Villainous Mastermind

[ No. The system does not engage in human trafficking. It is a legal business and pays all of its taxes. ]

"You, systems pay taxes? Damn, the IRS is probably just as scary in your world as it is in mine," said Cynthia as she wasn't expecting systems to have to pay taxes. For now, the IRS doesn't matter to her as she is a minor without any taxable assets in her name.

"That doesn't explain how I can give this guy a child?"

[ The system has vetted the situation and intentions on the side of the client. The child given to them will be safe for the foreseeable future and will live an enviable life. ]

After hearing this, Cynthia still had questions but she held back as the King still needed an answer.

"I'll accept this trade. I'll find candidates and send you their information," she said to the king. She explained to the king that she would go through orphanages around her and see how many kids fit the requirement.

After that, the king could have his pick, given that she could actually find and pull out this kid from his orphanage. The king was fine with these terms as no one minded having options.

After finishing the settlement of terms, Cynthia opened her laptop and started to type away on a programming platform.

Lines of code were formed on her screen in a mashup of numbers and letters that formed strings of complicated commands. Seeing her fingers clacking away at an unfathomable speed, the system internally complimented its host's skills.

'Wow! This is a good level of coding skills for what this world level is. Wait, it's actually quite advanced compared to the time period. Not by much though." The system noticed that Cynthia was building anti-spyware, malware, and other safety features to protect her device.

It even felt that Cynthia could make quite a bit of income if she licensed and sold a less advanced version of the program on the market. Cyber security is a very lucrative market as everyone wants their data to be safe and is willing to pay good money to keep it that way.

Not including the common person, large firms and companies would shower her in money if they could get their hands on something to prevent sensitive information to be stolen. The government would also pay good money if it is better than what they already have.

"Hehehe, it's done!" shouted Cynthia in glee as she finally let go o the keyboard after half an hour. She smiled in satisfaction as she had just finished a small part of her program.

Yes, it's a small part. You can't expect someone to build a full program in half-hour as most high-end programs take teams of people working for hundreds of hours to make.

"For now, this would protect my search history from being tracked." Cynthia was going to engage in a large-scale hack on servers from all the orphanages in the city.

She was going to do this through the internet and only needed to clean up her tracks from there. She had already removed the programs from Duketh industries that her father put in it.

They couldn't figure out what he was doing on the computer even if they got their hands on it.

So after making sure that there was no way she would be caught through technology, Cynthia easily bypassed the firewalls on the servers.

She evaluated the average firewalls of these days to be nothing compared to those in the future. The current strength of these systems is more like air walls to her.

BING! BING! BING! BING! BING! BING!

It took only a couple of minutes for her to simultaneously copy and download all the data she wanted from these orphanages.

While the download was happening, memories f the past surfaced in front of her eyes. She was much older, her beautiful face more elegant but even colder than it was when she was young.

She sat at an office desk as she was carefully listing to the instructions of a group of a dozen young kids from ages 13 to 18. There were both boys and girls but they all wore professional clothes such as suits.

Their mature outfits did not match their age and disposition at all, in fact, they were uncomfortable at the moment. So uncomfortable that they felt like tearing out of these expensive clothes that made them stiff.

Still, they held themselves together as the woman in front of them is the one that gave them the kind of life they wanted. They were fine ignoring their antisocial tendencies once in a while for her.

"How has life been at the foundation for your guys." asked the older Cynthia as she made a somewhat awkward smile towards the kids.

"It's been great! No one bothers us even if we stay locked in for days!"

"Yeah! The meals always come at the exact time."

'No one tells me when to sleep or when to wake up."

'i can spend however much time I want on my programing and no one stops me."

These were the responses that the young men and women gave Cynthia. They only had positivity for the life they had been given at the Cynthesis Foundation.

A place for genius, antisocial teenagers where they could live their lives as they wanted as long as they took care of their health. These 12 youngsters are from the Programming Unit, which consists of young programming geniuses.

Today, they are here to thank the founder of the foundation and assist her in learning how to code. They would all share their insight and instruct her to the best of their abilities.

This was the best they could do for her until they were of legal working age and provided a position at Cynthesis Holdings.

"Hehehe, those were some interesting kids. They grew up to be fantastic people and substantial assets for my companies," said Cynthia as she broke free from those memories.

She laughed peacefully as she really had a fun time learning with those eccentric kids, especially since each one of them had a different insight to give. At the end of their lessons though, she wasn't better than any of them and could only be considered somewhat skilled.

At this moment, she was wondering if she should start the foundation early this time when she received a string of notifications indicating that the download was complete.

When she saw the number of children she had to go through, Cynthia cursed out loud in fury.

"What the fuck! Why are there over 48 thousand orphans in this city?" She was hit with a culture shock as she was never aware that there was such a large amount of kids in her city alone that didn't have a family.

She then did research on the statistics for her country. She found that in Aznolia, there are about 500,000 kids that are considered orphans and a significant portion of them are available for adoption.

