I Am a Precious Being!
A strange thing had happened. I was certain I had cut my hair into a short bob yesterday, yet when I woke in the morning the length had restored itself completely. The proof was right there on my head: the ponytail I had tied after getting up.
Anyway... I hadn't woken on my own today either. Kim Bora had tapped at my cheeks until I came to. Even so, the night owl I had been was turning into a morning person. Sleep refused to arrive merely because I decided it should. Ever since my body changed, drowsiness crashed over me the moment night grew late, and when the morning sun touched me, my eyes snapped open all by themselves.
Uninvited guests, however, came swarming into my room. They entered one after another and carried off my precious furniture piece by piece, until nothing remained but the bed I was lying on. This could not be happening! They had not even stuck a red seizure notice anywhere, and they were hauling off someone else's belongings as they pleased! It was an outrage against heaven itself.
Kim Bora, watching from beside me, made no move to stop them, which meant the whole thing had been arranged beforehand. All I could do was stare blankly as people walked off with my furniture.
Kim Jaeman caught Kim Bora as she was heading out, once again, to take charge of Hana.
"Bora."
"Yes, Department Head?"
"So... a directive came down from the Institute. An official notice. From now on we are not to treat Hana as a test subject. We are to give her proper treatment."
"For real?"
Originally, Hana's classification had been lumped in with the test subjects. That was only natural. She was a humanoid monster discovered inside a Gate.
But headquarters, having read the report Kim Jaeman submitted, could see plain as day that she was about to become a bottomless cornucopia, and that leaving her filed as a test subject would cost them dearly. If stress twisted something in her, the loss would be theirs as well. From here on, if the Institute's higher-ups caught sight of Hana still shut in an isolation room, unpleasant words were all but guaranteed.
From the Institute's point of view, they had been a ship sinking by inches, helpless before shrinking budgets and dwindling crowds in the exhibition halls. Then Hana appeared, and suddenly there were heaps of ways to make money. The moment Department Head Kim Jaeman filed a report on the profit that could be drawn from her hair alone, the Institute's finance department became a crucible of frenzy. They had not even grasped the full extent of her abilities yet. And still they could already project returns on this scale.
"Hana is a god! Hana is a god!"
It cost practically nothing to produce, and the profit it could spin out was endless. So Hana would no longer be raised in a prison of iron bars. She was being moved somewhere a person could lie down and feel warmth soak into their back—somewhere she might, in a sense, live better than the researchers themselves.
That was why the furniture had left her room this morning. She was leaving the cramped little space for somewhere wide.
Without the faintest idea why, I held Kim Bora's hand and let her lead me off somewhere. As if she had come to understand me a little, she was not walking at a brisk adult pace, but slowly. If she went too fast, my short legs could not keep the tempo, and I had already gone sprawling more times than I cared to count.
According to Kim Bora, while my home was being moved there was something I now had to do. Or had she said something I had to receive? Following her, we arrived at a room. A single bed sat in the middle, and the lights glowed low and soft. It was the sort of room that, glimpsed from the hall, would have had people lining up to call it decadent.
Kim Bora sat me in a chair and put a call through to someone.
"Yes... Hana's here. I think you can go ahead and prepare."
Prepare what? Don't tell me that, just like cutting my hair yesterday, they were about to dissect me. I cranked the despair circuit rising in me up to full power. Judging by what they had done to me yesterday, they were bound to make me do something unpleasant. I dropped into a stance to flee, but sure enough Kim Bora stepped in and blocked me.
She did not grab me as roughly as before, though. At some point her hands had turned soft, wandering over me this way and that. There must have been something about being touched that simply felt good, because I ended up giggling—hehe—and refusing to leave her side.
How many minutes did I wait in that chair? The door opened, and a woman appeared. She looked incredibly young. Younger, perhaps, than Kim Bora beside me—like someone who had only just shed the look of a college freshman.
"Ah, Masseuse Kwon Arin! Please take good care of our Hana!"
"Of course. Don't worry."
A massage? As Kim Bora made to leave the room, I caught her sleeve and resisted. If she walked out and left me one-on-one with a stranger, I would get anxious.
But she must have expected as much. Seeing me clutch her sleeve, she gave a helpless little hehe and spoke.
"Masseuse, it seems Hana doesn't want to be apart from me. Would it be all right if I watched from the side?"
"Yes, of course."
With that, Kim Bora sat in the chair from earlier, and I was caught about the waist and laid facedown on the bed. They were probably about to start the massage, but my body was perfectly fine—so why?
Once it began in earnest, though, I thought I understood. Under those hands my body turned to jelly, and I felt as if I were in heaven itself! Only now, it seemed, had the Starlight Guild grasped how important I was. They were starting to look after me the way they would a celebrity.
Beside me, Kim Bora was diligently filming the whole massage, while the masseuse, small as my body was, worked hard enough to raise beads of sweat. I felt as if I were floating somewhere out in space, and slowly sank into sleep. The massage was so refreshing that drowsiness drifted in like a lullaby.
I came out of the room limp as wilted greens, melted clean through. I felt as if I finally understood why celebrities got massages. To think they kept something this wonderful all to themselves!
I was ready to head back to my room, but Kim Bora was walking somewhere else entirely. Don't tell me the massage was my Last Supper. I was supposed to return to the isolation room, so I took her hand and, with my whole body, told her to go that way.
Kim Bora caught the hand trying to steer her toward the isolation room.
"Hana's home is somewhere else now! We're not going over there."
So that was why they had carried my things out. An uneasy thought crept in. What if they told me to go into another room plastered in pure white wallpaper? Fortunately, perhaps because I had only slept there a single night, I had not actually gone insane—but I had no desire to return to a place full of faint machine hum and white noise.
Carrying that unease, I boarded the elevator. The Starlight Guild's elevator was not the kind walled in iron on every side. The rear was glass, so you could look out at the view.
"Wooooow..."
Riding up, I could see Seoul, tiny in the distance. Somewhere out there was my home, wasn't it? But I had been living on monthly rent, and for all I knew the landlord had already cleared my room out. I was three months behind... I'm sorry, Landlord.
The elevator climbed as if it would never end. Only when we reached roughly the middle floors did it finally stop.
Stepping out, I noticed there was no one moving around. This was a company. Shouldn't at least a few people be walking the halls? And yet not a single person passed through the corridor.
What Kim Bora said next was a shock.
"This is your home now, Hana! We leased a whole floor just for you, so from now on you'd better listen to Unni, okay? Understand?"
Leasing an entire floor of a building—the kind of jeonse contract that demanded a fortune up front—would take an absurd amount of money, and they had done that for me? I could feel the weight of it swelling all at once. Her next words, though, let me breathe a sigh of relief.
"A dedicated support team for you should be moving into that office in the corner soon, so the lease is only until then."
Fortunately, it did not seem I would be using this floor all by myself. Alone in a space this vast, I was sure a ghost would show up. If I had been left here by myself at night, I might have wandered the halls in tears. No—I would have been too scared to open the door in the first place.
I suddenly realized there were three doors. Which room was I supposed to use? That question was about to be answered by Kim Bora herself.
"Come on! Let's find a room you'll like. You just have to pick the one that suits you, okay?"
I could not speak, but Kim Bora alone knew that I could understand well enough. I nodded and followed after her.