Day 10, August 27, 2025
Account Balance: Remains unchanged at ¥2,580,000
Profit Change: 0
Aria woke before her alarm.
Because she didn't want to be awake.
She didn't check the market. Didn't glance at futures.
She just sat at her table, peeling a convenience store boiled egg, staring blankly at the power lines outside her window.
Tokyo's August morning was thick with heat like a sentence left unfinished.
She turned on the TV. NHK's morning financial news displayed Nikkei's pre-market chart. No gap up. No black swans. No trending topics.
Everything was calm to the point of irritation.
She glanced at the chart like it was a cup of coffee left to cool, no warmth left, but still something you had to drink.
She bit into the egg white. It tasted like nothing.
Turning back to her phone, she opened a note and typed:
"Markets are most deadly when they're calm. Not to your capital but to your will."
She stared at the line for a while, like waiting to see if it would breathe.
Julian woke at six. No alarm.
He never slept in, not out of diligence, but fear.
Fear that if he blinked too long, his account would bleed another 20%.
The upscale apartment in Yoyogi-Uehara was soaked in silence.
The low hum of the AC, the soft gurgle of the coffee machine, and the quiet sweep of a robot vacuum cleaner all were too civilized for his current life.
He slipped into a freshly pressed white shirt. The cuffs still bore his initials JW, hand-stitched at Turnbull & Asser.
He wasn't the man people once stepped aside for in Canary Wharf.
But his laundry detergent was still Aesop.
He still ordered a single-origin drip from Blue Bottle at 7 a.m., even if he only took one sip.
He hand-poured 25 grams of beans through a black Hario dripper, water heated precisely to 92°C.
Next to the timer sat a branded lighter. He hadn't smoked in four months, but that didn't mean he didn't want to.
As the coffee bloomed, he stared out the floor-to-ceiling window at Tokyo.
This city didn't know him.
Good. No need for polite small talk.
He turned back to his trading "bunker":
Dual Bloomberg monitors, MacBook Pro, iPad with VIX streaming live, four phones lined up like chess pieces.
One iPhone still showed New York pre-market futures in real time.
It looked like a one-man quant warship.
But only Julian knew it was actually a hiding place for debt.
Account balance: ¥3,210,500.
Just enough for three months' rent if he didn't eat.
A scrap of paper on his desk read:
"Valeant gamma not worth the noise." "Check float on Valeant." "No new trades until pain fades."
And yet… his fingers itched.
Not gambler's itch quantitative reflex.
His brain had been conditioned like a living, breathing options-pricing engine.
A twitch in the market, and his pupils would contract like a dog trained on Greek letters and electric shocks.
Julian opened LINE.
Aria: Read, but no reply.
He wasn't upset. He understood.
She'd seen him at his worst—on the edge of the Ikebukuro overpass—and she didn't leave.
But even he knew: the person who saves you doesn't owe you a future.
Still, he cleaned the apartment.
Ran the vacuum twice. Brewed a pot of cold brew. Changed the bathroom hand towel.
For one reason:
"If she shows up today, she shouldn't think I've completely fallen apart."
He tied his necktie in front of the mirror. A spritz of Terre d'Hermès—pepper and bergamot, like a forgotten gentleman's ghost.
The man in the mirror looked perfect.
Only Julian knew he was already bankrupt.
Not financially existentially.
No fund. No license. No firm.
Just a man in a Savile Row suit who followed old routines like a recently discharged psychiatric patient pretending the world was still intact.
He scribbled:
"Pretending nothing's wrong hurts more than dying."
Then he sat at his Bloomberg terminal, closed his eyes and saw not today's Nikkei chart.
But London.
He remembered the day. It was a Wednesday.
Not a special day. But the moment he walked into the office, something felt… wrong.
The trading floor was colder than usual. Everyone wore jackets.
Except for him, still in that silver-grey suit, the same shade as his Bloomberg screens.
He liked that color.
It reminded him of volatility.
He arrived at the morning meeting two minutes late.
First time. Also, the last.
The head of risk flipped through the printed positions and said, voice neutral:
"Why are you still that heavy on Valeant?
We agreed to scale down."
Julian sipped from his cup, didn't respond.
Then finally:
"You're scared. I'm calculating.
