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Chapter 72 The Mysterious Mentor

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Shane felt even more heartbroken when he heard that. “She’s always bullying you. I just wanted to teach her a lesson.”

Samantha let out a sigh. “I’m used to it by now. I’m fine. But you got publicly reprimanded just for helping me.”

As she spoke, a few tears rolled down her cheeks.

Seeing that broke Shane’s heart. “Sammy, don’t cry. Seeing you like this is killing me. I’ll take the punishment. I’d do anything for you.”

Samantha sniffled and clutched Shane’s shirt tightly, her voice trembling. “Shane, you’re so good to me.”

After getting rid of Shane, the grievance and softness on Samantha’s face vanished in an instant. What reced it was a smug and vicious smile. “Hmph. Sloane, I don’t believe you’ll get lucky every time.”

Sloane opened herputer and logged into the dark web forum. In her contacts list, there was only one contact. The profile picture was still grayed out.

They had lost touch five years ago, when she was locked in the psych ward. She didn’t even know if he still hung around here.

Bored, she scrolled through the hacker forum. This was where hackers shared techniques, bought and sold hacking tools, and posted their exploits.

Some sold zero–day vulnerabilities and negotiated with potential buyers.

Others posted attack missions with cash rewards for those whopleted them.

Sloane was casually browsing the mission posts, seeing if any caught her interest.

Suddenly, her backend pinged. A message popped up. She clicked it. Her screen instantly went ck. Then, a white skull appeared in the center.

Sloane’s eyes lit up the moment she saw it. It was him.

The mentor who had taught her hacking. He used to assign her homework like this too.

Her interest surged. It felt like she had gone back to five years ago in an instant.

7:54 Thu, Sep 4

Chapter 72 The Mysterious Mentor

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Tick tock. After thirty minutes, Sloane finally cracked the skull screen and restored her desktop.

A message popped up: iToo /iislow/i.

Sloane blushed with shame. She’d spent thest five years dealing with a bunch of old men in the psych ward and had clearly gone rusty.

She quickly typed a reply: iI /iiknow /iiI /iimessed /iiup/i. iIt’s /iibeen /iia /iirough /iifew /iiyears/i. iI’ve /iigotten /iiout /iiof /iipractice/i. iBut /iiI’ll /iiget /iiback /iiinto /iishape /iifast/i.

X9 replied almost immediately. This time, he dumped eight assignments on her with a three- day deadline.

Then he threw in one final line:

iPractice /iihard/i. And went offline.

Sloane stared at the screen, frustrated. It took her a while to recover.

“This isn’t a reunion. It’s straight back to hell,” she muttered. Still, years of trust and her stubborn pride pushed her to pull herself together and dive headfirst into the tasks.

At the Hawthorne Group, Andrew knocked on the door to the CEO’s office with a file in hand.

“Come in,” Lucas’s deep voice called from inside.

Andrew entered quickly and ced the file gently on the desk. “This is the detailed report on Peak Corp that you asked for. They’ve made major breakthroughs in robotic engineering. Their new intelligent coborative robot features advanced flexible control tech and canpleteplex tasks with extreme precision in tough environments. Its repeat positioning uracy reaches ±0.05mm, far beyond the standard for simr products. However, Peak Corp is extremely cautious about partnerships. They’ve already declined offers from several well- establishedpanies.”