Saionji Real Estate's Bunkyo Ward Branch had an Old Records Archive Room on Basement Level 3.
A dim incandescent lamp gave off a yellowish glow that barely lit the rows of gray tin storage racks along the walls.
The racks reached the ceiling and were stacked with corrugated cardboard boxes that were labeled by year.
Maki Saionji sat at a small plywood desk that felt cramped.
She was twenty-four years old and was born into a minor branch of the Saionji Family.
Large black-framed anti-blue-light glasses sat on the bridge of her nose.
Behind the lenses, her eyes moved quickly as she scanned a final project settlement statement from the previous quarter that was spread across her desk.
Her right hand held a sharpened red-and-blue pencil.
Her left hand pressed against the edge of the ledger to keep it steady.
As a numerical genius who had passed both the Japanese Certified Public Accountant and Actuary exams at only twenty-four, Maki's mind stayed sharp and efficient while she worked through these complicated cross-accounts.
Lines of figures for construction material depreciation, labor hour amortization, and tax deductions passed across her vision.
She didn't even need the electronic calculator next to her.
She could finish double-entry bookkeeping calculations in her head using only mental math.
The red tip of her pencil moved across the paper with a soft rustle.
She marked deviation rates next to the unit prices of two material purchases, and she was accurate to two decimal places.
This place was remote and narrow, but luckily she didn't have to deal with people or play office politics with coworkers.
Maki actually felt more relaxed here.
At least she only had to deal with data.
At that moment, she heard the dull friction of trolley wheels rolling over the concrete floor in the hallway outside.
Two female administrative staff members from the branch pushed a small metal trolley filled with old reports into the archive room.
They parked the trolley in the open space by the door.
While moving heavy cardboard boxes, they rubbed their sore shoulders and talked in low voices.
"My shoulders are about to break," the short-haired employee said as she shoved a cardboard box onto the bottom shelf and straightened up to catch her breath.
"Yesterday, right before we got off work, the head office suddenly sent an emergency notice."
"It said every branch had to send all its audit working papers from the past two years up for a re-audit."
"Everyone had to work overtime all night to check the data again."
"You should have seen the President's face when he saw the fax this morning."
"It was absolutely terrible."
The employee with the ponytail picked up another stack of reports and sighed in agreement.
"Tell me about it," she said.
"I heard from a friend in the Retail Department that there's a huge mess over at S-Food too."
"Didn't Hokkokuya just announce a fifty-yen price hike a while ago?"
"At midnight yesterday, headquarters forced out an emergency document that demanded the price hike be canceled immediately."
"I heard Executive Director Yasuhide was even called back to the main family for questioning."
The short-haired employee wiped the sweat from her forehead and leaned in closer.
"One side suddenly wants to strictly audit the books, and the other side has a core executive suddenly called in for questioning."
"You don't have to guess what happened."
"Someone at S-Food must have been caught skimming money off the top."
"The higher-ups are being tough this time."
"They're probably going to clear out everyone involved."
She spoke like she knew everything.
"Didn't you see how scared our President and Section Chief looked today?"
"Usually they sign off on drinking bills at fancy restaurants without a second thought."
"But this morning, even a few thousand yen in entertainment expenses got rejected."
"No one dares to make trouble right now."
"Oh? Really?" the ponytail employee said.
"I was wondering why things felt so tense lately."
The two seemed to finish moving the documents and left with the trolley.
Their conversation got quieter as they walked away.
The sound of the wheels slowly faded down the corridor.
Maki set her red-and-blue pencil down on the desk.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes to rest for a moment.
Even though she was an outcast stuck in this basement, Maki was still a member of the Saionji Family, and she understood clearly what was happening.
Only one person could bypass the boards of directors at various subsidiaries and send auditing orders to the real estate division while also sending a mandatory document to the retail division to cancel price hikes.
Only the Eldest Miss, who held the real power in the entire Saionji Family, had the ability and authority to make that kind of cross-industry move.
That Eldest Miss was a legend.
When the family elders talked about her, they all shared the same emotion: awe.
In just a few years, she had led the family to rise in status, earned a huge amount of wealth, and brought them back to their historical peak, or even beyond it.
People respected her like a god.
At the same time, she was decisive and handed out clear rewards and punishments.
She often dealt with tens of billions of yen, and she even had the power to decide the fate of family members.
People also feared her like a tiger.
But to an outcast like Maki, her awe of Satsuki included a fierce sense of admiration.
Those regular employees could not understand the Eldest Miss's thinking.
With their limited insight, they would never understand how perfect the Eldest Miss truly was.
Maki thought to herself that she was the one who understood the Eldest Miss best.
She reached for a blank piece of scratch paper and started working through deductions using the scattered data on her desk.
The low-level employees were sure this was just a story about "catching corruption."
That kind of simple logic fell apart when you calculated the actual return on capital.