In her heart, she felt sad for these children and felt even more fortunate that her life didn't start on the bad end of the spectrum. She wished she could make their lives better but she isn't that capable at the moment.

"Let's see, the king said that he wants them to be between 4 and 10. Hmm, hey system can you help me out here." No way in hell would Cynthia go through all of this one by one. She would narrow the list as much as possible.

She had already narrowed it down to that age range and this still gave a list of 22,000+ names long.

[ I cannot help the hosted except for collecting and confirming the authenticity of what is being traded. ]

"Tch, I don't want to make a facial recognition program. Those things are as difficult as building a skyscraper with bricks." Cynthia clicked her tongue but gave up complaining.

She was the one who accepted these tasks in the first place. She opened her coding tool and was just about to start when inspiration hit her.

"I should figure out how I am going to kidna...cough cough, I mean escort the child from the orphanage." Cynthia figured that she could take kids from any orphanage she wanted as a missing case would definitely be filled.

With that line of thinking, she started to monologue all the relevant information in her head.

"Crimes involving minors had their own section in the police departments and these sections are well funded.

The government doesn't want to lose kids as they are the biggest source of superhuman awakenings. Most superhumans are awakened when they are minors and rarely do they appear in the already adult population.

This means that I have to target orphanages in areas where the police are swamped in cases. This would lead them to have less time to investigate. As long as I leave behind no evidence, the police would close the case after one or two quick glances.

So orphanages in bust metropolitan areas should be my target. It would be better if I can find areas with higher crime rates.

It would be even better if the orphanage is one that is heavily populated as the disappearance may also take time to be noticed and reported."

With her monologue coming to an end and her parameters being set. Cynthia filtered out orphanages from the less populated areas. She also excluded the sectors in the city that were practically crime-free.

She made sure of these crime rates by hacking into the central police database of the city. It was only 50% percent harder than that of the orphanage servers if she calculated the difficulty of entry and extraction.

After finishing her search, she had it narrowed down to 25 orphanages with a total of 2,342 kids.

"Oh my, this hurts my head more than mana training," Cynthia claimed. She never hated doing math as a business person but when it comes to coding, she felt that the numbers are too overwhelming.

"This should be enough for now. I need to clear my mind before looking through this extensive list." Cynthia wanted to take good care of her mental health. She needed to keep her mental stress down to a certain level.

She has to be in a good condition to use the other two serums she had traded for. Mana training was going to strain her mind every day. This leads her to make the decision to take regular breaks and keep herself happy.

It would prevent any harm to her mind and keep the effects of the serums potent. Plus. she really did want to enjoy herself as much as she could. There was more than enough time in the next 24 hours to go through all the kids.

This is why she changed into some workout clothes and went on a run outside, She even stretched and did curl-ups, pushups, and other exercises to continue the toning of her body.

As she was doing this, the system was bust talking to her mother.

Daughter: Mommy, I think my host might be a criminal mastermind.

Mommy: You sure? I checked her records and she only committed minor financial crimes and figured out ways to pay fewer taxes. This was in her past life.

Daughter: She just figured out a near-perfect plan of abducting a child from an orphanage while minimizing the chances of getting caught.

When the mother read this, she didn't find it surprising as the host she choose for her daughter is very intelligent and cunning, This was the reason she could make a massive fortune from barely anything.

Mommy: As long as one has enough time to plan, access to information, and a cunning mind, they can commit nearly untraceable crimes. It is very common. Do not be so worried my love, your host is just capable.

Daughter: Mommy, It seems I forgot to mention that she did all of her planning in mere minutes. I see no holes in it as long as she doesn't get unlucky.

Mommy: Minutes? Are you sure?

The mother was taken aback, is her daughter hosts some sort of criminal mastermind? One that didn't show up until she was given the chance.

"Wait second, I should get those guys to do a more thorough background check. What if they missed some crimes?" she thought before contacting a certain group of underlings and giving strict orders.

Mommy: Give a couple of minutes, those guys are going to scour the remanents data of her pats timeline. They will check for anything that was possibly missed.

Daughter: Okay.

After 3 minutes, a report was received on the gorgeous mother's device. She quickly read through it as her eyes started to bulge out at the content.

Daughter: You still there, mommy? You should have gotten it already. Send it over.

The system's mother was at a loss and was decided on whether she should share such data with her daughter. She decided that she had to be transparent about things like these and forwarded the reviewed report to her daughter.

A report that was 5 times thicker than the original one. A minute later, the system sent a hateful message to her mother.

Daughter: WTF MOMMY?!! What do you pay those information brokers? They didn't share such crucial information about her criminal affairs.

At this time, in front of the system was a document that listed over 300 white-collar crimes. ones that involve a large number of acts that fall into legal gray zones and are hard for the government to charge people for.

These crimes were hidden so well that no agency across Planet Gaia had been even able to get a whiff at how much money Cynthia was hiding.