Anthea frowned slightly. “So, did Lorraine ever find Ivy’s Place in the end?”
“No,” Sherman replied, shaking his head. “Lorraine waited here for over thirty years, but her child vanished as if they’d never existed.”
The two of them were deep in conversation, and the driver, sensing their focus, slowed the car to give them more time.
...
Rebecca was falling apart.
It had been fourteen hours since she’d left Tech Summit Global, and the system still wasn’t responding.
Had it really disappeared?
What was she supposed to do now?
She sat slumped on the couch, fingers tangled in her hair, her features twisted in distress, looking every bit like someone on the edge of a breakdown.
It took a long time before she finally calmed herself enough to breathe. She opened her laptop, determined to at least log in to TechNet.
The system’s last task for her had been to conquer the tech world. Maybe, if she logged on, the system would come back on its own.
She navigated to the login page, typed in her password, and hit enter.
And then her face went completely white.
A notice flashed across the screen: her account had been permanently banned.
What was happening?
Was the system malfunctioning?
There was no reason for her account to be banned—she hadn’t even done anything wrong!
No, this had to be a mistake.
Rebecca restarted her computer and tried again.
But the result was the same.
Her account was truly, irreversibly gone.
In a panic, she opened her messenger app and sent a message to Mason’s assistant—the only acquaintance she had left in the tech world.
The assistant replied almost instantly: [Ms. Morris, you failed to complete a single task at Tech Summit Global, and over ten thousand users reported you for cheating. The system has determined your previous achievements were fraudulent, so your account has been permanently banned.]
That was it. As of today, Phoenix_Re no longer existed in the tech community.
How could this be happening?
How dare they erase her like this?
With burning eyes, Rebecca fired off another message to the assistant, but this time, she saw she’d been blocked.
Really? Was everyone just going to kick her while she was down?
“Bastards!” Rebecca screamed, hurling her phone to the floor.
Crack—
The screen shattered into a spiderweb of glass.
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