Executive Director Yasuhide managed the entire Hokkokuya supply chain.
If he took kickbacks from the edges of logistics to build a secret fund, the total amount would only be a few hundred million yen at most.
Yet headquarters launched an internal audit that swept through every branch in the entire group.
The cost of stopping work for inventory checks, hiring outside auditors, and doing the accounting would easily exceed several billion yen.
Every decision the Eldest Miss made focused on the return on capital.
She would never approve a cleanup that lost money.
Maki's pencil tip crossed out the word "corruption" on the paper.
She wrote down "fifty yen."
Yasuhide's real mistake had to be in that urgently canceled price hike.
Maki looked up, and her gaze fell on a mountain of archive boxes nearby.
That area held the branch's "Core Business District Store Acquisition and Leasing Intent Forms" for the next quarter.
Over the past two weeks, headquarters had sent frequent orders to the real estate branch.
They wanted detailed valuation calculations and contract risk checks on premium shops near several traditional restaurant chains and large supermarkets in the Kanto Region.
The retail side was cutting prices, while commercial real estate was expanding in the opposite direction.
Maki's eyes moved back and forth between these two cross-industry clues.
She picked up her red-and-blue pencil again and tried to plug the inflation numbers from the catering industry directly into the rental income formula for real estate.
The pencil tip drew two intersecting parabolas on the scratch paper.
One curve showed price inflation and supply chain costs due to the unrest in the Middle East.
The other curve showed the rent default rate for commercial real estate.
The result of her calculation appeared clearly where the two lines met.
With inflation caused by the Middle East situation, traditional restaurants faced huge cost pressure from imported beef and agricultural products.
If Hokkokuya also raised prices by fifty yen, the market would find a new price balance.
Competitors could still survive by passing the higher costs on to customers through price increases.
But if Hokkokuya kept its original price, customers would be extremely sensitive to price during inflation.
The artificially created price gap would cause a strong siphon effect.
Competitors would see their customer flow drop sharply.
Without the cash flow from customers, those traditional stores could not handle the high rent and labor costs in core business districts.
Within three months at most, they would face large-scale cash shortages.
Once competitors could not pay rent and were forced into bankruptcy and lease termination, the prime store locations they occupied would become distressed assets that banks wanted to sell quickly.
At that point, Saionji Real Estate, which had already prepared enough cash and finished its valuations, could buy all those irreplaceable locations at a huge discount.
Maki's breathing sped up.
The formula on the paper made her fingertips tingle.
She understood now.
That fifty yen was not just about the profit of a single restaurant.
The Eldest Miss was using suppressed prices in retail to precisely target and break the cash flow of competitors, and then she would finish the job by buying up property in the commercial real estate market.
This was another carefully planned takeover.
Yasuhide's clever fifty-yen price hike had given life-saving oxygen to the competitors who should have been forced out.
He delayed the time for competitors to go bankrupt and break their leases.
That directly ruined the group's big plan for real estate acquisitions.
Once she understood that, the sudden "strict audit" notice from headquarters made sense.
It was meant to stop other departments from making short-sighted choices that would interfere with this multi-industry strategy.
It was perfect.
The moment her calculation was complete, a wave of excitement ran up Maki's spine.
She was obsessed with this feeling.
Ever since she was sent to this sunless archive room, using scattered low-level reports to reverse-engineer the Eldest Miss's grand plans had become her only comfort in this boring place.
Last April, S-Mart ran a front-page ad saying they would "pay the 3 percent consumption tax for customers."
Ordinary people saw it as corporate charity.
But Maki compared S-Farm's supply chain price differences with the coin production data from the Mint Bureau.
She saw that it was a business move designed to hurt Department Store's checkout speed and pull in customers.
Half a year ago, Saionji Real Estate suddenly sold off a lot of land on the outskirts.
Branch executives thought it was because the Odaiba infrastructure project had drained their funds.
But Maki collected population maps and tracked the Bank of Japan's Official Discount Rate.
She had already sensed that the Ministry of Finance was about to cut real estate credit.
To the family elders, Satsuki was a ruthless and terrifying dictator.
But to Maki, this incredibly precise strategy that treated capital efficiency like a weapon was so perfect that it gave her chills.
She felt an almost fanatical respect for that pure logic.
Just as Maki was lost in the thrill of feeling a mental connection with that brilliant mind, the archive room's flimsy wooden door was pushed open hard.
The door slammed against the tin cabinet behind it with a loud bang.
Takagi, the branch's Finance Section Chief, walked into the room.
He held a thick, messy stack of bad debt reports from affiliated companies and slammed them onto Maki's desk.
"Organize these accounts and file them by year," Section Chief Takagi said as he dropped the documents and turned to leave.
Before he left, he looked back at Maki.
"Just do the filing," he said.
"Put away your self-righteous calculator and don't stick your nose into things that aren't your business."
The Section Chief left that cold warning and walked out of the archive room.