noveltune Chapter 213 A New World Beyond the Limits
Chapter 213 A New World Beyond the Limits
December 28, 1989.
2:45 PM.
Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo.
Saionji Industrial Headquarters Building. Top Floor Strategy Room.
A heavy lead-lined explosion-proof door completely isolates this space from the outside world. An indoor constant temperature and humidity system operates smoothly in a concealed, dark corner. Extremely weak, low-frequency airflow passes through hidden vents, continuously injecting into the room and locking the temperature at twenty-two degrees Celsius.
This extremely spacious, enclosed room contained only a very small number of furnishings.
Saionji Satsuki sat alone in the large leather swivel chair in the center of the room.
Today she wore an extremely soft light blue turtleneck cashmere sweater. The high-count cashmere fabric perfectly hugged her slender shoulders and neck. Her long, dark hair was simply pulled back with an antique-style tortoiseshell hairpin, with a few loose strands falling along the edges of her fair cheeks.
The sitting posture is extremely relaxed. The back is deeply sunk into the soft leather backrest, and the legs are casually crossed.
On the rosewood table beside me sat a bone china teacup, filled with freshly brewed premium Darjeeling black tea. Warm steam rose slowly in the cool air, and the amber surface of the tea occasionally rippled with the slightest ripples. The rich aroma, reminiscent of muscat grapes, spread layer by layer in the constant temperature air.
Satsuki's visual focus converges directly in front of the room.
A large display terminal, specifically designed for accessing the underlying data network of the Saionji Information System (SIS), is placed directly in front of it.
On the surface of the enormous cathode ray tube screen, a ghostly green light flickered continuously, driven by high-frequency scan lines. At the very center of the screen, a massive string of numbers representing the lifeblood of Japan's financial system rapidly pulsed with an extremely high electronic refresh rate.
Nikkei 225 Average: 38,890 points
Satsuki's gaze passed over the panoramic floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass curtain wall and landed in the direction of Nihonbashi Kabutocho, several kilometers away.
Grayish-white winter clouds hung low atop the skyscrapers. At this physical distance, all the noise from the outside world was completely blocked out by the thick, bulletproof glass.
But she seemed to see an invisible, frenzied current of energy, a mixture of extreme greed and madness, swirling above Kabutocho.
They stirred and cheered, pushing the balloon higher and higher, completely disregarding whether it would burst.
She looked away, her gaze shifting to a market data display monitor next to the main screen.
On the auxiliary screen, the order book data for core real estate stocks, infrastructure stocks, and financial heavyweight stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section is scrolling down at an extremely high refresh rate.
[Mitsubishi Estate: A single buy order for 3.5 million shares was entered. The current price has changed to 3,900 yen per share. The top five sell orders have been cleared.]
[Nippon Steel: Market buy orders are being triggered at a rate of 70 times per second. The latest transaction price hit the upper limit, and there are no new sell orders.]
[NTT: 30 billion yen has been invested to build a position. The Tokkin retail investor trust account is showing full buy volume.]
[Sumitomo Realty: Turnover rate reached 9% within ten minutes. Excess premium buy orders continued to queue, causing queue delays in the exchange's underlying matching engine.]
[Industrial Bank of Japan: Large institutional funds made bulk purchases at market price. Nominal total market capitalization broke historical records.]
...
The green volume histogram is rising sharply at an angle that completely defies conventional parabolic models. The matching frequency reported by the underlying data interface is approaching the processing limits of the exchange's mainframe. Massive buy orders are piling up in the channel, pushing the bid and ask prices to one limit up after another.
All of Japan's capital is being poured into this boiling trading pool with a frenzied, defiant attitude. Whether it's the political mission to stabilize the market or retail investors blinded by greed, all orders are forcefully pushing that number upward.
Satsuki watched the bills constantly refresh on the screen, a slightly mocking smile playing on her lips.
"We must do everything in our power to bring 1989 to a perfect close."
She picked up the bone china teacup from the table, the warmth slowly spreading through her palm.
Even if you subconsciously realize that this is a dream, you still want to force out the most dazzling idea with money before the end of the year.
She took a small sip of black tea.
For those speculators outside waving their bankbooks, trying to throw their last coin into the stock market, and even for those tycoon traders sitting in upscale restaurants strategizing, the massive index about to jump on the main screen is merely an ordinary step on the road to the legendary 40,000-point mark.
Aside from the expansion of their paper wealth, that number held no special significance for them.
