11:14 PM.
The Noruma HQ in Otemachi was as quiet as a sprawling morgue. To save a few yen on the electric bill, the motion-sensor lights for the entire building had been cut, leaving only the training floor bathed in a sickly, pale fluorescent glow. Julian was slumped in his workstation, actually preferring it this way. Between the messy divorce of his parents and the general fragmentation of his "home," this ergonomic chair felt more welcoming; at least the chair didn't ask him why he'd skipped a relative's funeral.
Less than two hundred meters outside the window, the Taira no Masakado Kanda Myojin shrine sat there like an eyesore. Amidst a forest of high-rise glass towers, that tiny, pitch-black courtyard looked like a patch of darkness the modern world had forgotten to form a spot specifically designed to give passing salarymen a panic attack.
Julian stared at his screen, white noise looping mindlessly in his noise-canceling headphones. He was mapping out the base-layer protocols for the London branch, trying to figure out why the firm's back-end was written like a literal labyrinth.
"Did someone write this code with their feet in the last century?" he muttered under his breath.
Suddenly, the candlestick chart on the right side of the screen gave a weird twitch, as someone had stepped on a power cord. In the next heartbeat, the "Time and Sales" window, usually packed with data, simply vanished.
Cleared. Completely wiped.
There was no error message, no lag. Just a slow crawl of green hexadecimal code surfacing on the screen, pulsing with a rhythmic, mechanical beat. Julian pulled off his headphones and tossed them on the desk.
"Are you serious? System maintenance at this hour?"
He reached for the keyboard to reboot, but a sound sliced through the dead silence of the office.
Clack. Clack-clack. Clack.
It was faint, like an invisible ghost practicing in the corner. Julian froze. He'd heard that sound before, back in his grandfather's study when he was a kid. It was the sound of wooden beads being flicked on an old-school abacus.
He whipped around, his chair letting out an indignant screech.
Nobody. Just rows of black monitors reflecting his own pale face.
He turned back toward the window. Down in that dark courtyard of the shrine, beside a stone lantern that should have been cold, a single spark of ghostly green fire flickered to life. The light dimmed and flared, and with every pulse, a crisp clack of a wooden bead echoed in the empty office.
Julian stared at the flame, then at the frenetic code scrolling across his screen.
"Don't tell me some ancient abacus has the processing power to audit my simulated trades in real-time."
He spoke to the empty room, his voice tinged with the professional annoyance of a man whose workflow had been interrupted.
"Hey, whichever auditor you are, the slippage on this trade is calculated. Don't go messing with my books."
The green fire flared again. The sound of the abacus accelerated into a frantic blur, as if the "accountant" on the other side had taken offense and was now double-checking every cent of his commission.
Saturday.
Julian felt like the further he drove, the more he was being sucked into a giant vacuum jar.
The air in Den-en-chofu was so quiet it made his ears ring. Even the trees on the roadside looked exceptionally polite, as if they were afraid to drop a single leaf without permission. It felt like the "Old Money" in this neighborhood had bought out the wind itself, even the breeze blew with a restrained, musty scent of antique wood.
He swapped his shoes for a pair of stiff slippers in the foyer. He always felt his grandparents' gaze wasn't exactly "kind" in the traditional sense; it was more the look one gives a "A5 Wagyu steak," expensive, high-quality, but ultimately destined for the altar.
"Ju-chan, you're back," his grandmother called out from the inner room. Her tone had less emotion than a bank's automated recording.
Julian didn't say a word. Walking down the hallway, he spotted his grandfather huddled in the shadows by the veranda. The old man had a piece of deerskin over his lap and was meticulously polishing an abacus that looked ready to fall apart. On the side of the frame, the gilded "East India Company" logo was half-rubbed away.
"Is this the best Noruma can do these days?" the old man asked without looking up, his fingertip sliding over the beads. His voice sounded like sandpaper on stone. "I smell the scent of bad debt in here."
Julian leaned against a pillar, unable to stop himself from rolling his eyes. "Grandpa, that's just the smell of old wood. Besides, nobody uses those things anymore."
The old man stopped. He looked up slowly, a sharp glint flickering in his cloudy eyes.
"Ju-chan, why do you think Noruma moved its HQ from Nihonbashi to Otemachi? Do you really think it was for those shiny new offices?"
"Why else? It's not like it's closer to the good takeout spots," Julian shot back.
His grandfather let out a dry chuckle, the abacus beads letting out a sharp clack. "It was to find someone to press down on the 'energy' beneath the soil. The Great Lord at the shrine (Masakado) hated nothing more than messy accounts. Now that you're going to Angel Lane by London Bridge to run the desk, you need to understand one thing."
He pushed the abacus toward Julian, his expression turning cryptic.
"Thousands of severed heads used to hang on that bridge. The blood of those poor bastards washed down the Thames and into the sea, swirled around, and eventually, it all flows back here to the Nihonbashi River. That's the 'Globalization' you kids are always shouting about all the bad debts eventually meet. In the end, every debt must be settled."
Julian felt a slight chill crawl up his neck. He stared at the East India Company logo and couldn't help but snark:
"So, according to your logic, globalization is just one big supernatural audit? What's the exchange rate? How many pounds is a head worth these days?"
His grandfather ignored the trash talk, staring intently at something behind Julian.
Julian followed his gaze back to the white wall.
The hanging lamp swayed. His grandfather's shadow twitched on the wall, but Julian noticed the frequency of the twitch was wrong. The old man hadn't moved, but the edges of that shadow had sprouted several irregular, tentacle-like silhouettes. They were crawling up the cracks in the wall, moving as silently as a prowling auditor.
Julian stared at the shadow for two seconds, took a quiet step back, and said:
"Grandpa... your shadow is moving a lot more than you are. Is it practicing for some kind of illegal ballroom dance?"
The old man snorted, flicking a bead with heavy finality.
"That's the auditor stretching his limbs. Ju-chan, your debt... it isn't light."