All Chapters of Restart My Life: The CEO's Second Chance: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

40 Chapters

Chapter 21: Mentorship and Masks

(Elias's POV)The sun outside the high windows had begun to set, long fingers of gold stretching across Elias Tan's office. Silence. Save for the gentle tick of the wall clock, his office was still. The air was musty, tinged with the faint smells of paper and stale coffee. Shylie sat across from him, straight-backed and unfazed, calm face and still hands resting on her knees.He had seen students bluff before. He had seen arrogance, pride, fear. But not Shylie. There was a stillness to her that made people nervous. It wasn't the quiet of shyness, it was the quiet of complete control.Elias slid a tablet across the desk toward her. "Let's begin." He leaned back in his chair. "This is a simulation. You're the head of a tech company. You're producing a highly sophisticated AI designed for use in hospitals. You're halfway through the production process when you discover a major fault in the system

Last Updated : 2025-10-16

Chapter 22: Echoes Through the Hall

The school was noisy that week. Midterms, student elections, and buzz from the tech incubator showcase echoed down every hallway. Students buzzed from class to class, lugging folders and unfinished sandwiches. Everybody looked tired and half-crazy from stress.But Shylie Reed moved through the crowd like she was unaffected. Unbothered. Her steps were steady, and her face placid.The whispers followed her anyway."She's getting special treatment.""Elias Tan's mentoring her, right?""No wonder she's so far ahead. Look at who she knows."She heard them all, but she didn't stop. She didn't turn or protest. She never did. She only focused forward.If people thought she was getting Elias's help to move ahead faster, she didn't care. Words couldn't build or destroy what she was making.

Last Updated : 2025-10-17

Chapter 23: Between Pressure and Peace

The rooftop garden was quiet. It was out of earshot of the school below. Most students had no idea it was even there. There was too much to pay attention to in hallways full of grades and gossip and midterm panic. Shylie had discovered it by accident weeks earlier. Since then, it had become her refuge.Sunlight spilled across the garden in an afternoon haze, bathing the wild plants that clung to the railings in light. A few bees floated lazily from flower to flower. The air was fresh and silent.Shylie sat with her knees pulled to her chest on a small stone bench. Her hands were loosely folded in her lap. She was not thinking about projects or equations or algebraic word problems. Not today. She only wanted silence.She heard footsteps on the gravel path behind her, but didn't look up. She already knew who was coming."Thought I might find you here," Darren said quietly. He had a peacefulness

Last Updated : 2025-10-18

Chapter 24: The Cost of Winning

The simulation Elias had sent was different. It wasn't about building a system or writing code. It wasn't about empires or products. This one was personal.SCENARIO:You've made it to the final stage of investor meetings. Your revolutionary technology is complete. But a key engineer, your only family, has made a critical mistake that could jeopardize your launch. Investors are threatening to cut you off or pull their funding.Do you choose: Family or Future?Shylie sat at her desk, not moving. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. The words on the screen seemed to throb faintly under her gaze, regular as a heartbeat.She didn't have to imagine the scenario. She already had.A long time ago, before this restart, before she had even known Elias, her younger brother Thomas had made the same kind of mistake. The mistake that had ended it all. He had trusted the wrong person, sign

Last Updated : 2025-10-19

Chapter 25: The Forgotten Sibling

Dinner at the Reed house had not always been so cold. Thomas remembered times of laughter, silverware clanking against plates, his mother's quiet voice chastising him whenever the noise level became too high. But now, it was so quiet. Too quiet. The five of them sat in their traditional places, each of them trying so hard to act like everything was okay. It was like they were in a play with no audience.His mother set down the plates with a gentle clink and did her best to avoid eye contact. His father shielded himself behind the Sunday paper, flipping idly through its pages without actually reading them. Leah talked the easiest, her voice filling the awkward silence with her usual ease. Nonsensical things. A class project. A teacher's praise. A bright, unceasing smile. If any of them had a band-aid for their family, it was Leah.But the air had frozen because of Shylie.Shylie didn't eat much. She sat

