Initial Account Balance: ¥2,593,000.
Final Account balance: ¥3,873,000
Daily profit: Approximately ¥1,280,000
Day 17, September 3, 2015
She glanced at her phone.
1:29 a.m.
The lights in Kabukicho were still on, brighter than midnight itself. A crowd gathered outside a club, men and women, laughing and leaning on each other under a fog-like glow, like restless particles of light.
Up in her high-floor hotel room, it was quiet; it felt like the sound had been switched off completely. Only her fingertips slid across the trackpad now and then, like a mouse crawling across the surface of a chessboard in the dark.
1:30 a.m.
She didn't rush to place the order. Instead, she let the glow of the screen reflect off the back of her hand.
She stared at that light longer than she had ever stared at any candlestick chart.
She knew what she needed: a body still as a mountain. No trembling hands, no twitching eyes, not even a shift in heartbeat.
It had been a long time since she moved in this rhythm.
Not the rhythm of trading, but the rhythm of setting a trap. The kind where only she knows the destination, while everyone else is still wandering along the edges of the map.
She liked that term, perceptual time lag.
She saw herself not as a participant, but as a signal triggered ahead of schedule.
She wasn't watching the order book.
She was testing whether her own mind was "stable enough" to let an entire sequence flow through her body without a hitch.
Three accounts. Three rhythms. She activated the first one within a minute.
It wasn't a trade. It was a breadcrumb.
What mattered wasn't the moment of execution, but the instant the order book registered its first anomaly. When the air seemed to shift just slightly.
She couldn't hear it, but she knew: the chart had started to move.
It was like dropping a stone into still water, then stepping back and watching the ripples spread.
Nothing on the screen had changed, but she knew data was observing data.
Like a nervous system stirring, bracing for the next impact.
She didn't triple-click. She didn't write macros for the next set of actions.
She didn't even look at what she typed—because she wasn't operating an account. She was talking to the market.
It was footwork. A performance.
A move that belonged to no one.
A rhythm no one could follow.
An action that left no fingerprints.
1:41 a.m.
The second order went out.
The screen offered no feedback. But her hand grew steadier.
As if slipping into some deep muscle memory, a body trained through losses and endurance, now reactivates that long-dormant mode called control.
She knew she was summoning something. Not capital. Not people. But the market's reflexes.
The anxious clicks. The algorithmic hesitation. The gaze was pulled in by uncertainty.
She never saw herself as a trader. She was more like a prophet, gently tapping the surface of the water from afar, leaving traces on purpose, without letting anyone see her hand.
1:58 a.m.
The third account was activated.
The entry looked random, like a sleepless retail investor casually placing a few lots.
She did that on purpose—to muddy the trail.
What the market fears most isn't someone making a move.
It's not knowing whether someone did.
That's the ambiguity she wanted.
No exposed maneuvers. Just fragments that could be misread in hindsight as a mid-sized institution making a quiet move.
She understood the market loved fill-in-the-blank puzzles.
And right now, she was that blank.
She wasn't watching the chart.
She was watching the clock.
Her timing was engineered. The rhythm is calibrated to stay just below the algorithmic alert threshold.
The script ticked forward, line by line.
Without a change in expression, she set her pen down next to the keyboard and took a sip of long-cold coffee.
The bitterness anchored her in reality.
Her heart wasn't racing, but her attention had fully withdrawn from the five senses.
Only logic, rhythm, restraint, and direction remained.
2:05 a.m.
The balance in the first account shifted.
¥1,000,000 → ¥1,016,500.
Not profit. Just movement.
Like someone brushing the surface of the water she'd disturbed, too light to count as a trade, but enough to leave a shadow on tomorrow's after-hours chart.
She didn't smile. She didn't adjust her position.
She simply moved her mouse to another brokerage tab, letting the second account's cursor hover near the price band.
She wasn't trading. She was reminding the market that someone was here.
It wasn't a call to action. It wasn't aggressive accumulation.
It wasn't the kind of move that makes things jump.
It was more like a gentle nudge. A message that said,
You'd better pay attention.
What she imagined was this:
Tomorrow morning, even if it was just one person—an analyst, a quant model, or an old-timer watching the tape—catching this small disturbance tonight, they would think:
"Someone's in control."
