Chapter 79: Could She Be a Super Hacker?

Hearing her say "teach me" without any buildup, not even offering a word of "please," Xu Yunzhou almost laughed out of anger.

"Teach you?"

Xu Yunzhou "floated" half a circle in her narrow space where even turning around was difficult, his tone carrying obvious displeasure,

"Sure. However, I'm not running a charity here. Calling me something nice-sounding like Teacher or Master, would be appropriate, right?"

Xu Nuo stared at the code that had just successfully run on the screen. Without turning her head back, her voice was as hard as a stone:

"Teacher."

Xu Yunzhou:

"...Your tone, it sounds more to me like you're calling 'that guy' or 'hey'."

He completely submitted.

If it weren't for the fact that this broken game couldn't skip this instance, he really wouldn't want to serve this rebellious young girl covered in thorns all over!

Thinking about how well-behaved and fragrant those young ladies Xuanxuan and Ruru were!

They could act coquettishly, rely on him, and even dance a dance of gratitude! Not like this little stone, besides making him angry, she's preparing to anger him to death!

Forget it, endure it!

Just treat it as a necessary tribulation in a System's career, a stubborn stone that must be redeemed on the path of cultivation!

"Sigh, fine, seeing as you are so sincere."

Xu Yunzhou's perspective locked back onto her code editor, his tone becoming slightly more serious,

"Here, you want to write a crawler to scrape transaction data from that gray forum, the idea is not bad. But the other party's anti-crawler mechanism isn't vegetarian. You directly charging head-on using the requests library is purely asking to be banned."

Xu Nuo's brows immediately furrowed tightly; this was the biggest difficult problem she encountered currently:

"Then... what should be done?"

"Your thinking must be flexible, you can't be single-minded."

Xu Yunzhou began to instruct,

"Try using tools like Selenium to simulate the browser behavior of a real user. Or, more cleverly, look to see if it provides data API interfaces for mobile Apps."

"Even reverse-analyzing its App communication protocol is more efficient than you charging head-on like this right now."

"Doing network security, offense and defense are one body, you can't just know how to strike fiercely and charge blindly."

Xu Nuo's eyes abruptly lit up. She didn't say more, her fingers immediately dancing on the keyboard, beginning to try the several new ideas Xu Yunzhou mentioned.

She learned extremely fast, her comprehension astonishing.

Often, Xu Yunzhou only gave a slight pointer, and she could immediately draw inferences about other cases from one instance and understand by analogy.

Observing the speed of her fingers almost dancing into afterimages on the keyboard beside her, Xu Yunzhou muttered secretly in his heart:

With this learning speed and concentration, could it be I really have to nurture her into a super hacker who commands the internet and hacks into the Pentagon?

The problem is... although I know a bit myself, I can't be considered a top-tier tech boss. Won't I expose my ignorance when teaching later on?

Uh... wait, the Game Mall actually seems to have a thing called [Hacker Master Experience Card]. It's just that one use only lasts five minutes, and it's deadly expensive...

If it really comes down to it, I'll just package the difficult problems and throw them to Lin Ruoxuan. She definitely has top-tier professional teams under her who can solve them.

Unknowingly, the ink-like night outside the window began to fade, and the horizon turned fish-belly white.

Xu Nuo finally successfully scraped the data fragment she wanted.

Although it was only a very small step, an almost satisfied expression appeared for the first time on her pale little face, although it flashed by fleetingly.

She finally couldn't hold on anymore, falling heavily onto the cold, hard tatami mat, almost instantly falling into a deep sleep.

She didn't need to go to school during the day. Although nominally affiliated with a "Correspondence High School" located in Adachi Ward, she only needed to symbolically show her face once a month and submit some perfunctory reports.

Attending this school was her "identity cover" to legally stay in Nihon, and also a necessary formality that the so-called distant cousin Uncle Kobayashi Ba downstairs did to maintain his "guardian" status (and use it to fish for some government subsidies).

As the sky turned bright, this building named "Happiness Manor" and its surroundings began to buzz, emitting various annoying noises—arguments next door, the sleep talk of a drunkard downstairs, the ear-piercing roar of a motorcycle, and TV static coming from nowhere...

Xu Nuo tossed and turned on the narrow tatami, disturbed into being half asleep and half awake.

Her brows furrowed tightly, seeming to have fallen into some terrifying nightmare. Her body twitched slightly, and finally, she jolted awake abruptly, sitting up all at once!

Her eyes were empty, carrying the bewilderment of just escaping a nightmare and fear that hadn't dispersed completely, unconsciously muttering in a low voice:

"Dad... Mom... where are you..."

Xu Yunzhou, who had been quietly "observing" her all along, understood clearly in his heart, a wave of complex emotion rising.

It seems this girl's life experience is even more bumpy than he imagined.

A heaven-shaking change must have happened in her family for her to be sent to this foreign country and entrusted to such an unreliable so-called "relative."

Mhm, that pair of seemingly expensive headphones also has an explanation now; it might be one of the few items left before the family's misfortune.

No wonder she is so resistant to him.

People who have experienced the cruel devastation of life have long ceased to believe that good luck will fall from the sky, so they instinctively fear and reject it.

With a thought, he gently clicked that [Reward] button emitting a gentle green light.

A large hand composed of soft light surfaced out of thin air, gently brushing over her sweat-dampened bangs, dispersing the palpitation and chill brought by the nightmare.

Under that comfortable touch, Xu Nuo subconsciously narrowed her eyes slightly like a cat being stroked along its fur, her tense body relaxing for an instant.

But in the next second, she abruptly woke up completely.

Bouncing away like a frightened rabbit, wrapping the thin quilt tightly around herself, she glared vigilantly toward Xu Yunzhou's direction, her voice carrying disbelief:

"You... you're still here? Everything last night... wasn't a dream?"

Xu Yunzhou's illusory figure let out a deep and pleasant laugh, carrying a meaning of "you've finally accepted your fate":

"Genuine and guaranteed. Since you're awake, why don't we chat? Mhm, where in Great Xia are you from?"

Xu Nuo rapidly reined in that momentary fragility from just now, returning to that cold and hard appearance, turning her head away:

"Nothing to chat about."

The refusal was clean and neat.

Xu Yunzhou didn't mind either, changing to a more practical topic:

"Alright, then let's talk about something useful. Have you ever thought about moving out of this hellhole?"

"With this kind of routine and living environment, you won't grow any taller, and your body will get worse and worse. You are still young and still developing, you can't go on like this."

Hearing this, as if hearing the biggest joke in the world, the corners of Xu Nuo's mouth pulled into a "heh" full of mockery:

"You, a ghost from Great Xia, are completely ignorant of the situation here in Nihon."

She extended two fingers,

"First, without the agreement and provided materials from that so-called guardian downstairs, as an underage foreigner, I have no way to independently sign any formal rental contract. Second,"

She paused, her tone carrying the coldness of reality,

"Even if I could sign, deposit, key money, the first few months' rent, and the most basic living expenses... I need to prepare at least one million Yen to possibly barely survive. One million! Do you understand?"

(TL: Key money / Reikin is a mandatory, non-refundable gift to the landlord common in Japan.)

Looking at her expression of "you completely don't understand human suffering," Xu Yunzhou didn't get angry but laughed instead, his tone as relaxed as discussing what to eat for breakfast:

"Just this? And I thought it was some big matter."