Day 13, August 30, 2015
Account Balance:¥2,613,000
9:25 PM – Pre-Market
There was no breeze in the room, only the laptop fan wheezing like a dying lung.
Aria sat at the small table, elbows propped on the keyboard, watching three tickers pulse on the screen: GILD, AAPL, SPY.
She didn't touch her teacup. The green tea had long gone cold, heavy as the Tokyo night.
A post dropped into the forum thread.
"Who's shorting GILD tonight?"
"Heard the FDA hearing got leaked something's dropping post-market."
"That bastard's finally going to bleed."
She didn't blink.
GILD, the notorious zombie ticker. One of the oldest villains in the U.S. market circuit. Everyone knew his name.
His chart always looked like it had been drawn with a scalpel. Clean. Narrow. Deceptively calm. He would lull you in, then stab without warning.
Eight out of ten traders didn't lose because they were wrong.
They lost because they were early.
In the jungle of market open, when the pack began to hunt, GILD was always the first to smile and the last to fall.
Why was he targeted again tonight?
Because there was news.
In biotech, post-market "data releases" were standard fare. Leaks, insider whispers, strange funding flows, everything showed up in the candles.
She didn't comment. Didn't like the post.
Just opened the order interface.
Adjusted position sizing.
Set stop-loss.
Tightened slippage parameters.
Like cleaning a blade before the first cut.
She wasn't waiting for confirmation.
She was waiting for the moment.
Her gaze paused on GILD's daily chart. In the top-right corner: live price, implied volatility, and 5-day average volume.
She made her assessment fast:
Don't chase the short. Wait for him to fake.
Why?
Because the market doesn't reward the correct direction.
It rewards correctly predicting when others will be wrong.
Tonight's setup wasn't about a technical breakdown.
It was about how many people thought it broke down.
That's when shorts make money.
She flipped to Level II. Watched the order book.
The buy side was stacked too neatly. The sell side was oddly thin. A decoy.
It was bait. Designed to lure retail traders upward, only to dump on their heads.
She didn't hesitate.
Fake or not, the open is the most dangerous and profitable moment for first contact.
She set the position size to ¥400,000.
Roughly 15.5% of her account.
Big enough to hurt, not big enough to cripple.
Stop-loss was razor thin—just ¥0.2 leeway.
She would not tolerate slippage.
Only a clean drop.
This wasn't hope.
It was precision.
9:30 PM – U.S. Market Open
The bell rang.
Like the gates of a coliseum crashing down.
GILD opened +0.6%.
Price hovered around 111.6 like a body floating just beneath the surface. Too buoyant to drop, too weak to climb.
Then came the surge in volume.
Something below the pool was stirring.
She didn't hesitate.
Zoomed into the chart. Switched to 15-second candles. Broke down the microstructure.
Orders were flashing on the right.
Sellers sitting way above at 113.5, like bait.
No real money had moved yet.
But the air was getting thinner.
She clicked "Order."
Typed in a limit.
Set to GTC (Good Till Cancel).
Allowed ¥0.1 of slippage.
Confirmed.
The ¥400,000 put order hit the book.
Stop-loss set at 111.8.
Tight. Exact.
This wasn't a vote.
It wasn't a gamble.
It was a clean incision.
She said nothing.
The screen reflected her face, sharp, cold, unflinching.
Tonight, she was a hunter.
Not a gambler.
9:33 PM – The Ten-Minute Kill
Three minutes in, GILD began to tremble—like the floor beneath it gave way.
111.4 → 110.6 → 110.0 → 109.6
Red candles stacked like falling guillotine blades, each thudding down with a finality that echoed like a snare drum dropped on concrete.
Aria didn't touch her mouse.
She leaned back slightly in her chair, like a surgeon waiting for the bleeding to stop.
On the right side of her screen was an old-school finance forum.
The thread was lighting up:
"GILD's getting nuked!!!"
"Who cut first? Those puts hit FAST."
"He's actually bleeding. Finally."
"No head-fake this time?"
"110 cracked!! oh man, it's beautiful."
"Aladdin-tier breakdown. That knife was surgical."
Screenshots flew. Time & Sales charts. Trade logs from ThinkOrSwim.
Someone yelled:
"Post the full chart! I'm screen recording for my boss!"
She didn't open any of it.
Her ¥109.6 limit sell order filled without a hitch.
The Matsui Securities interface blinked:
[Realized Profit: +¥33,000]
[Order Complete: Put × 5 contracts]
[Account Balance: ¥2,613,000]
She exhaled.
It wasn't relief.
It was execution decompression.
The release that only comes after doing exactly what you said you would do. No thrill. No panic. Just a clean closure.
[Quick Finance Note: How Put Options Work]
To many beginners, "shorting" feels like sorcery.
But here's the simple truth:
Buying a put = betting a stock will fall. If the stock drops, your put acts like "crash insurance" and rises in value. You can then sell that put at a profit. Aria's move tonight wasn't just about being right—it was about being right before everyone else.
She positioned herself just before GILD broke short-term support, and liquidity thinned.
She didn't bet on a generic decline.
She bet on a sudden, violent flush—the kind that breaks nerves.
For her, the real signal wasn't "GILD is weak."
It was "enough people will think GILD is collapsing—and they'll panic together."
Once the price lost its grip under 111.5, it was like flipping the switch on a chainsaw.
109.4. The candles kept bleeding.
She didn't take a screenshot.
Didn't flex her P&L.
Didn't drop a "that was me" in the forum.
She just closed her laptop.
Like a scalpel wiped clean and returned to its sheath.
No flair. Just precision.
