Finally growing genuinely suspicious, he pulled two banknotes from his massive stash and inspected them under the street lights, but he could not seem to find a single difference between them. Because of that, he assumed there was no danger in it. Depositing so much cash into a bank, however, could look extremely suspicious.
Desperate to test the boundaries of this money-duplicating ability, Joshu opened up a betting platform on his phone and placed a massive fifty thousand yen bet on a boat race. Surprisingly, he won, netting an absurd 3.1 million yen. Happy with the win, and with how neatly it disguised where he was getting the cash from, Joshu went to zip the bag up, only for it to unexpectedly implode from the inside out, splitting open and exposing the mountain of money to a few nearby strangers.
Panicked and unable to force the bag shut, Joshu scrambled over to a nearby public coin locker to hide his fortune. As he did this, he could not help but notice something odd. Every single one of the serial numbers on the banknotes ended with the same three characters. 13R.
Moving on, he tried to slam the locker door shut, and eventually managed it with great strain. The mechanism faltered under the pressure, though, and the door sprang open, releasing a few stacks of cash. Gusting through, the wind caught those banknotes and scattered them across the street.
Weirdly, a few police officers and random bystanders quickly gathered the loose cash and politely handed it back to him without question. Of course, the amount he received back from everyone was more than he had initially lost, which only added to the confusion.
Desperate to get away, he flagged down a taxi, but was told to look for someone else, since the driver was headed in the other direction. Being Joshu, someone who always got his own way, he did not listen, and shoved fifty thousand yen at the driver in advance.
Midway through the journey, the cab driver accidentally took Joshu over Hagi Bridge, which happened to be closed at the time, and apologised profusely for the mistake. The driver reminded him of how he really needed to get back to his wife for her birthday, and handed him back his fifty thousand yen.
Sick of the game, Joshu tried to refuse the money, sparking a brief struggle between the two of them. Adamant on paying for the journey, even if it was just as far as Hagi Bridge, Joshu slammed the wad of cash into the driver's pocket.
Weirdly, he swiped the note against the driver's lighter, causing a spark. But the fire that caught did not destroy the cash. The moment the bill started to burn up, it aggressively multiplied, duplicating and overwhelming Joshu until he was completely covered in a suffocating mountain of burning paper.
Suddenly Joshu gasped awake, finding himself on the floor of the Higashikata living room. His father, Norisuke, was standing over him, annoyed, assuming he had had one too many the night before. Joshu stumbled towards his bedroom, wondering whether the entire ordeal had just been a horrific nightmare, until he threw open his door.
His jaw dropped. His entire room was filled to the ceiling with the exact same banknotes.
Sometime later, the man Joshu had robbed at the idol event was walking back to his apartment. Watching him from the shadows, Joshu stepped out, calling the man by his true name. Zaihei Nigatake. Cornering him now, Joshu aggressively demanded answers about the cash.
To his surprise, Zaihei looked at him with pure gratitude and thanked him from the bottom of his heart. He assumed that Joshu had managed to destroy the Milagro Man's money, and that this was why he had come here now. This entire thing had never been his doing to start with. The curse of the Milagro Man had been passed to him, and it would only pass to someone else when some of the money was destroyed.
Zaihei's story had started around two years earlier, when he went to Germany to see a band play. While out there with no extra cash on him — he did have cash, but he had left it back in his room — he stole a single bill from a homeless man near the concert's exit. That one bill was one of the Milagro Man's bills.
The rules of the curse were simple, but devastating. It made you infinitely wealthy, but it stripped away your ability to ever actually buy or spend anything normally. The only way to break the cycle was to trick someone else into taking the money, and to get them to either destroy a bill or attempt to return it to a previous owner. Which was exactly why Zaihei had deliberately left his wallet and credit card exposed at the merchandise table.
The idea of the Milagro Man's money was actually an open secret among the public, which was why the store owner, the cabaret staff, and the bystanders had instantly returned it to Joshu with interest, just to keep the curse away from themselves.
The original source of the Milagro Man was apparently an incredibly wealthy arms dealer. After a few generations, someone inside that family went completely mad after losing a massive lawsuit, brutally murdering their own family and burning the estate to the ground. All that was left behind was a single scorched bill. That was the Milagro Man's first bill. No matter where you went after obtaining that bill, the curse would follow, and the bill would eventually migrate too. The only choice was really to pass it on.
Finally, Zaihei mockingly advised Joshu never to buy anything again, warning him that losing the ability to participate in the world was a fate worse than death. Grinning wickedly, Zaihei bowed and turned away, casually opening a fresh bottle of melon juice to celebrate his freedom.
Immediately, with a smug smirk, Joshu called forth Nut King Call to secretly screw several of the cursed bills directly into the cap of the melon juice bottle. By twisting that bottle open, Zaihei accidentally tore and destroyed the hidden cash, instantly snapping the trap shut and forcing the curse right back onto himself. Needing to leave, Joshu slammed the door shut, leaving a screaming Zaihei behind to be smothered and overwhelmed by the returning mountain of Milagro Man cash.
On his trek back to the Higashikata estate, Joshu passed by a billboard for a mainstream idol group. He mocked their stupid looks for a moment, but a quiet, sobering thought crossed his mind. He did not even compare to them, or to the talent they possessed.