Day 8, August 25, 2015
Beginning balance: ¥1,300,000
Ending balance: ¥2,040,000
Daily profit: Approximately ¥740,000
Aria hadn't slept. She didn't need to. The night was a prolonged heartbeat, stretched and sharpened with each tick of her option chain.
The apartment was quiet. Outside, Tokyo was still curled in its own dreams. But her screen? Her screen was a war drum.
AAPL, TSLA, Nikkei ETF puts, they were all lit up in shades of crimson green, percentages clawing upwards like they wanted to escape the screen. The numbers pulsed like living things.
Her balance read: ¥1,300,000.
She stared, expressionless. Then closed her eyes and whispered, "You thought the hard part was making money. It's not. The hard part is making it alone."
She stepped out onto the balcony. The sky was a fading navy. A distant garbage truck clanged its way through the quiet. She took a sip of cold black coffee and lit a cigarette with the steadiness of a surgeon.
The rest of the world would wake up to carnage.
She was already in it and winning.
At noon, Aria walked through the underpass at Ikebukuro Station, heading toward the curry shop. But she didn't make it far.
There was a man standing on the pedestrian overpass, hands clenched on the railing, looking down.
Not the casual lean of someone enjoying a view. This was different.
He was wearing a silver-grey suit. His phone dangled loosely in one hand. She could see the screen. The last message was still visible:
"Hit limit down. I lost everything. Even my parents' savings."
He didn't see her approach.
Aria stood two meters behind, saying nothing at first.
Then, her voice low:
"You stand there, and no one will remember you. But if you make the right trade? The whole market will watch you."
He turned.
The wind at Ikebukuro Station had a dry, electric chill. One that carried headlines and anxiety in equal measure.
The man stood out before he even turned.
His silver-grey suit was too crisp for this hour. The cut is too clean. The tie, barely loosened, told of a man who hadn't slept, not out of leisure, but because charts don't let go easily. And the Omega watch on his wrist was not flashy, but old, lovingly maintained, ticked in sync with the Nikkei's death spiral.
Aria didn't need to see his face to know: this man had been betting on survival.
And he'd lost.
Sharp cheekbones. Messy brown curls. A deep, quiet panic behind his wire-frame glasses.
The wind at Ikebukuro Station felt like it wanted to shove people off the platform. But he stood still.
Not just still balanced. Like someone who could hold a wine glass steady during a financial apocalypse.
Julian Watanabe, she would learn the name later from the black linen business card he handed her at the café.
His silver-embossed name felt like a clean candlestick on a chart: sharp, efficient, merciless.
His eyes didn't betray much emotion, but there was something in them, like he'd seen the line between loss and gain more clearly than anyone.
His suit wasn't department store black, but textured dove-grey, jacket flaring slightly as the wind lifted it. Beneath it, a vintage Omega watch glinted.
2:18 p.m.
The market's execution hour.
"You're standing here because you want to be saved? Or looking for a counterparty?" she asked as she approached.
He didn't smile. Just turned his head. "Neither."
She waited.
Julian exhaled, eyes falling to the put options still flashing red on her phone.
"So you're the one fading Apple," he said. "Ballsy."
And in that moment, she got it.
He wasn't trying to die.
He was just trying to find someone who understood his trade.
He didn't jump.
He sat down. Put his phone away. Said nothing.
And watched her walk away.
9:47 PM. Aria was back in her apartment. The air was still thick with static from market mayhem.
She checked her phone.
Account balance: ¥2,040,000.
Open positions: Nikkei ETF PUTs, Softbank PUTs.
She had doubled her money. Again.
She didn't cheer. She didn't even smile. Instead, she stumbled into the bathroom and vomited into the sink.
Adrenaline had limits. Her body had reached them.
She stared at herself in the mirror, pale, wide-eyed, veins dancing at her temple.
Her phone buzzed.
A message.
Julian: "TSLA testing bottom. Prepping short straddle."
She replied: "Watching. VIX still breathing."
Julian: "You always this calm?"
Aria typed: "No."
Later, at a Shibuya café, she sat with a lukewarm Americano.
Julian had texted her an hour before.
No emojis. No greetings. Just one line:
"Thanks for not looking away."
He looked calm when he walked into the café. Too calm.
Not like someone who recovered, more like someone who found peace in chaos.
The kind of man who'd study a landslide and call it beautiful because it followed the chart.
Aria watched him pull out a notebook, not a laptop.
He didn't sit like a man saved. He sat like a man reborn.
Julian stirred his coffee like it offended him, one, two, three rotations, then stopped. No sugar. No cream. Just bitterness, neatly contained.
Aria watched the movement, then his fingers — long, ink-stained, the kind of hands that scribble positions and exit times in the margins of doomed spreadsheets.
"Do you always drink it black?" she asked.
"I like to taste my mistakes," he said without looking up.
She laughed because it was exactly something she would have said.
Across from her, the man from the overpass. Clean shirt. New tie. Same tired eyes.
He looked at her. Not as a ghost. As something worse, someone real.
"I shorted too," he said quietly. "After you left. Thanks."
Aria didn't respond at first. Then:
"Good. Don't be stupid tomorrow."
The Shibuya café was crowded.
Julian didn't bring a laptop. Just a thick notebook with English-Japanese mixed charts, annotated with spidery handwriting.
He pushed it across the table.
He glanced out the window before speaking.
"I almost jumped because I thought I was finished," he said.
"But turns out, I just needed one more trade. Funny how that works, right?"
"This spread VIX versus TSLA. Two years from now, they'll teach it in risk management classes."
Aria scanned it.
It looked more like a heartbeat than a volatility index. Spikes and crashes, hope and collapse.
She didn't say it was good. Just smiled.
"You're a romantic."
Julian gave a short breath of laughter. "Aren't all traders?"
And for a second, Aria realized something.
She wasn't the only one trading from hell.
Hell had Wi-Fi. And he'd logged in.
She opened her laptop one last time.
Nikkei PUT: +¥740,000.
She shut it.
"If hell has Wi-Fi," she said, standing up, "it was green today."
She opened her laptop one last time.
The numbers glowed like altar candles.
Aria ran her fingers along the edge of the screen, like tracing the outline of something dangerous but familiar.
The money was real. The risk had been real. So why did it feel like the world hadn't changed at all?
She wasn't scared of losing anymore.
She was scared of winning and never being able to stop.
Notebook Entry.
"Day 8. Everyone's bleeding. I'm not. "
Maybe that's the real sickness.