But Satsuki knew exactly where the physical limits behind those numbers lay.
She was waiting, waiting for that turning point in history.
...
2:50 p.m.
The green characters on the terminal screen began to scroll even more frantically. Massive amounts of buy order data, like a flood bursting its banks, poured into the exchange's core matching pool through the trading networks of various securities companies.
The extremely faint sound of the electronic screen refreshing echoed repeatedly in the quiet room.
The green numbers rise straight up as if completely defying gravity.
[38, 905 points]
[38, 910 points]
In the original physical history, this country's economic momentum had an absolute extreme. The closing price of the Nasdaq on December 29, 1989, should have permanently fixed the index at that specific level of [38,915.87 points]. This would then trigger a long, decades-long avalanche.
The 0.5 percent interest rate hike order issued by Bank of Japan Governor Yasushi Mieno a few days ago possesses the terrifying potential to drain market liquidity. This momentum should have completely exhausted the last bit of upward momentum in the market this afternoon.
The gravitational force of history is inherently irresistible.
This is how it should be.
Satsuki's gaze was fixed on the green number on the screen that was still jumping upwards, her fingers unconsciously tapping the table.
The Bank of Japan's interest rate hike order will not have an immediate effect, as has happened historically. As a result, the market index was not only not suppressed by the negative impact of the interest rate hike, but instead showed a sweeping short squeeze.
The only variable is... oneself.
The sunlight reflected Satsuki's own image onto the screen, where she overlapped with the wildly rising bar chart.
The enormous "money multiplier" that the Saionji family has been relentlessly injecting into the real economy over the past two years has finally come to fruition.
The deep-sea pressurized caisson operation in Odaiba and the heavy oil combustion matrix at Gokurakukan in Hokkaido—these two unprecedented infrastructure behemoths devoured an incredibly vast amount of wealth. However, this enormous sum of hundreds of billions of yen did not simply vanish in the vacancy of the financial system.
All of this wealth was converted into huge sums of money for purchasing steel, cement, specialty glass, and large machinery.
Saionji Construction's finance department would send bundles of checks bearing the bank's seal to building material suppliers in the Kanto region. Once the suppliers received the funds, they would immediately start up the blast furnaces and production lines, and then turn the profits into huge salaries for hundreds of thousands of low-level construction workers, truck drivers, and assembly line operators.
This substantial amount of cash perfectly evaded the Ministry of Finance's oversight of real estate lending to financial institutions. It flowed directly into the bank accounts of ordinary people and small and medium-sized enterprises through countless pay slips and settlement checks.
Building on this, the efficiency revolution brought about by Saionji Foods' integrated supply chain for the three major convenience stores, along with the "paying taxes for the people" policy implemented by S-Mart and Uniqlo, completed the second phase of liquidity release.
The 3% consumption tax that should have been turned over to the national treasury during the circulation of goods was forcibly retained by the Saionji Group, leveraging its enormous profit margins, and ended up in the wallets of millions of middle-class individuals. The disposable cash in the hands of the people was not diminished by the implementation of the new tax system. Looking at the cash saved in their wallets, their confidence in spending expanded exponentially.
The more fatal source of the liquidity swell stems from the Saionji family's strategic move to sell off peripheral plots and core assets some time ago.
In order to acquire deliberately released high-premium land plots and core commercial office buildings such as the "Pink Tower," Seibu Group and Daiei Group applied for massive bridge loans from major commercial banks. The banks' credit approval departments operated at full speed in the face of these high-quality collateral, converting massive credit lines into book figures and forcibly inflating the total M2 broad money supply of the entire society.
Base money is created and then amplified through the lending and deposit cycles of commercial banks.
This liquidity pool, comprised of funds channeled to infrastructure projects, tax-exempt funds, and credit expansion funds, amounts to trillions of yen.
Driven by rampant self-confidence and pure greed among the public, this massive influx of liquidity, large enough to overwhelm everything, transformed into a wild beast completely out of control. Instead of entering the real manufacturing sector for expanded reproduction, it flowed back into the already overheated Tokyo stock market through countless retail investor trust funds and the trading networks of major brokerage firms.
Mieno Yasushi attempted to raise borrowing costs by increasing interest rates. However, faced with the massive "interest-free cash flow" generated by the Saionji family through its extensive physical infrastructure projects and tax breaks, the Bank of Japan's mere 0.5 percentage point interest rate leverage was simply insufficient to move this giant mountain built from countless physical cash flows.
