02:14 AM.
The luxury of Ginza had completely extinguished in the dead of night, leaving only a clinical, sickly silence. The storefront windows along the streets still glowed with expensive, cold light, but not a single soul was visible in the aura, only the streetlamps casting scorched shadows across the empty asphalt. Julian stopped in front of a defunct gallery. The entrance was sealed tight with heavy red pine boards, the crevices choked with years of accumulated dust. Yellowed notices clung to the wood, making faint, brittle cracking sounds in the midnight breeze.
He didn't knock. Instead, he pushed aside a hidden gap at the edge of the boards and slipped inside.
Inside, there were no lights. The air was thick with a strange scent, a mix of old oil paints and preservatives. There were no infrared scans or modern security gates. At the end of the corridor stood two elderly men. They wore black montsuki haori, the silk family crests on their collars glinting faintly in the dark. They stood like withered statues, hands folded, their wrinkles so deep they looked carved by a chisel. Their breathing was imperceptible.
Julian stopped and pulled the black envelope his grandfather had given him from his inner coat pocket. He said nothing, simply holding the envelope level with his chest.
The man on the left raised his head. His eyes weren't cloudy; they were as bright as polished obsidian. He didn't reach for the letter. He simply stared at the black wax seal for three seconds, a pure, boundary-crossing silent confirmation.
Simultaneously, the two men bowed, shifted their shoulders, and cleared a path to a descending stone staircase. The lead elder took an object from his sleeve and presented it to Julian with both hands: a silver fox mask. The cold-forged metal was sharp, its lines aggressive, with the corners of the eyes tilted upward in a look of malicious wit. Inside was a soft silk lining, carrying a faint scent of sandalwood.
Julian took it. The moment his fingertips brushed the silver surface, a bone-chilling cold jolted through him. He traced the frozen eye sockets, hesitating for a second. Masks were for those who needed to hide. He was Julian wherever he went; he was Julian. Why cover his face?
But the elders remained motionless, their eyes as calm as ancient wells, exerting a wordless pressure: "The rules are the rules."
Julian let out a short, dry laugh and slowly slid the cold mask onto his face. It hid his expression and his name, leaving only two eyes to peer through the narrow fox-slits at the path ahead. He took a deep breath; through the mask, the air tasted sharper. Descending the stone steps, Julian felt a low-frequency vibration rising from the earth. It didn't sound like music; it sounded like a massive, rusted machine slowly devouring time. He had come here to hear it for himself, the raw "noise" hidden behind the veil of prosperity.
The air below was much drier, smelling of the embers of burnt paper. The stairs opened into a massive vault nearly ten meters high. At its center sat an imposing Noh stage built of black cypress, devoid of any decoration. Pale lanterns hung above, casting vertical pillars of light onto a massive, translucent quartz table in the middle of the stage.
Six people sat around the table. All were masked; some wore the "Okina" Noh masks, others wore traditional Western black blindfolds. Julian crouched in the shadows of the second-floor gallery, his fingers unconsciously tracing the edge of his silver fox mask.
"Seattle, your progress is too slow." The speaker was an elder in an Okina mask. His codename was "London Bridge." His voice sounded like a dead branch dragging across sandpaper.
"Server processing power needs time to override physical sovereignty," a man in a navy-blue bespoke suit responded coldly. His codename was "Seattle." "The GAFA base protocols are finished. Once the fiat system collapses, all asset mapping will be transferred within a second."
"Frankfurt" tapped the quartz tabletop, creating a sharp clicking sound. "The old debt is too heavy. Current debt-to-GDP ratios are triple the global output. These aren't just numbers anymore; this is gravity. And gravity will bring the whole building down."
"Which is why we need a 'smooth evaporation,'" London Bridge whispered.
Julian's brow furrowed beneath his mask. These men weren't discussing how to create wealth; they were discussing how to burn the rotten ledgers without alerting the tenants in the building.
A massive, fluorescent blue curve suddenly projected onto the black wall behind the stage was the trend line of global debt. The slope was desperately steep, its end nearly vertical, like a steel ruler on the verge of snapping.
"The current deflationary pressure is too great. If we let this debt explode directly, we'll be buried with it," said Otemachi." His voice was young but possessed a flat, motionless deadness. "We need a new consensus."
London Bridge nodded and projected a number onto the quartz: 2%.
"Global normalized inflation at 2%," London Bridge announced, as if reading a decree. "This is the final objective for the next phase."
Julian sat in the shadows, his mind flashing back to every textbook he had read at Barclays and LSE. The books said 2% was to stimulate consumption, to keep the economy vital, the golden balance for growth. But looking at the silent silhouettes of these old men, all the formulas in his head collapsed. This wasn't about growth.
"2% inflation means that every thirty-five years, half of the world's debt is legally erased," Frankfurt added with a cold smirk. "And the fools holding cash and pensions won't even realize the blood in their pockets is draining at 2% a year. It's called 'painless sacrifice.'"
Julian felt a wave of nausea. This wasn't macro-regulation; this was a precision-engineered, legal, and colossal harvesting machine.
"When do we scuttle the fiat ship?" Seattle asked.
