Chapter 19 – The Hacker in the Code
Three days later, the unpredictable became the catastrophic
. Xiao Xi's System went completely silent.
No missions,
no updates,
no luck counter—just a blank, unresponsive darkness where the translucent panel used to be.
The digital tether to her survival was gone.
"System?" she called internally, trying every known command and verbal trigger.
Silence.
The feeling was akin to being suddenly blindfolded and thrown into a battlefield.
She was relying purely on her own memory of the plot, which was already warped by the existence of Gu Yanzhou.
Then, her phone buzzed with an ominous, anonymous message from an unknown sender, sent via an encrypted proxy.
We know about your 'luck theft,' Miss Xiao Xi. We know how you manipulate the narrative.
Enjoy your fame while it lasts.
Her stomach dropped, the fear sharp and visceral.
Someone knew.
Not just about her current success, but about the mechanism of her survival—the System, the Luck theft, the entire transmigration cheat.
The chilling realization was that the sender had access to information that should only exist in the System's core code.
Panic threatened to surface, a paralyzing cold spreading through her limbs, but she forced herself to breathe deeply, activating her strategic training.
"Think, Xiao Xi.
Who could it be?"
Her eyes flicked to the cast list in her mind—Lin Yueran.
The rival was the only one who had watched her closely enough, who had the intense, obsessive motive to dig deeper and find the anomaly behind Xiao Xi's sudden reversal of fortune.
Lin Yueran possessed the motive and the connections in the entertainment world.
But did she possess the technical skill to hack a foreign system?
Meanwhile, in the shielded security hub of the Dynasty Tower, Gu Yanzhou's elite tech division was intercepting and analyzing strange, highly sophisticated activity around Xiao Xi's public and private online accounts.
Gu Yanzhou stood over the humming servers, his expression dark and dangerous. The data was encrypted, complex, and clearly malicious—a coordinated cyber attack designed not to steal money, but to gather information and destabilize.
"Who's targeting her?" he demanded, his voice low and tight with controlled fury.
The protective impulse he'd suppressed for days surged to the forefront.
His chief security assistant hesitated, pointing to a complex network map. "Sir, the access points are untraceable, but the final routing address—the destination for the exfiltrated data—is coming from somewhere using the entertainment company's private network."
Gu Yanzhou's eyes narrowed to slits.
The location confirmed his deepest suspicion: this was an internal, targeted attack, likely orchestrated by a professional within the entertainment world who had access to the production company's infrastructure.
"Then it's an inside job," he confirmed, his voice icy.
"Someone knows she is a vulnerability, and they are trying to exploit it.
Find the user credentials associated with that network access point, and then contact my corporate security team.
I want a complete shutdown of that individual's access to any external media platforms within the hour.
And I want that person isolated immediately."
He knew this wasn't just rivalry; this was war, escalating from petty sabotage to full-scale technological warfare.
Gu Yanzhou's empire was built on controlling information, and he would not allow anyone to compromise his primary strategic asset.