The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 30

The news of the "ghost team" swept through the ranks of the competitors like a shockwave. On the official competition forums, theories exploded. Some claimed it was a hack. Others thought it was a team of professors or even a secret team from Blackwood Industries, setting an impossible benchmark. No one believed it was a legitimate student submission.

In the opulent headquarters of "Team Sovereign," the mood had shifted from confident focus to angry confusion.

"A glitch. It has to be," said Jen, one of Mark's top coders, staring at the leaderboard with disgust. "The system probably bugged out and auto-completed their entry. They'll be disqualified in an hour."

But Mark Chen wasn't so sure. He was a true prodigy, and he knew that sometimes, genius looked a lot like a glitch to ordinary people. The sheer audacity of the result intrigued him. While his team continued to grind away at the second problem, he did something no one else thought to do. He used his administrative access as a senior student moderator to pull the raw submission file for "Team SC."

He opened the file, expecting to find a corrupted mess of code or a simple exploit that had tricked the system.

Instead, his breath caught in his throat.

What he was looking at was... beautiful.

It wasn't just code. It was a work of art. The structure was so clean, so efficient, it was almost alien. There were no wasted lines, no brute-force solutions. It was a short, devastatingly elegant script that didn't just solve the problems; it revealed them to be trivial. It was like watching someone solve a Rubik's Cube not by turning the sides, but by simply telling the colors where they were supposed to go.

A cold dread, mixed with a profound, humbling awe, began to creep up his spine. He had spent his entire life being the smartest person in the room. Now, he was looking at the work of a god.

And there was something vaguely familiar about it. The style, the perfect, ruthless efficiency... he had seen it before. Not in a classroom, but in the dark corners of the internet.

He quickly opened a secure, encrypted browser, its interface a stark black, and navigated to a site that didn't exist on the public web. It was an elite, invitation-only hacking forum known as "The Black Ledger," a place where the world's most talented and dangerous coders shared war stories and traded in secrets that could topple governments. He searched for a specific term: "signature coding."

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