'Saturday: November 26th: 08:30:59'

Saturday

26th November

08:30:59

“—I will briefly review, please excuse me.”

Takiguchi’s voice was Naoki’s welcome into the faceless voice call, and he was met by a small panel of uncustomised avatars. The names listed beneath almost made him gasp, but he held on long enough to mute his microphone.

“So far the programme has generated a return on investment of about eight times. All our brokerage channels are rate-limited, so this means your signed letter of confidence will move us in the direction of international expansion.”

“Eight times?” Came an unfamiliar voice. “You said that earlier. You’re sure?”

There was one avatar sitting in the middle of the screen which had been decorated by a photo that was recognisable even to Naoki, despite his steering clear of higher education.

Takiguchi answered, his voice unusually thick with layers of formality.

“Our projections note that the returns shall climb to anywhere between sixteen to thirty times within the next ten years, Mr. Itai, sir. We estimate that current rate of returns will take approximately five years to double.”

Naoki sat, watching the digital meeting transpire between Takiguchi, his business partner, and the Board of Trustees of Keio University.

The only avatar that wasn’t muted could only belong to Koei Itai, the president of the university.

These people are…

Naoki thought of his neighbourhood gym, where the Keio Bodybuilding Club frequented.

If he was willing to break multiple levels of NDA, Takuya would hardly believe this.

A graph flashed on-screen.

“We are very excited to work with the FSA in supporting these figures, and so I hope you will be excited to see them.”

Naoki felt his heart lift with the slow black line that slowly traced towards the upper-right corner of the timeline.

The line represented a number, in yen, that had been raised by countless hours of sweat, anxiety, late nights, early mornings. Countless days and weeks and months of focus, sacrificing mixers and meals and chapters of the heartwarming manga that would otherwise sustain Naoki’s soul.

He'd hung it all on that line.

Mr. Itai exclaimed when he saw it.

“Marvelous!” The Keio president’s voice bubbled over in the form of microphone crackle. “You weren’t exaggerating in the slightest, Mr. Takiguchi. And… Mr. Katsumada? You must’ve worked hard on this.”

Naoki felt a jolt go down his spine. There was a potency in the man addressing him, and his hand trembled, almost hesitant to reach forward to unmute his mic.

“We’re so appreciative that you took the time out of your busy schedule to hear us out, Mr. Itai.” Naoki bowed, even though he didn't need to.
Maybe especially because he didn’t need to, did he feel the need.
“—We’re very proud and excited to present you with this product.”

“I’m half a mind to sign up immediately!” President Itai chortled. “I’m most interested to hear more about the particulars. What are your plans for launch?”

Takiguchi took over, giving Naoki time to ensure his mic was muted, double-ensure, triple, before he reeled back into his chair, gasping.

He hadn’t seen enough of the money he’d made in his lifetime to even take a crack at getting into Keio University. And none other than the Chairman of the Board, someone who most students might go their entire careers without interacting with, was asking to hear more about their fund.

Suddenly the 3,000,000 his business partner had teased him about earlier truly seemed like nothing more than a joke.

He took it as a validation, but it was also a massive slap, heavier than any weight he’d ever lifted, of a mystery.

How in the world had Takiguchi even organised this?

In the time it had taken Naoki to wonder, Takiguchi closed the deal.

“We’ll assemble a small committee to oversee a motion for a wire transfer.” One of Itai’s representatives took over, as the President happily bowed out of the call. At least, it sounded that way on the microphone.

Something about his exit gave Naoki a small feeling of uplift. Even men of great stature could have surprisingly familiar mannerisms.

“You should hear from us by tomorrow.” From the slight, tremorous buzz at the back of the woman’s voice, he had a hunch they would hardly be waiting that long.
“Until then.”

And with that, the meeting ended.

Sitting deep into his clicky, springy office chair, the man marveled at the conclusion of this deal.

The 3,000,000 funnel they had just finished organising was a process weeks in the making. There was a wide network involved, overseen by a small team that they were corresponding with from various timezones, not just Japan.

But this must have been the first and only contact Takiguchi had made with the Keio Board of Trustees.

Once, today, was all it had taken for them to decide to invest.

Naoki hadn’t even grasped what was happening before the deal was settled. It had hardly been necessary to even have him present. He didn’t even know whether to be happy Takiguchi’s called him in, or upset.

Bzzzt.

Naoki looked down at his phone, to find that Takiguchi had probably guessed what he was thinking.

‘High ticket clients.’

He cracked a grin.

“How much are you expecting from this one?”

He was fairly sure by now that any way he had to measure money was broken. He’d lived in fear of 3 million, been sent into the depths by a missing 100,000, and was still craving a platter set that went for 2,170 yen.

That didn’t stop him from reeling all the way out of his seat, when Takiguchi replied.

‘Lower bound is forty million.’

Naoki gave himself a moment to reel. He needed to, as he tried to compare the vast number to everything he’d ever invested into the fund.

It was a pittance. But that didn’t matter. As he reeled, Naoki reeled out of his chair, and stood up. Paced a small spiral around the apartment, before slowly retracing his steps.

“Focus…” He breathed.

Now was the time, above all other things, to do that. And really do it.

Bzzzzt. The man leant onto a vein-carved arm, and read on.

‘After finished with the emails, need you to check on our influencer funnel.’

Naoki frowned. So soon? Trading wasn’t opening publicly for a month. “So why the hell…?”

‘they can’t keep secrets. Will tell their most important contacts on the DL, big fishes will smell undiscovered gold rush.’

