"The wise traveler does not mourn his useless map. He begins to study the stars."
– From a Kaishi philosophical text, The Wayfinder's Guide
The rest of the week passed in a blur of focused work.
Riku fell into a rhythm. It was dictated by the rising sun and the five o'clock chime that signaled the end of the day.
He chipped away at the mountain of disorganized data. He slowly wrestled it into a clean, logical structure.
His quiet competence did not go unnoticed. Sato-san treated him with a cool, professional respect. Even Mr. Watanabe would occasionally grunt in approval. He was becoming part of the office's small, quiet ecosystem.
But beneath the surface of this newfound routine, a fierce impatience burned.
His mind was not on textile manifests. It was on the future. A future whose map he desperately needed to redraw.
........
When Saturday morning arrived, he was out of his apartment before the sun had fully risen.
The Torai Public Library was a grand, imposing structure of stone and granite. It was built decades ago in a Western style. It spoke of a time when the city was first finding its place on the world stage.
Inside, the air was cool. It smelled of aging paper and lemon polish.
A massive card catalog dominated one wall. On the other, a few beige computer terminals with monochrome screens offered access to a primitive digital index.
The library, like the world, was caught between two ages.
Riku ignored them both. He needed a snapshot of the world.
He headed for the periodicals section. It was a large, sunlit room with newspapers clipped onto tall wooden reading stands. He picked up the premier financial paper, the Kaishi Keizai Shimbun.
He scanned the front page. His eyes were hungry for familiar names. And then he saw it.
A headline about ongoing trade negotiations.
"Concord Ministers Express Caution Over Columbian Tech Tariffs."
Riku froze. His fingers tightened on the thin newsprint.
Concord? Columbian?
The names were alien. Yet their context was eerily familiar.
He quickly scanned the rest of the article. There was no mention of the European Union or the United States.
His heart began to beat a frantic, heavy rhythm against his ribs.
This wasn't a simple trip to the past. This was somewhere else entirely.
........
He abandoned the newspaper. He moved to a weekly news journal. He flipped through it until he found a map of the world.
It looked almost the same. But the labels were all wrong.
North America was dominated by a single entity: The Republic of Columbia.
Western Europe was united under the banner of The Continental Concord.
The vast expanse of Russia and its neighbors was a monolithic bloc labeled The Rodinan Collective.
The world he knew was a broken mirror. The shapes were the same. But the image was fractured, reassembled into something new and strange.
The panic he'd kept at bay for days threatened to overwhelm him.
His greatest advantage, his encyclopedic knowledge of history, had just been rendered nearly obsolete.
He forced himself to breathe. Panicking was a luxury. He was a former analyst. Data was data.
The model had changed. But the underlying principles had to be the same.
........
With a new, grim determination, he went to the history section. He pulled down heavy, cloth-bound volumes.
He started with the event he knew had shaped his own world more than any other: World War II.
But he couldn't find it.
There was no "World War II" in these books.
Instead, he found chapters on "The Thirty Years' War." A brutal conflict that had lasted from 1914 to 1944.
It had been a global meat grinder that bled the great nations dry. It ended not in victory, but in the "Brokered Peace of '44," an exhausted truce.
And his own nation? This Shogunate of Kaishi?
They had remained staunchly, stubbornly neutral. While the rest of the world had burned, they had built. They had traded and innovated. They had kept the great powers at arm's length.
This world's Japan had never been defeated. Never occupied. Never had its constitution rewritten by a foreign power.
The implications hit him like a physical blow.
The companies he knew existed here, but they were different. They were without the post-war American influence that had shaped their counterparts in his world.
And the American giants? Apple? Microsoft? Intel? Did they even exist in the Republic of Columbia?
........
He spent the entire day in that library. He moved from history to economics to reels of microfilmed newspapers.
As the sun set, casting long shadows across the silent reading room, the initial panic finally subsided.
It was replaced by something else.
A cold, thrilling clarity.
His knowledge wasn't useless. It was a compass, not a map.
He no longer knew the exact route to treasure. But he still knew which direction it lay.
He knew personal computing was about to explode. He knew a global information network was on the cusp of changing humanity. He knew the power of the microprocessor was the single most important economic force of the coming decades.
His task was no longer to simply remember the future. It was to rediscover it.
He had to find this world's Jobs and Gates, its Wozniaks and Allens. They were out there, somewhere in the stock listings of Torai or the business parks of Columbia.
He left the library as the streetlights flickered on. His mind was buzzing.
The challenge was a hundred times greater than he had imagined.
But as he walked through the cool night air, a slow, predatory smile touched his lips for the first time.
It was the smile of a hunter who has just been shown a new, richer, and far more dangerous forest.
The game was afoot.