Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaurs
A fun movie was playing on the TV. It was built on the latest fashionable trend: an F-rank porter awakens, becomes an S-rank hunter, and saves the world. Watching the female teammates who had looked down on him so coldly back when he was F-rank now drown in regret and beg his forgiveness sent a thrill through me, as if I myself had become the hero on the screen.
But a thought occurred to me. Why did the people in stories like this never try to settle things by talking? So many of those misunderstandings would have unraveled after a single minute of conversation, and yet they simply refused to speak to one another, stretching the misery out until it was as stifling as choking down a dry sweet potato. That part was frustrating.
Even so, from the protagonist's side of it, the payoff was delicious. As a porter he had spent every day bowing and scraping, and then a single awakening turned him into someone the whole world looked up to. I found myself wishing I could end up like that too.
I turned my head and stole a glance toward Kim Bora. She was hammering away at her laptop, completely absorbed. Keeping a careful eye on her, I began to crawl, inch by inch. Being shut inside this cramped room all day was suffocating, which meant that every so often I had to step outside and get some air.
The last time I had gone tearing down the hallway, Kim Bora caught me and scolded me within an inch of my life, but I was not the sort to be cowed by that. A prophet, by nature, had to take risks.
Tiptoe. Tiptoe.
My escape plan fell apart the moment I reached the door. Somehow she was already behind me. She scooped me up and carried me straight back to where I had started, and I hung there in her arms with my legs dangling, feet nowhere near the floor.
"Haa... I can't take my eyes off you for a second, Hana."
Nothing dangerous was going to happen just because I stepped outside, and yet Bora looked at me as if I were not to be trusted in the slightest. My pride took a hit. Say what you like—I knew a thing or two!
Once the movie ended and boredom set in, I took the crayons and drawing paper Lee Haru had given me and set about making a fun picture. Crayon in hand, I drew a landscape packed thick with trees. Kim Bora watched the drawing with a finger propped against her chin, as if she were trying to imagine something.
"Is that your hometown, Hana?"
I had to spend the entire day with Kim Bora. Giving up on sunlight, I started sticking the glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs she had bought all over the wall. Just the thought of those dinosaurs glittering and sparkling in front of my eyes after dark was enough to thrill me.
Tonight, I was sure, I would sleep easy in the company of shining glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs.
At Starlight Guild, whose total revenue exceeded two hundred trillion won, the share claimed by the Starlight Institute was not particularly large. The research funds it received from headquarters came to less than thirty billion won a year. The R&D laboratories of any reasonably well-known conglomerate were allocated more than two hundred billion.
There was a reason for the gap. The Starlight Institute handled only the docile otherworldly lifeforms that could, with some effort, be brought back from raids. The danger was low, and so the support from headquarters was low as well. Nothing it produced was especially likely to make money.
Of course, Starlight Guild maintained a proper research institute separately.
The budget executed there ran into the hundreds of billions of won. It studied how the raid byproducts the guild mainly distributed could be applied to everyday life, and how that research might be turned into something worth selling. In a sense, that was the real technology research institution.
The institute's full name, then—the Starlight Otherworldly Lifeform Research Institute—received very little attention from Starlight Guild headquarters. The sums being spent were simply not in the same league. From a guild's point of view, interest inevitably drifted toward whichever side brought in the money.
That was one of the reasons Department Head Kim Jaeman had been so delighted when he discovered Hana's ability, rejoicing as if the achievement were his own. The report he had received concluded that Hana's existence alone could bring in tens of billions of won a year, and so he fussed over her and raised her like something precious.
The institute's annual budget did not even reach thirty billion won, and yet Hana's ability by itself was hauling in tens of billions a year, roots, vines, and all. And her abilities had still not been fully brought to light.
Every lifeform from the gates besides Hana was a hippo that did nothing but eat money. Not one of them was a treasure that returned a proper profit. Every creature the institute had handled until now shared a single trait: each had developed along the lines of how do I kill a person? Given that monsters inside the gates had to fight their enemies in order to survive, it was only natural, in a way, that their byproducts evolved in an aggressive direction.
They needed to make use of Hana, but the Starlight Institute did not have many departments. For a major corporation, the division of duties among them was barely drawn at all; everything was a jumble. With so little funding from headquarters, they could not hire more people. It was the usual black company—no replacement staff, just grinding the people already there down to the bone.
That was why Department Head Kim Jaeman had to roll up his sleeves and go out into the field himself to handle publicity. Ordinarily the work would have fallen to the PR team at Starlight Guild headquarters, but there were no resources to spare for a research institute stuck out in some remote corner.
The Starlight Institute was a parasite that did nothing but run a deficit. Its output was effectively zero. Had it not belonged to a guild obligated to protect citizens from the threat of the gates—had it been an ordinary company—it would have been shut down long ago.
Kim Sangtae, of Starlight Guild's food development division, was running experiments with Hana's hair. Rather than dropping an entire strand—nearly a foot long—into a tea bag all at once, he was studying a method of cutting it with scissors and portioning the pieces in.
His first attempt was to pour green tea into a large container and drop in a single strand. But whether there was simply too much water, one hair was not enough to bring out that special green-tea flavor. The color came out bland. A failure.
After continued testing to find the right amount of hair, he judged that one-quarter of a strand of Hana's hair per green-tea bag was the proper dose. It was an enormous discovery, because they could now produce four times as much green tea as before. Assuming they could be supplied with more than a hundred thousand hairs a day, that meant going from a hundred thousand tea bags to four hundred thousand.
"Now that I think about it, couldn't we just leave out the ingredients in the green-tea bag entirely?"
"Last time we removed half the green-tea powder from the bags, and the flavor still didn't change all that much. I believe it's because this hair is the actual source of the taste. The surrounding ingredients don't seem to matter very much."
"The Starlight Institute's clinical trials have only been completed for the green tea so far, so other products are still premature. Even so, I am confident that if this substance were added to coffee, or to carbonated drinks, it would cause an enormous stir in the market. The compatibility is so good that the ways we could use it are practically endless."
Hana's hair had even performed a miracle on the raw-material costs of the green-tea bags. The cost of making a single bag was infinitely close to zero won, while the price at which it could be sold left the company free to gouge as it pleased. He was certain that anyone who once tasted this green tea's drug-like addictiveness would never be able to escape it.
The core executives of Starlight Food had only one thing to worry about.
"Roughly how much is the green tea currently on the market selling for?"
"On average, forty won per tea bag."
"Let's sell our Starlight Green Tea at a hundred won. First we monopolize the market at a cheap price, and then we raise it."
"If we suddenly raise the price, won't consumers balk?"
"We already circulated the tea through the companies once, and the response was explosive. When we followed up with a survey, people said they could fully accept a price as high as three hundred won—what a vending-machine coffee costs."
"Even so..."
"If it doesn't sell, I'll take the responsibility. Frankly, the way I see it, this is like swimming with one hand on the bottom. The Starlight Institute has given us an excellent material that simply cannot fail to sell on the market. We can't be the ones who fail."
On the spot, the price of Starlight Green Tea was set at ten thousand won for a hundred bags. First they would send it circulating among consumers at a cheap price, and then they would sell it dear.
And green tea was only the beginning. From here on, they could use the hair to develop all kinds of products.