She didn't want to be the market maker.
She didn't want to stand out as the main player.
She wanted to be
the one who might not even exist, but no one dares to ignore.
She didn't post immediately.
She spent ten minutes processing the screenshot.
Cropping it just right, leaving behind only the patterns a trained eye could recognize.
No watermark, no chart labels, just a few overly saturated lines, like someone had overexposed a projector slide late at night. Blurry, chaotic, but compelling.
She opened the finance board on 2ch, logging in with an ID registered a few days ago.
No avatar. No bio. Just a string of characters that looked like it came from an API test account.
The title was casual, like a quiet note between pros.
[shenhen hongkong private fund shell?] Unusual night activity on a little-known GEM stock, possibly early-stage capital testing.
The body was even simpler:
Partial order book segment shown (cropped)
Not a stock tip, for research only
See the last three days of data if interested
She wasn't promoting anything.
She was tossing out a smoke bomb.
After posting, she didn't check the replies.
Instead, she stared at the numbers in the top right corner of the screen.
The refresh cycle started at 30 seconds, then became 15, finally stabilizing at under 10.
There were people in the backend.
She didn't care who.
As long as they were human.
This was the battlefield she knew best.
Not the trade itself, but the space that whispered,
Someone knows something.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
Not from fatigue,
But from the calm certainty of a hunter
watching the prey touch the outer ring of the trap.
8:55 a.m.
She opened the three trading dashboards and lined up the stocks she believed might move.
She wasn't reading charts.
She was listening for rhythm.
9:03.
A sudden pattern shift.
A familiar name made an unusual move—one that didn't match the pace of last night.
She stayed still.
It wasn't her order.
It wasn't her account.
But she knew—someone had picked up the signal and wanted to be the first to follow.
She whispered,
"Good boy."
9:12.
Momentum began to echo.
Not a surge in volume, but a cautious, deliberate climb, one tick at a time.
She could feel the hesitation behind each order.
Each trader is suspicious, but no one is willing to be late.
She didn't smile.
She silently crossed out a name in her mind.
She didn't want control.
What she wanted was a scene
where no one admitted to being the mastermind, but everyone started to perform anyway.
9:24.
Suddenly, a data spike.
A short-term resistance level broke.
In the seconds that followed, a string of delicate copycat orders surged in.
The chart lifted like someone had pressed it from underneath.
It wasn't her hand.
But she knew—the first pebble had stirred the water.
9:46.
The number on the screen stopped moving. It hit the top.
She hadn't planned this setup. She hadn't set the target.
But the pattern was clean.
Like a sample slide cut straight from a PowerPoint deck.
Ignition→Observation→Push→Volume→Consolidation→Acceleration→Pause→Lock
She didn't make a profit.
She won the market's attention.
She looked at her third account.
The floating P&L jumped a few notches and settled on a clean number.
Not a windfall.
But enough to be flagged by algorithms.
Enough to trigger a system response.
She didn't click "close position."
Because this wasn't a gain.
It was a reminder:
You're now part of the game.
She took a sip of coffee.
She didn't care.
She wasn't here to work.
She wasn't here to fight.
She came to write her own script of presence.
Not the boss.
Not the boss's assistant.
Not some influencer in retail forums.
Just a shadow.
Drifting between trades and expectations.
Impossible to ignore.
She wasn't the blade.
She was the light.
Enough to make people wonder if a blade was hiding behind it.
11:03 a.m.
The first limit-up snapped, like a rubber band stretched too far, relaxing half an inch at some unseen point.
She didn't flinch. She didn't speed up her fingers. She casually opened two "long‑dormant" account interfaces—usually silent, like shadows in empty rooms, but today they had purpose.
Within ten minutes, each of those accounts made several micro adjustments. Not crashing the order book, not fleeing—it was withdrawal.
Withdrawals were done as if she had never been there. No walls pushed, no glass shattered. Just quietly drawing the curtains, returning chairs to place, slipping out through a side door.
Funds moved in the back end without violent leaps. Like two children playing too roughly, who, before the parents notice, sweep cookie crumbs under the couch.
