Adam shut the apartment door and pressed his back against it.
His chest rose and fell hard, and his heart was still pounding too fast.
Compared to the fifteen years of hell he had already lived through, what happened in that cafe should have felt small. He knew that. But knowing it and feeling it were not the same thing.
While he had been sitting there, pretending to be just another frightened student, every second had dragged old images back into him. Laughter, Blood, Helplessness and John's voice. The sound of people deciding his fate while smiling.
He had held himself together until now. Only now, with the door locked behind him, did he finally let the strain show.
Adam walked a few steps into the apartment, sat down on the floor, and spent the next several minutes doing nothing except breathing deeply and forcing his body to settle. His hands had not fully stopped shaking yet.
At last, he opened the system and looked at his inventory.
Most slots still held the jewelry copies, diamonds and gold. One slot held the bag.
Adam selected it and used Paste. The bag appeared in front of him at once.
He stared at it without touching it. There was still a hard knot of doubt in his chest. If the bag turned out empty, then all of his effort at the cafe would mean almost nothing.
He grabbed the zipper and pulled it open.
Cash filled the bag exactly as before.
For a moment, Adam just stared at it. Then a long breath left him, and his shoulders dropped. He leaned back and sat there on the floor with the bag in front of him, letting the relief wash through his body.
A second later, he stretched back fully and lay flat on the floor for a moment, eyes on the ceiling.
This was real. The copied bag had copied the money too.
It also made the situation far more dangerous. Relief and pressure had arrived together.
Adam sat up again and looked at the cash.
"Now I have to decide what to do with it," he muttered.
He raised one finger. "Option one."
Then a second. "Option two."
The first option was dangerous.
He could call Bobula and somehow try to recover the original bag or interfere with what happened on the other side. But even as the idea formed, Adam already disliked it.
'Bobula is opportunistic. Even from what little I have seen, that much is obvious,' Adam thought.
In his previous life, Bobula had not been central enough for Adam to study deeply, but what he had seen so far was enough. Bobula climbed wherever he smelled advantage. If he already understood anything about the bag, the money, or the conflict between Bruno and Gonda, then contacting him now could expose Adam instead of helping him.
That path depended too much on another person's greed, fear, and stupidity.
Adam lowered the first finger.
The second option was cleaner.
Leave the other money where it was and move this money first. That was the real logic.
Both bags were real. Both copies of the money were real.
But if two identical sets of cash existed, then suspicion would fall harder on the one that entered circulation later. If Adam used his first, then his version would already be moving through the world as accepted money before anyone had reason to question it.
The later version would carry more risk. And by the time anyone on the other side tried to spend theirs, this one might already be too deeply embedded to challenge easily.
'Whichever enters the world first becomes the one the world accepts,' Adam thought.
That was enough for him.
"Second option," he said quietly.
He hid the bag under his bed, in the hollow space beneath the frame, then stood up, checked once more to make sure nothing visible had been left behind, and finally left the apartment.
The time mattered. It was getting close to two-thirty.
Kenji would be waiting. And Adam could not meet him as himself yet, not while so many threads were still loose.
Adam headed straight back to the makeup shop and changed his appearance again, returning to the old-man disguise before stepping back out into the city.
Elsewhere, in a quiet room, John sat alone.
A photograph rested in his hand.
It was an old picture of Monica as a child, standing with her father and mother in a school photo. John's gaze remained fixed on it with eerie patience, as if the image mattered for reasons no one else would understand.
Then someone knocked.
John looked toward the door. "Come in."
A man entered, posture tight, voice careful. "Sir, we checked everywhere. We still can't find him. The last confirmed sighting was at the park. After that, he disappeared."
The man did not say Adam's name. He only called him him.
John heard the report and looked back down at the photo. He stayed silent long enough for the man to grow visibly tense.
That silence carried more pressure than shouting would have.
Finally, John spoke.
"A weak person always leaves traces when he tries something unusual," he said. "But if Adam, my game piece, has managed to remove himself from the board this cleanly, then something happened that we do not yet understand. Keep watching."
In John's mind, Adam was not a person first. He was movement on a board.
And when a piece moved in a way the player had not predicted, that meant the board itself had changed.
He found that interesting for now.
There was no anger in his voice.
That made it worse.
The man nodded at once and left.