Half-past ten on a Sunday morning. Tokyo Central Station was bustling with people; the steady sound of train announcements intertwined with the hurried footsteps of thousands of individuals.
He stood leaning against a massive pillar near the West Exit, both hands shoved deep into his pockets. Completely unlike the young men nervously waiting for their girlfriends in sharp, meticulously groomed outfits, his style today exuded a bizarre and incomprehensibly out-of-place vibe.
He wore a baggy, plain white hoodie paired with knee-length black shorts and black-and-white sneakers. To add to the eccentricity of this unmatched ensemble, his hair was neatly slicked back with wax, and perched on the bridge of his nose was a pair of non-prescription black-rimmed glasses. This getup made him look more like an eccentric artist taking a stroll than a young man about to step into a romantic date.
That was entirely intentional. He had no desire to impress. He didn't need to dress up to please a commodity bought with money. To him, today's meeting was simply a quality control check before bringing this "personnel" into the official act at the hospital.
At exactly 10:45, a figure parting the crowd caught his eye.
Ichinose Chizuru - or rather, Mizuhara Chizuru, according to the name on the app - appeared in an incredibly flattering coral one-piece dress, a thin cardigan draped lightly over her shoulders. Her long, softly curled hair bounced in the breeze, and her subtle makeup highlighted a flawless face. From the moment she strode forward, dozens of gazes from the surrounding men were magnetically drawn to her, filled with lust and envy.
She stopped in front of him, the corners of her mouth instantly painting a radiant, sunny smile, as if she had been looking forward to this moment for a very long time.
"Kazuya-kun, have you been waiting long?" Her voice rang out sweet and clear, carrying just enough intimacy to melt any virgin guy's heart.
But not him. Standing before the highest-rated beauty on the app, his heartbeat didn't skip even half a beat. He lightly pushed up his glasses, his mouth curving into an industrial smile - precise, standard, polite, but with an absolute temperature of zero.
"I just arrived as well. Let's go, Ms. Mizuhara."
Chizuru faltered slightly. A razor-thin flash of awkwardness crossed her smile, existing for only a tenth of a second before her professionalism covered it up. Clearly, she wasn't used to this distant form of address and this chillingly indifferent attitude. The vast majority of male clients, upon seeing her, would get flustered, turn beet red, stutter uncontrollably, or use a hungry gaze to scan her from head to toe.
But the young man in the white hoodie and shorts in front of her looked at her with eyes as still as a dead lake. The way he called her "Ms. Mizuhara" sounded no different from a CEO calling a subordinate.
"Y-yeah... Let's go!" Chizuru quickly adjusted her tone, stepping behind him. Inwardly, she made her assessment: Today's client seems to be quite strange and closed off.
The date venue was the Central Aquarium.
The deep blue light from the massive tanks cast over their faces. The atmosphere was inherently designed to be romantic and ethereal, but in his presence, everything became as dry as a biology student's field trip.
Throughout the outing, Chizuru continuously deployed the "professional skills" she had practiced hundreds of times to win over clients. However, every single one of her efforts hit a solid, invisible fortress wall.
Walking through a narrow, crowded corridor, Chizuru proactively stepped closer, lightly reaching out to link her arm through his - the most basic physical contact designed to create a sense of fluttering romance.
The exact moment her fingers brushed the fabric of his hoodie, he naturally took a half-step back, making way for a woman pushing a stroller to pass. He clasped his hands behind his back, walking leisurely, and turned his head to speak in a tone so polite it felt alien:
"Walk carefully, it's a bit crowded here, you don't need to cling to me. I don't like feeling entangled when I move."
Chizuru's hand grasped at thin air before awkwardly withdrawing. She bit her lower lip slightly, feeling her professional pride being challenged.
Reaching the central tank area, Chizuru decided to switch tactics. She ran up and pressed both hands against the thick glass, her large, round eyes sparkling as she looked inside, then turned back to him with a perfectly innocent, coquettish expression.
"Wow! Kazuya-kun, look! That fish is so cute! It's just swimming around so slowly, doesn't it look silly!"
He shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled over. He didn't even bother looking at her adorable expression; his gaze merely skimmed over the giant, flat-shaped creature drifting in the glass tank. His face was emotionless, his voice steady as if reading from an encyclopedia page:
"Yeah. An ocean sunfish. Survives entirely dependent on ocean currents, has a very small brain compared to its body size, and is utterly useless at self-defense. This creature exists mainly because it reproduces in massive quantities; its actual survival skills are virtually zero. It does look... incredibly dumb."
The romantic atmosphere Chizuru had painstakingly built shattered into a million pieces. The innocent smile on her lips died, replaced by a dumbfounded, speechless blink. Did this man lack a romantic nerve? Did he really spend money to hire her here to narrate marine biology?
From behind his non-prescription glasses, his razor-sharp eyes took in all of her reactions. Inside his head, a ruthless analysis and evaluation was constantly running.
He mocked inwardly: "Her smile just slipped by a millimeter when I talked about the fish. Her voice is forced half a pitch higher than normal to create an illusion of fragile innocence. Her steps intentionally slow down by half a beat to force the man to walk parallel and feel like a protector. So cheap."