The total balance across her three accounts quietly increased by ¥10,830,000.
Not a profit figure, but a system's reply:
You closed the loop. It's valid now.
She didn't immediately screenshot. She didn't go check trending keywords on finance boards.
She knew what she left behind.
11:28 a.m.
A PDF appeared in her local folder, named in that corporate disguise format—"you'll never know what it is unless you click it."
She opened it and confirmed three items:
System Service Commission Agreement (Template No. X‑1194)
Digital Asset Research Support (Consulting Fee: ¥1,800,000)
Overseas Platform Operational Environment Test Record (Custody Fee: ¥680,000)
All compliant. All documented.
None of these amounts were "profits" but "service fees."
She wasn't taking money from the market. She was collecting from a contract structure.
12:00 p.m.
The computer remained on; the coffee sat unfinished.
The transaction logs from the three accounts had auto‑synced to a private journal page. She clicked "Archive," saving today's move into a folder called Pattern No.7.
She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes—listening to a rhythm that had ceased minutes ago but still hovered in the air.
She wasn't waiting for the next move. The move was over.
She wasn't waiting for feedback. The feedback was written in the numbers.
She was just confirming—she had outpaced the system by one step, and the system hadn't realized yet.
She muttered something, as though answering a question no one had asked:
"This isn't trading."
"It's just structural correction before delay is reconciled."
She wasn't grabbing money from the market.
She was performing a silent loop in the system's gray zone.
No one knew who she was.
But after today, the price chart of that stock would hold a permanent irregular echo.
Like a fingerprint.
As if she never appeared—but she left her handprint.
Evening
She sat on the edge of the bed, her laptop still open across her knees.
The hum of the hairdryer drowned out the rain outside the window.
She tossed her hair to one side, letting the warm air blow through it freely. The direction of the wind didn't matter—she only needed that sound, that barrier between her and everything else.
Her phone lit up. A message from Liu:
"Ten o'clock tonight. Kabukicho. Upstairs café. Come alone."
She didn't respond. She opened the map to ensure the spot still stood.
Her gaze lingered for seconds, waiting for a second message to confirm it wasn't a misunderstanding, not a bait, not a trap.
But she knew it wasn't.
Because what he was giving her would not pass through the banking system: cash.
At 10:07 p.m., she pushed open the café's glass door and went upstairs. The room was empty.
The lighting was white. The seats were red. On the table lay a small, unremarkable zippered bag.
Liu sat by the window, motionless.
He pointed at the bag.
"Advisory fee: ¥800,000. Performance bonus: ¥480,000. Count it."
Aria remained still. She sat and touched a cigarette, without lighting it.
Staring at the bag's texture, checking its authenticity, or perhaps deciding whether this money marked a turning point.
After a moment, she reached out and unzipped it. Her fingers brushed stacks of crisp cash, tightly bound. Cool, but heavy.
She did not count them.
She zipped the bag closed and placed it at her feet.
Liu glanced at her. "You moved faster than I expected. People in the market are watching."
Aria remained silent, then asked:
"Is this money clean or dirty?"
He shrugged.
"If you can spend it, it's clean."
Back at the hotel:
She whispered, almost to the air or maybe the mirror:
"The ¥520,000 I lost was my admission ticket to the market."
"Now, I'm in."
She rose, walked to the mirror. She picked up a half‑used tube of deep red lipstick. Decisively, she wrote eight letters across the glass:
Don't trade the chart. Trade the players.
She stepped back, stared at that message mirrored back at her.
It was no aphorism, no slogan.
It was her next rule, addressed to herself.
No matter how charts shift—
She would pursue not the K‑lines, but the player behind them.
As long as she could divine intention, she could stay one step ahead.
She smiled, closed the lipstick, and tossed it back into her bag.
Tonight, she would not place any more orders—
Yet she had already completed a step more crucial than any trade:
She had been recognized by the system.
No longer a retail trader, not just an observer, not even a responder.
She had become a variable.
From now on, every shock in the market would carry one more possibility: "she might be behind it."
That night she slept peacefully.
In the accounts, a dozen pending K‑lines hung.
She did not close them.
She knew those lines were no longer for reading charts; they were for influencing minds.