Chapter 2

“Cutting off authorization unilaterally like this is a severe violation of company discipline.”

I glanced at the disciplinary document. It was filled with paragraph after paragraph painting me as selfish and a threat to team harmony.

“Do you even know she’s been intentionally stalling my full-time status approval?”

He went silent for half a second.

Only half a second.

“One thing has nothing to do with the other. Your attitude is a major problem. Go apologize to Adeline first, then turn the gateway access back on.”

I looked him straight in the eyes.

“And if I refuse?”

His face darkened completely. “Valerian, you need to see the bigger picture. By causing a scene like this, the entire development team’s performance bonus for the month is going down the drain.”

“And if you force a forty percent pay cut on me, who’s going to pay my mortgage?”

He leaned back in his executive chair and let out a sneer. Twirling a Montblanc fountain pen between his fingers, his tone dripped with condescending arrogance.

“Young man, don’t get so hung up on money. In today’s job market, good opportunities are hard to come by, but programmers? They’re a dime a dozen.”

“Dime a dozen?” I was almost amused by his sheer ignorance. “Next Tuesday is the Mid-Year Mega Sale. Without my high-concurrency settlement engine, your systems won’t even handle fifty thousand concurrent requests.”

Leonidas waved his hand dismissively.

“Valerian, you take yourself far too seriously. The world will keep turning without any one person, and the company needs to give new talent a chance to grow.”

I stared at him.

“So, is this your decision, or Adeline’s?”

He avoided my eyes.

“I’m simply optimizing the team structure.”

I nodded. “Got it. So there’s zero chance of me being made permanent at my original salary, right?”

“That’s Adeline’s department. You’ve upset her so much that she’s taking sick leave, so no one’s opening a special channel for you.”

“Fine,” I said, standing up. “Issue me a written statement clearly stating that the company unilaterally breached the contract, leading to my resignation, and that any technical failures going forward have nothing to do with me.”

His expression changed instantly.

“Valerian, don’t push your luck.”

“I want it before the end of the day. Otherwise, I don’t mind going straight to the client’s CTO for a quick chat.”

I slammed the door behind me.

The moment I stepped back into the office, I spotted Adeline—the woman who had supposedly been so upset that she needed to take sick leave—sitting there with a cup of coffee in hand, chatting away with Tristan .

At two in the afternoon, Adeline walked up to my desk carrying a thick stack of documents.

Her eyes were still red as she put on a fragile, purely professional act.

“Valerian, here’s your exit checklist. According to the new policy, you need to organize all the abandoned system logs in the archive and sign off on them before we can stamp your papers.”

I looked at the stack of well over a hundred pages of scrap paper, so angry that I laughed.

“I’ve only been here for three months, and you’re making me sort through four years of logs?”

“It’s standard procedure. My hands are tied.”

I stared at her for three solid seconds.

“Fine.”

I spent three hours using AI to crudely process the logs, printed them out, and tossed them back to her.

At five in the afternoon, I took the signed form to her desk to get it stamped.

She looked at me with an aggrieved expression.

“Oh dear, what bad timing. Mr. Sterling just left early, so we can’t stamp it today…”

I had just walked past Leonidas’s office minutes ago and heard him on the phone.

She was intentionally using these disgusting tactics to wear me down, trying to force me to surrender the core permissions to the new project.

I took a deep breath and suppressed the anger in my chest.

“Fine. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

I knew the entire company had its eyes on me. The second I lost my temper, they would use it to cement their claims of my ‘emotional instability and technical bullying.’

Just before the workday ended, a notification popped up in the main company group chat, tagging everyone.

It was posted by Leonidas.

[@Everyone: Recently, the company has discovered certain employees displaying arrogant behavior, using the minor technical resources in their hands to maliciously threaten the company, severely disrupting the workplace ecosystem. The company has zero tolerance for such ‘individual heroism’! I hope everyone takes this as a warning and upholds professional ethics.]