Born Into Villain's Family: I Have a 200\% Rebate System-Chapter 462: Problem Statement

As she walked back, she remembered another appointment, the meeting she had scheduled with a young man she barely remembered by face, but whose project had left a strong impression on her.

She recalled the presentation, the raw potential, the messy brilliance beneath the surface. She had been intrigued enough to want to see him in person.

The meeting venue was the same discreet location she always used: a private room, with a sleek table and a soft leather chair reserved for her.

When she arrived, the young man was already there, waiting nervously.

The moment he saw her veiled form and the elegant black dress she wore, he stood up quickly and bowed. "Ms. Dawn," he greeted, his voice almost cracking with tension.

Aurora, in her Ms. Dawn persona, sat down gracefully and gestured for him to take a seat. "Show me the document," she requested calmly.

Miller, hands trembling slightly, handed over the proposal. Aurora opened the folder and began to read. The more her eyes perused the pages, the colder her expression became.

The proposal was superficial. It was mostly buzzwords, vague concepts, and shallow descriptions. There were no solid numbers, no concrete data, no clear principles, and no technical backbone.

Without a shred of hesitation, she tossed the file onto the table. The slap of paper against wood echoed in the private room.

"Do you have any idea how many years you could spend in prison for wasting my time like this?" she asked, her smile polite but her eyes razor sharp.

Miller stiffened. "I... I don’t understand what you mean," he said carefully.

Aurora tapped the cover of the discarded folder with her fingertip.

"This is fluff," she stated. "Only surface-level ideas, no proper definitions, no data, no foundation. I can say with complete certainty that this is garbage."

Miller swallowed. For a moment, his first instinct was to defend himself, but under her piercing gaze, he shifted tactics.

He smiled faintly and admitted,

"I submitted this proposal to attract attention. I was hoping that an investor would give me insight, something I could use to build a real business later."

Aurora drummed her fingers lightly on the table and watched him. She wanted to hear more.

Miller, for his part, had originally created the idea with the intention of scamming some money out of naive investors.

But now that he was face to face with Ms. Dawn, this woman who clearly saw through everything, he realized something unsettling.

’If she still considered investing at any point, he thought, it means this idea might actually hold some hidden value. Maybe I was the one who failed to see it clearly, not her.’

It could be said that after spending such a long time in jail, Miller had slowly learned an unexpected skill: he had become very good at reading faces.

He had watched people lie, bluff, panic, and manipulate for years, and he had trained himself to notice the tiny shift, the tightening of a jaw, the dip in a gaze, the tension around someone’s mouth.

Eventually, he could more or less guess what a person might be thinking just from the way their expression moved.

So when someone like Ms. Dawn not only showed interest in his project but also agreed to a face-to-face meeting, he understood something very clearly.

’If a person of her level is willing to sit here with me, then the idea itself must be solid,’ he thought. ’Even if I don’t understand it fully, the core concept must have real value.’

However, he also knew that value without knowledge was dangerous.

If he wanted to truly use this idea, he still needed Aurora’s guidance.

For that reason, he quickly changed his tune and adjusted his acting, making it seem as if he had a long-term vision all along.

His performance was smooth enough that even Aurora, found herself wondering whether he might be smarter than she had initially assumed.

For a brief moment, she genuinely questioned,

’Did this guy actually think this through better than I expected? Did he almost outplay me just now?’

As that doubt flickered through her, she leaned back slightly and decided to test him properly.

"I will give you a simple test," she said. "Since you claim you understand the core principles, let us see."

She tapped her finger lightly against the table and continued in a calm voice,

"Imagine you are building a system that needs to process one hundred million user requests per day through an AI-powered recommendation engine. Each user has a profile with at least fifty attributes, and every request must be matched against a database of one million items. You need to return the top ten recommended items for each request within two hundred milliseconds. Tell me how you would design the data structures and algorithms. What kind of indexing would you use? How would you distribute the load across servers, and how would you make sure that the time complexity per query remains close to logarithmic rather than linear? Also, tell me what you would do if the traffic suddenly doubled."

She watched him steadily, eyes cool and assessing.

"If you really understand the core of what you wrote, you should at least be able to outline a coherent solution."

Miller’s throat went dry, but he forced his face to remain calm. "All right," he responded, nodding slowly as if he was thinking deeply.

He furrowed his brows and stared at the table, trying to give the impression that he was carefully mapping out the solution in his mind, when in reality his thoughts were in utter chaos.

’What indexing? What distribution? I just threw around fancy words in that proposal. I don’t actually know this stuff. Think, think... say something about servers... or caching... anything...’

Aurora waited patiently.

The silence stretched.

Finally, Miller pieced together a broken, vague explanation about "using multiple servers," "sorting data quickly," and "maybe using some kind of caching system," but nothing he said answered even half of what she had asked.

Aurora listened in silence, then laughed quietly, the sound soft but edged with razor-sharp clarity.

"You really have no idea what you are talking about," she remarked. "You do not understand the basics of what you wrote."

Before he could reply, she began explaining the solution step by step, how the data could be partitioned by user ID or geography, how indexes could be built using inverted lists or vector embeddings, how approximate nearest neighbor search could drastically reduce the search space, how caching could be done intelligently based on user behavior, how a load-balancing strategy could be implemented, and how system resources could be scaled horizontally when traffic spiked.

Her explanation flowed with technical precision yet remained clear enough that even someone like Miller could grasp the overall idea. As she spoke, the color drained from his face completely.

When she finished, she looked at him calmly.

"This is only a basic version of the problem," she added. "I did not even bring up fault tolerance, data consistency, or advanced optimization. I did not expect you to fail this badly. This proves that you have no understanding of the AI-powered startup you proposed on paper."

Miller stayed quiet, his mind spinning.

After a moment, he lowered his gaze and spoke in a restrained voice.

"If that is the case, then it means you were attracted by the problem statement itself, not by my solution."

Aurora stared at him, amusement flickering in her eyes.

She had to admit, he was not completely dull.

"You are not entirely stupid," she commented. "Yes, I found the problem statement interesting. I believe the solution is possible, but it will require a lot of serious thinking... at least a month or more of dedicated work. When I read your document, I was excited by the question, not by you."

She folded her hands on the table and looked straight at him. "Since you clearly only have the problem statement and no real solution, quote me a price for it."

Miller paused, and a slow smile formed on his lips.

Compared to other wealthy people he had met, Aurora was on a completely different level.

Most rich investors would either dismiss him with a wave of the hand, steal the idea, or throw him a minor amount to keep him quiet. She, however, was openly acknowledging the value of the idea and offering to buy it legitimately.

’She knows that if she builds a company around this and I keep the original email, I could cause trouble later, he realized. She wants everything clean and traceable so her image stays untouched.’

What Miller did not know was that as soon as she asked him to name a price, Aurora subtly turned on a recorder on her phone. She also made a mental note to draw up a proper contract if they reached an agreement.

She quietly watched him, waiting.

Miller thought for a while, and then his expression changed slightly.

"If you show this much potential, then I am sure the startup can be built," he said slowly. "In fact, I would prefer to keep the problem statement, take half a year to work on a proper solution, and then launch it myself."