Marketing, baby, was what Naoki’s reading amounted to.

He blinked. The strategy made too much sense for him to regret not coming up with it himself.
There wasn’t much for him to add. He suppressed the flare-up of his ego, typing a reply:
“Gotcha.”

‘One more thing.’ Takiguchi suspended the giant thumbs-up sticker for a few messages.
‘Just in case you file the invoice before I can get to it, make absolutely 100% sure it’s marked ‘collateralized’.’

The sticker came, and Takiguchi vanished with the locking of a phone screen.

Naoki pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to push a mental note through the fog.

Thanks to recent developments in digital technology, the fund they were building had ways of offering capital services at low overhead, at small but consistent return, and also incorporated automatic contracts that expanded their service model across every industry.

His brain already hurt enough as it was. He rubbed his head.

Basically, their fund was a new kind of banking system, that was better, quicker, and more efficient at moving money around. And thanks to a tech-assisted way of measuring market behaviour, the system also made smart investments that took account of how other people were viewing the fund’s own trades.

In other words, thanks to Takiguchi’s supervision, the fund was semi self-aware.
It would even bet against itself in the short term, if it meant coming out on top by the end of the quarter.

And as of next month, it looked like they’d go twelve quarters straight without a single loss, and the gains were only steadily rising.

If someone was going to invest in that system, i.e. put forty million yen in, they were essentially giving Takiguchi and Naoki control over that entire sum of money.

That meant they had a year to turn that forty million into three hundred and twenty.
And another year to turn that into two and a half billion.

Quickly his head began spinning again. The numbers didn’t make any sense. They’d never made any sense.

The only thing that made sense was Takiguchi’s note.

Make 100% sure it’s marked ‘collateralized’.

The fund needed to make for-damn sure that every yen was backed up, meaning that even if they lost everything the Keio Board had paid them, they’d be able to body a refund on top of losing their client.

Not two and a half. They basically had two years to make five billion yen.

The very thought made the man want to trade in his tight-fitting shirt for a blanket, and his deskchair for a hole.

He righted himself, refueling his brain with a chestful of air. Be it might the sound of human voices, or maybe the chill of being called by name by President Koei Itai, but Naoki felt energised enough to crawl back into his emails.

There was a trick to focusing, even if you didn’t want to. Slowly Naoki’s visage shifted into one made of stone, as he furrowed his brows into a deep, deep frown.

This time.

¥¥¥

Hours later, it was when Naoki reached the end of the list of emails and came upon his first telephone number that he realised he couldn’t take it anymore.

Perhaps it was the slow, subtle, but certain shift in light outside, or the fact that the day had warmed by half a degree. The city had woken up at some point through the middle of Naoki’s work session, and he could now hear the bleat of traffic as cars tailed one another two ways through the nearby intersection.

He couldn’t believe it. He, a man who had borne loads greater than the mass most men would ever even lift in a week, as he slouched backwards, and stared at the ceiling after merely twiddling his fingers across an RGB-illuminated tactile piece of plastic for barely two hours…

He couldn’t believe how pitiful his discipline was.

Done.

He’d already opened multiple new tabs, his dopamine-starved system searching for something to fill the vacuum.

Done, I’m done, can I be done?
I'm—

He was moments away from reaching for that button that would unblock his bookmarks. All he could do was congratulate himself on his self-awareness, as he watched himself cursor over the icon. On the other side of this button meant the free manga reader site, and the next ten chapters of—

…

Slow down.

Achingly painfully, another chance for a Cute Escape slipped through his fingers, which he peeled away from the mouse button, and instead clasped together, as he stared into the corner of his desk.

I need to focus.

Another part of this life was having the discipline to accept your own pitiful discipline levels, and slowly but surely raising the bar.

Influencers…

The phone calls could wait. Nobody without an email listed would care much about new-fangled technology, anyway.

He hauled his mind by the end of his cursor back to the homepage, distracting himself from one task with another. He looked over the lists of contacts he and Takiguchi had collected.

He hadn’t even realised until the day Takiguchi had suggested tapping into this market that influencers could be financial in nature, or rather, that yelling about obscure movements of numbers in databases on the internet could produce any kind of influence at all.

It was a few short clicks to check the details of the contacts, but he would have to do some research, make some judgements, write a shortlist, and…

More emails.

Or texts, at least. Both of those were better options than phone calls, but both of them called for more finger movements, and Naoki was about frozen stiff.

Not so much by the cold. He’d adjusted to that, at least. But by boredom.

Naoki was far enough in his self-awareness journey to tell it was too late. The wind of counterveiling thoughts had slipped in through the cracks between contexts, and widened the gaps.

The mind of the man had drifted, and the weight bearing down on him had shifted accordingly.

He began not to feel the cold. Only a heavy, heavy burden, one Atlas himself wouldn’t have been jealous of.

“I’m not worried about it, dear.”

It was recalling moments like those that made Naoki feel like he was living in the turning of a plot point in a manga. It was moments like this that kept him going.

“I know you’ve been working hard.”

And he had. So hard he felt like he was bleeding in his soul.

So hard he couldn’t choose between his plattered cheat-feast, and throwing up.

Why, then, had he turned up 100,000 short?

Naoki felt a low fire start in him.

A fury, like a forest, burning down to its mineral soil.

He hadn’t been working anywhere near hard enough.

“Influencers, huh…?”

Trailing down the list, Naoki began to reach for his phone.