The gamma skew's warped to hell, not going contrarian is what'll kill us."
Silence.
No agreement, just confusion.
No one knew what he meant.
Julian was used to not being understood.
He didn't need understanding. He needed confirmation from the market.
But this time, it didn't come.
Julian'd built a directional position on Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX).
Structured derivatives.
Triple gamma exposure.
All-in on a rebound post-regulatory panic.
That afternoon, Valeant announced it was under investigation.
Stock dropped 16% overnight.
Julian's P&L turned blood red, down 17% in one shot.
At 2:45 p.m., he was still staring at the screen when the terminal went dark.
Bloomberg access revoked. No warning.
The firm did not explain.
Just a system message:
"You've hit your maximum loss threshold. Access revoked."
He didn't even get to take his Hermès water bottle.
As he walked out past the glass walls of the trading floor, nobody made eye contact.
The intern who once begged to study his models took the long way around him.
Someone handed him a sticky note that read:
"It was never the market.
It was always the leverage."
That night, Julian didn't go home.
He went straight to a dive bar across from Canary Wharf Station.
The graveyard of fallen finance bros.
He stood at the bar, ordered a Negroni, and downed it in a single gulp.
Sat in the corner, opened the Notes app on his phone.
"Am I not worthy of being a trader?
Or is the market not worthy of me?"
No answer.
Only the next morning at 5 a.m., staring at his banking app.
Julian transferred the last of his unfrozen commission to his Barclays account in the UK.
At 4 a.m., he converted it into ¥15,000,000 via TransferWise.
No goodbyes. No explanations.
He didn't even take the Penhaligon's bottle from the bathroom shelf.
Then booked a one-way ticket to Tokyo.
Without changing the sheets.
At exactly 4:00 p.m., Aria's phone buzzed.
Yuji. A voice message.
She stared at the little play button hovering on screen.
Her finger floated above it. Never tapped.
The screen dimmed. Then went black.
She didn't open it.
Not out of anger.
Just exhaustion.
A kind of weariness that was harder to explain than any market crash.
She felt like a compressed file unzipped too many times by the system, still technically functional, but no longer whole.
Yes, she'd made money.
But Aria couldn't tell anymore whether it was a strategy…
or just inertia.
Every day, she tracked candles, volatility, volume, flow, IV, and float.
She could execute trades with precision, detachment, and even elegance.
But she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt excited.
She stared at a broadcast antenna in the distance, and typed:
"The most dangerous thing isn't losing.
It's wondering whether winning is still worth it."
At that moment, Yuji was sitting at his desk.
Top-right corner: a small potted plant, a pothos.
Aria had bought it six months ago.
Yuji still watered it. Never mentioned it.
He picked up his phone, recorded a voice message, and deleted it.
Then another. Deleted again.
On the third try, he said only six words:
"Do you think it'll rain tonight?"
Then hit send.
He knew she wouldn't reply.
Still, he wanted to send it.
There was no fight.
No cold war.
Just… silence.
The kind that grows between two people drifting at different velocities.
He still remembered her vividly:
The curve of her face when she drank barley tea in the middle of the night. The way she tried not to laugh at his bad jokes. The look she gave him the first time she explained implied volatility, a look that said, "You'll never get it."
It wasn't that he didn't love her.
Yuji just no longer knew how to reach her.
She had left behind the version of herself who used to get excited over a three-day weekend or debate over a discounted bento.
And he… stayed behind.
Even their tenderness had become too heavy.
Aria glanced at the voice message notification, hesitated—then turned away.
She lay down on the tatami, staring at the ceiling.
She hadn't placed a single trade that day.
No positions. No alerts. No forums.
She felt like a professional dancer watching someone else finish an entire routine from backstage not jealous, just tired.
She didn't know if this counted as "detaching from the market."
Aria just… didn't want to move.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember Day 1.
The very first time she hit TRANSFER FUNDS.
The heat.
The hunger.
The greed.
The clarity.
The part of her that still wanted to live.
But now, those feelings felt like memories from another body.
She'd made 129x already.
And she knew:
Even if she made another perfect run, there would never be another resurrection like the first one.
She whispered to herself:
"I already won once.
But the version of me that won isn't the one who's still here."