2025-12-05 22:40:33
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 121
Chapter 121A few months later....For three months, Lucas had lived in this self-imposed exile. The sharp, promising scholarship student was gone, a ghost replaced by this pale, focused operative. His crime had been curiosity; his sentence, social and academic obliteration. The Sentinel System—the university’s all-seeing, all-judging digital panopticon designed for “community harmony and proactive wellness”—had been turned against him with surgical precision.It had started with a research fellowship under Professor Alistair Finch, a charismatic pioneer in campus predictive analytics. Lucas, diving deep into the Sentinel’s source code for his thesis on algorithmic bias, had found the “Oracles”: a set of privileged, hidden administrative accounts that could inject data, alter behavioral flags, and manipulate the all-important “Civic Trust Score” without a trace. The Oracles weren’t a bug; they were a backdoor, woven into the system’s very fabric. His forensic trail led not to a hacker
Chapter 120
Chapter 120The choice was made. Path Three: Subversion. Now, Lucas Johnson had to build his arsenal. His intelligence was vast, scattered across encrypted drives, cloud snippets, and the labyrinthine corridors of his own memory. To wage a war from inside the enemy's walls, he needed it weaponized: organized, accessible, and protected with the kind of failsafes that would make attacking him the costliest mistake Sentinel could ever make.He began by designing the architecture. This wasn't a simple folder of documents. It was a strategic database, a war room in digital form. He used a custom, open-source database platform, heavily modified and hardened, running on a standalone machine never connected to any network. He called it **Project Labyrinth**.**Labyrinth** was divided into interconnected sectors, each a pillar of the coming offensive.**Sector A: The Human Cost.** Here, he compiled the dossiers of every verified victim. Julian Morrow's toxicology report and the link to the Pal
Chapter 119
Chapter 119The blueprint was complete. The machine—Sentinel’s vast, silent engine of acquisition—was laid bare in his mind, every gear, every wire, every chilling protocol mapped. The inheritance, that shimmering miracle that had guided his life for years, was now revealed as the central cog in that machine. It was no longer a question of what had happened to him. It was a question of what **Lucas Johnson** would do next. He stood at a precipice defined by three distinct, terrifying paths.**Path One: Acceptance.** He could play the part. He could stop his investigation, allow the “tests” to conclude, and accept the full inheritance when it was offered. He would receive the keys to Tier-II assets: the investment portfolio, the seed capital, the life of secure, gilded comfort. In exchange, he would enter their world. A debriefing, likely with Dr. Aris Thorne or the ghostly Axiom. An orientation. He would be given a role—perhaps in SACE-PSYOPS, analyzing new targets. Or in Ouroboros, m
Chapter 118
Chapter 118For months, Lucas had been a cartographer of his own persecution, mapping each cruelty back to its source. He had charts of SACE's divisions, dossiers on operatives and handlers, financial trails leading to defense contracts and blood minerals, and chilling protocols for non-compliance. But standing back from the vast mosaic of data, a single, coherent image finally emerged. It was no longer a collection of terrifying parts. It was a machine. A machine with a singular, chilling purpose.Sentinel Systems was not a wealth management firm that dabbled in psychological manipulation. It was the opposite. It was a **human capital acquisition engine**, and wealth management was its camouflage, its fuel source, and its reward mechanism.The inheritance structure was the perfect cover. It provided a plausible, even laudable, explanation for sudden fortune. It attracted exactly the kind of individuals they wanted: the brilliant, the ambitious, the vulnerable outsiders hungry for a c
Chapter 117
Chapter 117Lucas had mapped the machinery, identified the architects, and traced the tainted money. He had become a formidable intelligence analyst within the very system designed to break him. But in his meticulous excavation, he had uncovered something more immediate and chilling than corporate flowcharts or financial crimes: the rules of the game, and the penalties for breaking them.It was buried in a sub-directory of the SACE administrative server, a folder labeled **PROTOCOLS / CONTINGENCIES / HEIR NON-COMPLIANCE**. The language was not the dry legalese of the trust fund. It was the crisp, procedural dialect of a security manual. He opened the master document.**Subject:** *Containment and Consequence Frameworks for Heirs Demonstrating Awareness of Assessment Parameters or Active Non-Cooperation.*His blood turned to ice as he read. The document outlined a tiered response system, a graduated escalation of force designed to manage heirs who stepped out of their designated role a
Chapter 116
Chapter 116The inheritance had always been a paradox—a miraculous salvation with a hidden barb. Lucas had accepted its dark strings: the surveillance, the tests, the conditional clauses. But he had, in some quiet corner of his mind, clung to the foundational myth: it was his grandfather's money. A legacy, however twisted by Sentinel's management. It was a link to a family he never knew, a bloodline offering a lifeline. Now, armed with the maps of Sentinel's financial labyrinth and a hardened resolve to question every truth, he decided to follow the money to its absolute source. He needed to know what his life, his suffering, was ultimately being purchased with.He began with the "Johnson Family Trust" documents. The listed grantor was "The Alistair Vance Memorial Trust," named for his grandfather. On paper, Alistair Vance was a self-made industrialist who had made a modest fortune in post-war manufacturing and died without direct heirs, his estate managed by a distant law firm that h
You may also like
The Pinnacle of Life
Evergreen Qin1.7M viewsThe Unexpected Heir
Estherace85.7K viewsRevenge of the Abandoned Heir
wounded_warrior126.4K viewsReturn Of The Dragon Lord
Snowwriter 135.2K viewsTRILLIONAIRE'S COLD REVENGE
EL JHAY3.8K viewsThe Almighty General
Michael Chi 129 viewsRise Of The Rejected Son-in-law
S. F. A229 viewsThe Rise Of The Orphan Billionare
Son Of Neal2.2K views