Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 104

Chapter 104: Beautiful Ceo and Me

Charlotte leaned back in the leather seat, legs crossed, arms folded like she was settling in for a poker game she already planned to win. The tinted glass behind her sealed them in, cutting off her security detail like they were children told to wait in the car.

Her gaze locked on Peter—sharp, evaluative, a little amused. "Alright," she said smoothly, like someone giving an intern just enough rope. "Since you clearly have all the answers about my company’s little meltdown, let me walk you through the AI project."

She spoke with practiced control, voice clipped and executive-clean. 40% cognitive capacity target. Evolutionary neural mapping. The infamous 10% plateau that had stalled progress for eight months and devoured millions in R&D. It was a good summary. Efficient.

But to Peter, it was like watching someone recite the Wikipedia page for a language they didn’t speak.

He nodded occasionally, adding the occasional thoughtful "mm" or "interesting" like punctuation marks in a conversation he wasn’t really inside of. Not yet.

’She knows the outline,’ he thought, eyes scanning her face. ’But not the soul of it. She’s parroting the engineers. She’s not listening to the code.’

Charlotte finished with a casual flick of her hand, like brushing ash off couture. "So. That’s where we are. Stuck at ten percent efficiency. My lead dev thinks it’s a processing limitation—CPU bottleneck or resource bleed—but we haven’t found a fix."

Peter tilted his head. "It’s not any of your problems."

Her eyebrow arched, slow and elegant. "Oh? Enlighten me."

He leaned forward slightly, voice lowering—not for secrecy, but gravity.

"Apart from your incompetent team... the ten percent barrier isn’t technical," he said. "It’s psychological."

Charlotte blinked once. "Excuse me?"

Peter’s tone didn’t shift. He wasn’t trying to convince. He was stating fact.

"Humans have a baked-in fear of building something smarter than themselves. You think it’s a budget issue. A system issue and all the little problems you and your team think. It’s not. Your team—your brilliant, overworked, overpaid not-o-smart engineers—they’re subconsciously sabotaging the project. Because the second that AI crosses the threshold... they become obsolete. Their relevance dies. And that fear? It’s bleeding into every line of code they write."

Charlotte stared.

No witty comeback. No rebuttal. Just silence for a beat too long.

Then—finally—

"That’s... a hell of a theory."

Peter’s eyes didn’t flinch. "It’s not a theory. It’s the real firewall."

Charlotte frowned, arms crossed, brows pulling together like she was trying to decide whether to debate him or throw him out the window. "Say that but I say that’s a pretty cynical view of human nature."

Peter didn’t flinch. "Cynical, yeah. But also true." His voice was calm, surgical. "Even if your team somehow limps to thirteen percent, you’re not just facing bugs and bottlenecks. You’re picking a fight with every intelligence agency, government, and power structure that relies on humans staying the smartest thing in the room. They’d bury your project. Or bury you."

Charlotte’s lips twitched. "Bury me how?"

He paused. Let that sink in.

Charlotte stared at him. Then exhaled sharply, like she needed to release the steam building behind her eyes. "Jesus Christ."

Peter smirked. "That’s the first time you’ve agreed with me."

She gave him a long look. "No. That was me asking Him why I’m still sitting here."

But she didn’t move.

And Peter knew exactly what that meant. He went on...

"Intelligence isn’t just faster processing Charlotte, it’s actually about recursive self-awareness loops that can only be created through—"

"—recursive self-awareness loops that can only be created through paradox-layered context trees, not linear computation." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Peter paused, letting that hang in the air like a bomb too elegant to explode. His voice had gone smooth, academic, dangerously self-assured—the kind of tone that made people feel both enlightened and insulted.

Charlotte stared at him like she was trying to decide whether to slap him or hire him.