The extra trillion yen in liquidity single-handedly propped up the market from its impending collapse.
The terminal screen paused for an extremely brief moment. In that instant, the underlying data packets completed one last massive throughput and computation.
The green characters are rearranged.
2:55 PM.
The numbers freeze.
[38, 915.87 points]
After a microsecond-level pause.
The numbers on the screen, accompanied by a faint flash of light, completely left behind that mark that once represented the limits of history. They continued their arrogant ascent.
[38, 930 points]
Satsuki seemed to hear the sound of gears meshing.
The wall of historical resistance was breached in that one second.
The world line has shifted.
From that very second, all the precise memories, specific locations, and timelines of her past life in her mind turned into worthless scraps of paper. The trajectory of history was severely disrupted by the immense external force of capital she herself exerted.
Aside from the unwavering macroeconomic trend that the economy will eventually collapse due to over-expansion, every tiny detail of the future is shrouded in a thick and unpredictable fog of war.
The prophet's illusory aura shattered completely at this moment.
Satsuki leaned back in her large leather swivel chair, watching the number continue to rise.
Ah, I'm about to lose that all-knowing, godlike perspective...
This time it broke through the limits of the Nikkei, but what about next time? What kind of shifts will the world take in the future?
The script in my hand, titled "Memories of a Past Life," is nearing its end.
Satsuki slightly pushed off with her feet, turning the leather seat around. Her gaze swept past the panoramic bulletproof glass, landing on the vast city outside the window.
Stripped of the pre-ordained script and its false filter, the outside world is unfolding before her eyes in a completely new light, unlike anything she has seen since her rebirth.
Freed from absolute control, the trajectories of all things exude a sense of vitality and reality.
The script has failed.
So what?
Memories of a past life are ultimately just a crutch to help you get started.
Now the cane is broken.
However, the business acumen and operational skills she honed through years of fierce business battles have become an integral part of her physical body.
She was not a bystander in this world; she, in the guise of Saionji Satsuki, actively participated in the waves of this new world.
Over the years, her attendance rate at school has consistently ranked last, which doesn't mean she's been playing around everywhere.
On the short-selling side, forward put options worth up to $300 billion have been allocated in 100 offshore trust accounts on overseas exchanges, ready to launch a massive harvest of the Japanese financial market the moment the market crashes.
On the information and communication side, Saionji Information System (SIS) leases physical fiber optic cables from NTT and relies on dedicated network equipment and underlying protocols at both ends to bypass traditional regulatory restrictions and directly access the global trading hub. Through its proprietary algorithms, it monitors the flow of funds and transaction anomalies throughout Japanese society in real time.
At the heart of infrastructure development, the Saienji Pagoda in Odaiba will be completed in the near future. Combined with the surrounding area, the Saienji family will practically have a "country within a country."
In the real estate game, Hokkaido's "Gokurakukan" operates with extreme luxury and ostentation, serving as a deliberate financial lure to deplete the Seibu Empire's cash reserves, paving the way for its eventual takeover of its biggest rival. Soon, Seibu will be carrying this massive bomb to its doom.
By expanding into lower-tier retail and physical real estate, the Saionji Group's vast real estate empire encompasses Uniqlo, S-Mart hypermarkets, S-Collection boutiques, Kitakuniya fast-food outlets, and thousands of karaoke vending machines across Japan. This network not only constructs a grassroots consumer network but also forms part of its extensive real estate portfolio. Saionji Foods' central kitchen system has taken over the fresh food supply for the three major convenience store chains in the Kanto region, giving it access to data on the daily consumption patterns of the general public.
Through technological barriers and overseas equity stakes, SA Investment controls shares and board seats in Silicon Valley's core technology giants such as Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft. Combined with upstream factories like Takata Quartz acquired in Japan through court proceedings, it has initially established a technological monopoly on the underlying hardware of semiconductors at both legal and physical levels.
All her strategies are built upon a solid foundation of economics and resource management. No matter how far the overall figures deviate from historical trends, as long as this business system exists, Saionji Satsuki will not fail.
We arrived at exactly 3 PM.
On the terminal screen in the center of the sealed room.
The green characters underwent one last extremely high-frequency data refresh. The bouncing cursor stopped at this moment.
A brand new limit, unique to this world, has emerged.
[38, 950.20 points]
Satsuki turned to look at that number.
This is an unfamiliar number.
This is a completely new number.
Her eyebrows curved slightly, and the corners of her mouth turned up, forming a faint smile full of ambition.
"Hello, new world."