9:50 PM – The Red Line Déjà Vu
She leaned back in her chair. Her right hand was still warm from the trackpad.
GILD flickered at 109.4 on the chart. The candle's angle looked surgical—sharp, direct, irreversible.
It resembled a flatlining EKG: one last twitch, then stillness.
That candle hung there on her screen like a coordinate of fate.
She stared too long.
Her eyes dried out. Vision blurred.
And then it hit her.
Not dizziness.
Not delusion.
Something deeper.
Like she'd seen this chart before. Felt it. Lived it.
Not this exact candle.
But the feeling of it is the quiet finality of something ending.
Her spine prickled.
It was like someone had vacuumed the heat from her bones.
She zeroed in on the upper wick, a failed breakout, a classic trap.
And somewhere, not quite in words, a thought formed:
"Did I… die on this candle?"
She tried to laugh. Tried to rationalize the absurdity.
But the laugh got stuck halfway.
Her cheek twitched. No sound came.
She reached for her notebook.
Her hand was steady.
The pen was her usual—black gel, hard tip. No wobble.
She wrote:
"You fell today because I shorted you.
But ten years from now… will you bite back?
Don't fool me twice."
She wrote slower than usual.
Not out of fear.
But because every word felt like it was… retrieved.
Not composed, reclaimed.
She didn't reread it.
Just pushed the notebook toward the table's edge.
Then she sat there.
Watching the red candle hold.
For five more minutes.
Not to prep the next trade.
But to confirm one thing:
She was still alive.
Back to mid-August, 2025
2:48 a.m., Tokyo
There was no wind that night.
Only the wheezing fan of her ThinkPad, spinning like an asthmatic rodent gnawing away at her last strand of sanity.
Aria Lin sat hunched on the tatami, wrapped in a gray blanket like a patient who'd already left the hospital just not the bed. Her overheating laptop rested on her legs, its bluish glow flickering like the final breath of someone drowning.
The interface was all too familiar.
Matsui Securities' overnight system—tiny fonts, cluttered layout, zero design.
Top-right corner reads:
[Total Assets: ¥1,142]
[Current Holdings: None]
[Credit Margin Available: ¥806,000]
That was all she had left.
Earlier that night, she had already lost three positions:
Full short on ETH in crypto? Stopped out. Shorted the Nikkei ETF at the day's low? Got squeezed and forced out. Bet long on Tesla earnings? Management sounded defeated, and the stock tanked three red candles in a row.
Three straight losses.
She sat there, listening to the clock tick like someone on the other side of the wall was counting down her remaining breaths.
She didn't cry.
She was too tired to even process failure.
Then, her phone screen lit up.
Telegram.
Group chat: Rug or Riches
Hundreds of degens still awake, still wired.
She tapped in automatically.
"GILD ready to die."
"FDA leak dropped. Drug rejection incoming."
"$109 is the key pivot. This is it tonight."
"I loaded 5 puts. Who's with me?"
She froze for ten seconds.
She'd been tracking GILD since 2020.
It was one of those stocks you always think is going to crash, but somehow revives every time. Like a pharmaceutical demon running on inertia and litigation settlements.
She hesitated.
But her finger had already clicked the "New Margin Order" tab in the Matsui app.
She copied the move.
¥800,000 full margin short on GILD,
Strike price: 109
Expiration: 3 days
Deep OTM. Low liquidity. High leverage.
She knew this was stupid.
But she didn't want to be smart tonight.
She just wanted it over.
3:12 a.m.
A few minutes later
The candlestick didn't move.
She had expected it to snap below 109 and begin a clean breakdown.
Instead, GILD just floated, like a corpse in cold water.
Not rising.
Not falling.
She started to panic.
This wasn't stability.
This was a coiled reversion.
She opened the forum. Someone posted:
"You idiots missed the news. HQ just filed two acquisition disclosures."
Then—
Ping.
Phone buzzed.
[Breaking]
Gilead to acquire two biotech firms in $21B all-stock deal
Post-market: +8.2%
In that moment,
Air lost its weight.
Gravity inverted.
Her screen lit up like a slot machine from hell:
[Unrealized Loss: -¥794,000]
[Margin Maintenance Rate: Below Limit]
[Forced Liquidation Triggered]
[Alert: Additional Collateral Required]
Red banners exploded across the dashboard.
She didn't even get to hit "confirm."
The system executed the margin call automatically.
Her account went to zero in less than a second.
The remaining ¥1,142 turned into ¥72.
Then came the LINE voice messages from Yuji:
"Did you lose again?"
"Why aren't you answering?"
"I can't take this anymore. I'm done with you like this."
She didn't open them.
Didn't listen.
Just placed the phone face down beside her.
What followed was: silence.
That kind of silence that happens when you've failed so often, your body forgets how to react.
Her body flushed hot, then cold, then burning again.
And then,
A sharp, angled pain slid beneath her sternum.
Not straight. Not clean. It cut sideways.
Sudden. Irregular. Like someone stabbed her with a question mark.
Her last mental image was of GILD's green candle climbing upward. Still rising.
Like someone pushing her off a cliff and waving goodbye while doing it.
She collapsed onto the tatami.
Never got up again.
No movement.
No heartbeat.
SYSTEM BOOT
One second of black screen.
Then, a cold, sterile message appeared:
[Financial Timewarp System Activated]
Mission: Travel to August 18, 2015.
Goal: Earn ¥10,000,000 in 30 days.
Tools: Era-restricted. No cheats.
Failure = Soul deletion.
It was as if the market itself had spoken.
And offered her,
One brutal reset.