Last Updated : 2025-10-20

Chapter 26: Intervention Protocol

It was late. Actually, it was very late. Past midnight. Shylie arrived back to her dorm-style student unit just outside the incubator hub. The small, sterile room with its bare walls and utilitarian furnishings felt like a refuge from the Reed household insanity. But there was nothing restful about the cramped space where Shylie had come to live “closer to campus under a work-study program.” She had wanted to be near the hubs, closer to the action. But the truth was she just couldn’t take it there anymore. It had become too oppressive, her family’s collective madness too suffocating. She set her bag by the door with a harsh exhale and kicked off her shoes before stepping into the silence, inhaling the stillness like a narcotic. The pale lamplight cast an eerie pallor across the entire room; even the high buzz from the city outside the thin windows felt muted and far away. She wasn’t alone. Elias was sitting at her desk, an unmistakable presence framed by t

Last Updated : 2025-10-24

Chapter 27: Calculated Exposure

Shylie sat alone in the incubator's private strategy room. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed faintly in the background. On her desk was a solitary lamp, casting harsh shadows across the reams of printouts, handwritten memos, and a manila folder, stampedCONFIDENTIAL: Simulation 26. She'd been here before. The same practice rooms, the same data to pore over, the same decision trees to analyze and evaluate and perfect. The variables were different this time. She could feel it in her bones. Shylie read the packet once, twice. Three. It wasn't a game.Scenario: You are co-founder of a breakthrough biotech startup with a sibling. Your sibling leaks part of your research to a rival firm in a moment of desperation. Your company's investors are on edge. Trust is broken. The future of your work is on the line.

Last Updated : 2025-10-27

Chapter 28: The Reckoning Room

The boardroom meeting was in a modern wood-paneled conference room; freshly upholstered but intentionally stiff. The massive oval table gleamed like black marble, reflecting the tense faces around it in sickly amber from the fluorescent lights above. A tense silence. Thick. Humid. Oppressive. Each breath everyone took seemed labored in the room’s acoustics. Principal Min presided over the table. Stiff-backed and pursed-lipped, her eyes darted back and forth at the disparate groups around her. Administrators on one flank, as tight-lipped and formal as they were white-collar. Parents on the other, one fidgeting in her seat with an oversized purse, the other scribbling notes in a cheap notebook (concerned or looking for a scoop, either would do). Principal Min looked expectantly at Elias Tan. Tan was unmoved. Erect and statuesque, he exuded a cool authority in the room. Tall, built, and inhumanly calm. He was wearing a perfectly-tailored charcoal suit, presse

Last Updated : 2025-10-29

Chapter 29: Cracks Beneath Control

The incubator was silent, too silent. The overhead lights were low, pooling her workspace in the corner of the room with angled shadows while leaving the rest of the room lost in darkness. Piles of printouts from her simulations littered her desk, pages of her script of handwritten notes (meticulous, to a degree only Shylie could read), sprawling logic trees (scribbled in the margins), decision branches, thoughtfully annotated. Conditions for every potential failure had been mapped and re-mapped, re-evaluated again and again, revised to the point of obsessive perfection. No mistakes. No blindspots. No allowances for weakness. She had rewritten her version of the core of the platform by hand, already envisioning what would happen when she opened it up to the rest of the school. She'd gone through every line, every decision point, every potential outcome and evaluated, measured, and double-checked it. Triple-checked. It was more than secure now. It was perfe

Last Updated : 2025-10-31

Chapter 30: The Breaking Point

The incubator was deathly silent.Lights had been dimmed, neon glows filtering across the floor, leaving long shadows in their wake. The room was empty and still, only the low buzzing of ventilation systems punctuated the void, the silent, methodical rhythm of a world that moved without her.She sat in one of the sound-proof presentation rooms alone, watching the faint blue light of the simulation terminal.Keyboard keys clicked softly, repetitive and unobstructed. But her fingers remained suspended above the keys, no movement at all. She had not typed a word in hours.Her mind wandered, far away from this antiseptic plastic reality, somewhere else.His voice haunted her.Memories reflected on her consciousness, the clipped edges of his mouth bouncing around in her head, louder than the drone of the machine in front of her, louder than any stimuli she could manufacture."You cut yourself off so completely..

Last Updated : 2025-11-03

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