He felt a wave of disgust churn in his stomach. Every gesture, every word from Chizuru was overly calculated. It was perfect, but it was the perfection of a soulless money-printing machine wrapped in beautiful skin. Did the person who scripted this service think all men in the world were affection-starved idiots blinded by desperation? That they were willing to pay a fortune just to exchange it for such clumsily staged lies?
Women and their sweet lies. The old memory of a deep wound clawed at his mind once more. He despised hypocrisy. And the person walking beside him, ironically, was the absolute peak of commercialized hypocrisy.
He raised his wrist to check his watch. This was the fourth time in half an hour he had done this. Occasionally, when Chizuru was trying to make eye contact and tell a cheerful story, he would deliberately look away aimlessly, or let out a very faint sigh. Subtle yet glaringly obvious signals of rejection, enough to slap the pride right out of any woman.
Two o'clock in the afternoon. They sat across from each other at a small cafe inside the aquarium grounds. The rental time on the app was only halfway through.
Chizuru gently stirred her smoothie, feeling completely deadlocked. Even though she had tried every possible method, this client maintained an absolute distance. He wasn't rude - he always opened doors for her, pulled out her chair - but that politeness was like a fortress wall built of ice, impossible to penetrate.
Unwilling to accept defeat, Chizuru decided to play her final trump card. She leaned forward, reaching out to touch the back of his hand resting on the table.
"Say, Kazuya-kun, do you believe in palm reading? I've learned a little bit about it, let me check your love line for you, okay?" Her voice dropped lower, carrying a deadly, enchanting allure.
Clack.
He slammed his glass of lemonade down onto the table before her fingers could even touch his skin. The dry collision of glass against wood rang out, cleanly slicing through the ambiguous atmosphere Chizuru had just tried to create.
The industrial smile on his lips vanished. There was no more superficial courtesy. In its place was an ice-cold, hyper-rational face, dripping with the condescension of someone holding the power of life and death.
He dug his hand into his black shorts pocket, pulled out a pre-prepared brown paper envelope, and slid it across the table toward Chizuru.
"The service fee for today." His voice was flat, without a ripple of emotion. "The full amount for the entirely booked time, plus travel expenses."
Chizuru was stunned, her eyes widening at the envelope and then looking up at his stone-cold face. Her hand, poised to read his palm, slowly withdrew, resting awkwardly on her lap.
"Huh? Kazuya-kun... what are you talking about? But we're only halfway through our time! There are still two hours left. Do... do you have an unexpected emergency?"
He didn't answer her question. He unhurriedly pulled out his smartphone and unlocked the screen. The sparkling diamond icon of the Diamond app appeared right before her eyes.
Under Chizuru's dumbfounded gaze, he tapped straight into the review section for the ongoing date. Without a hint of hesitation, his finger selected the row of five shining stars, typed a few lines of text into the comment box, and hit send.
He pocketed his phone immediately after finishing, planted both hands on the table, and slowly stood up. He tilted his head down slightly, looking at Chizuru out of the corner of his eye - the posture of a superior looking down at a defective product.
"I don't have any emergencies." His icy voice cut through, the volume just loud enough for only the two of them to hear every single word clearly, every syllable striking like a hammer directly onto the professional ego of the perfect girl in front of him.
"I simply do not want to waste any more of my own time here. 5 stars. 1 star for you, for the painfully forced, sickeningly fake experience you just put on for the past two hours. And the remaining 4 stars because this damn app is fundamentally a machine that breeds lies to begin with. The fault isn't entirely yours."
He smirked, dropping a razor-sharp concluding remark:
"Don't harbor illusions about your abilities, Ms. Mizuhara. You're only fooling empty-headed idiots with thick wallets."
Chizuru's eyes were blown wide open, her pupils contracting to pinpricks from the sheer, concussive shock of his verbal assault. For the very first time since she had stepped into the lucrative, shadowy underworld of selling smiles and rented affections, her impenetrable, flawless armor suffered a catastrophic breach. His words had bypassed every layer of her psychological camouflage, brutally ripping apart the pride and superiority she had secretly harbored.
She had dealt with terrible clients before. She had endured the crude, the aggressively handsy, the obnoxiously wealthy. She had coddled the painfully shy, the weeping, the emotionally broken. But she had never, in her entire tenure, been confronted by a man so utterly ruthless that he viewed her as nothing more than a malfunctioning appliance. A man who would casually discard her halfway through the session without demanding a refund, and then personally, surgically dismantle her coveted title of the "Ideal Girlfriend" with such profound, unadulterated contempt.
Chizuru's lips trembled violently. Her throat constricted, filling with a bitter, suffocating tightness that prevented her from vocalizing even a single syllable of defense or retaliation.
He had no intention of lingering to observe the fallout of his psychological strike. The review had been submitted, the financial transaction was concluded, and his rigorous field test had yielded the data he required.
He turned his back on her and strode decisively out of the café. His posture beneath the baggy white hoodie was rigid, uncompromising, and completely straight. He merged seamlessly back into the dense, shuffling crowds of the aquarium, his pace steady, without casting even a fraction of a glance backward over his shoulder.
As he walked, disappearing into the sea of people, he reached up to adjust the frame of his zero-prescription glasses one final time, muttering quietly to himself.
"The operational mechanics of this wretched service are now fully understood. Her level of professionalism is certainly adequate for manipulating men significantly older and more foolish than she is. But it is completely, utterly useless against me."