"No rush. Before the ship sinks, we must ensure the lifeboats are filled with gold." London Bridge traced several complex black-gold codes onto the table. The prefixes were Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. "These digital sovereignties are built. When the Dollar and Yen become wastepaper, global assets will log back into the GAFA algorithms via these codes."
Julian stared at the flickering code, his fingertips cold. He finally understood the play: they were going to drain the world's cash, hide the wealth in algorithms common people couldn't understand, and then shut the gates.
"The audit is over," London Bridge said, standing up with stiff, slow movements.
Julian looked at them, and a wildly absurd thought took hold: if the world is destined to be robbed, it's better to be the one taking the tolls on the GAFA lifeboat than the one bleeding out for the 2%.
The quartz table sank silently into the floor, replaced by a dark red bronze altar rising from below. It was a complex polyhedral geometry, every inch of its metal surface densely engraved with sigils from the Key of Solomon. Through the fox mask, Julian watched the Hebrew letters; they weren't static; they were writhing like leeches on the bronze, constantly restructuring.
A low-frequency tremor shook the ground. Without warning, London Bridge stood up. He grabbed his own left index finger and snapped it with a crisp "CRACK." Seattle followed, then Frankfurt. These men who controlled the global cash flow were performing a standardized industrial process, systematically breaking their own knuckles, wrists, and arms. No screams, only the dull thuds of shattering bone.
Blood dripped from their sleeves, but it didn't spread on the floor. It moved as if pulled by a magnet, flowing upward through the geometric grooves of the bronze altar. The blood filled the writhing sigils, turning the dark metal a stinging scarlet.
A sound of grinding metal, like ten thousand fingernails on glass, tore through the air. The top of the altar split open to reveal its core: a sphere composed of countless miniature solid gold gears and hundreds of translucent eyeballs. The gears spun at high speeds, driving the eyes to open and close, their pupils flashing with a light of calculation beyond human dimensions.
As the blood poured in, a scorched cold mist rose from the sphere. Within the mist, the distorted silhouettes of four massive entities took shape. They had the heads of beasts but wore silk robes. Julian stared at them, and his definitions of "interest," "credit," and "debt" began to disintegrate. These weren't demons. This was the Mother of modern finance.
The silhouette representing "Compound Interest" reached out with a thousand hands, overlapping with "Leverage." They formed an imploding pentagram, spinning so fast it transcended physical limits, leaving trails of glowing, undecipherable mathematical logic on Julian's retinas.
Julian tried to model it using the mental power he had honed at LSE. If A is risk, and B is the hedge... BANG!
It felt like a detonator went off in the back of his brain. Every model, formula, and logic was wiped clean in an instant, replaced by an abyss named "GAFA." He realized the algorithms after 2013 weren't code, they were the shadows cast by these things into the three-dimensional world.
"Juritsu."
A heavy voice sounded behind him. It was his father. Before Julian could turn, his father's hand, covered in liver spots, clamped onto him with a death grip, dragging him toward the center of the altar.
"Log in," his father's voice said, cold and devoid of humanity.
Julian's palm was forced onto the spinning, blood-scented golden sphere. A violent, searing sensation pierced his nerves instantly. It didn't feel like engraving; it felt like his bone marrow was being sucked out and replaced by a cold, pulsing binary current. He could feel his heartbeat, his temperature, his DNA, even every future second of his life being tagged, packaged, and forcibly uploaded into that digital sovereignty. His "biological asset" had officially logged in.
05:40 AM.
The cold wind of Ginza cut his face like a blade. Julian knelt by a utility pole near the ruins of the gallery, vomiting violently into a storm drain. Stomach acid mixed with the remnants of last night's alcohol spread across the grey asphalt. It felt like ten thousand screaming cicadas were stuffed into his brain; the side effects of his logic being forcibly rewritten left him barely able to stand.
Trembling, he fumbled for his phone, habitually wanting to check the Nikkei index. The moment the screen lit up, Julian's pupils dilated.
The candlestick charts on his screen were no longer smooth curves. They were writhing black lines, identical to the ones he had seen on the altar. They twisted into eerie sigils, pulsing in perfect sync with his own breathing. The stock prices weren't fluctuating. The stock prices were breathing.
He stared at the phone, his stomach churning again. But he didn't continue to vomit, nor did he feel fear. He stared intensely at the GAFA price curves from early 2013, the ones that hadn't yet taken flight, and flashed back to those blood-soaked ledgers representing the 2% inflation.
He raised his hand and looked at his palm. Beneath the skin, a dark gold pentagram mark flickered faintly, like a living vascular tumor. Julian wiped the grime from his mouth and stood up, slow and steady. In the middle of the deserted Ginza street, he looked at the luxury towers reaching into the clouds and let out a hideously distorted smile. That smile tore through his usual mask of elegance, revealing the predator beneath something far greedier than the demons under the earth.
"Since you're robbing us in broad daylight," he whispered, "then I'll be the one... who robs the robbers of everything they own."
With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the heavy silver fox mask into a trash can. The sound of metal hitting a soda can rang out sharply in the morning silence. He dialed an encrypted number for a private broker.
"Open an account for me."
As the sun began to rise, his shadow stretched long across the ground, longer and far less human.