Substitute Wife, Genius CEO novel Chapter 249

Lily had barely begun to celebrate Summer's resignation from the project team.

But her joy lasted only a few minutes before a notification pinged in the group chat. A new member had just joined.

Harrison Banks tagged everyone: [It's a shame Summer had to step down due to personal reasons, but we have a new addition. Please welcome Pax to the project team.]

The chat immediately exploded.

[Pax? The same Pax who won the International Computer Science Award?]

[The Pax who single-handedly annihilated the world's top foreign hackers, defended our database, and hacked theirs in retaliation while they were at it?]

Pax: [That's me. Hello everyone, it's an honor to be working with you all.]

Staring at the messages, Lily felt like she was going to cough up blood.

Summer was gone, but now Pax was here.

If she had known this was going to happen, she would have vastly preferred Summer staying on the team.

This was Pax, for God's sake. Back in the day, even Lily couldn't hold a candle to Pax's genius.

If Pax hadn't mysteriously vanished from the tech scene, Lily would have never earned the title of AI Prodigy in the first place.

Lily typed out a generic welcome message—she had to, she was the team lead.

But a suffocating sense of bitter resentment twisted in her chest. It was a suffocating, resentful realization that no matter what she did, there was always someone better. Her chest felt tight, like a heavy block of concrete was resting on her lungs.

All she wanted was Harrison's attention and validation. She wanted to leverage this project to become his official protégé.

But with Pax in the picture, Lily would no longer be the most outstanding member of the team. Everyone only ever remembers the person in first place.

Filled with irritation, Lily turned to Xavier. "Xavier, you've worked with Pax before, right? What kind of person are they?"

"I honestly don't know," Xavier replied. "Even though Pax licensed their patents to Sterling Group at a discount, I've never actually met them."

All their communications had been strictly through email. Sterling Group didn't even have a phone number on file.

Pax was a complete ghost. No one knew if they were a man or a woman, young or old.

But speaking of Pax, their patent licensing agreement was about to expire.

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