forgot to mention. I also tried adding the following two lines to my ~/.profile file:

export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATHexport PATH=~/.npm-global/lib/node_modules:$PATH

I would then source ~/.profile.

This made absolutely no difference.

Edit #3:

Fixed a path in the 6th bullet point.

Edit #4

This is the output of my npm config list:

[username /home/public]$ npm config list; "user" config from /home/private/.npmrcprefix = "/home/private/.npm-global"; node bin location = /usr/local/bin/node; node version = v16.16.0; npm local prefix = /home/public; npm version = 8.13.0; cwd = /home/public; HOME = /home/private/; Run `npm config ls -l` to show all defaults.

Notice it says npm local prefix. Attempting to npm config set local prefix ... does not work. local prefix is not a variable you can assign a value to. I tried localprefix as well. This did not work.