What Kind of Plant Will Grow?
"Hmm..."
A long groan slipped out of me as I stared at the thing in my hands. A jump rope. The last time we went to the supermarket I hadn't had the strength to carry the bags, and afterward I'd made my wishes perfectly clear—I wanted to exercise. What came back to me was a jump rope.
To Bora, Haru, and Maru, anything like a gym probably looked like a fine way for me to get hurt, so this must have been what they settled on. Even so, jump enough and your height shoots up, and once you're taller, doesn't strength just come along on its own?
The calculation finished in my head. Rope in hand, I headed outside. I could have jumped indoors, but doing it outside had so much more style. Maru trailed after me to watch.
"Hana, don't push yourself. If it gets hard, you tell me right away, okay?"
With that, she pulled out her laptop and seemed to settle into company work. Watching her, I readied the rope for my first jump. Back in my prime I'd even entered a jump-rope competition and taken a prize. When it came to jump rope, I was overflowing with talent.
"Hah!"
I fired myself up and took my stance. So cold... Gripping those bleak, chilly handles, I started to jump, keeping the pace slow at first. I wanted to try double-unders, but I held myself back with grim determination.
This was the first time I'd exercised in a child's body. Everyday life I'd more or less adapted to, but exercise was another story entirely. Push the wrong way and get badly hurt, and the people around me would be heartbroken.
"Yah! Yah!"
I kept jumping, pouring a shout into every leap. Around a hundred in, I could feel my breath climbing. My stamina was pathetic. I needed to build it up. Ordinary people don't tire until they've cleared a thousand—that's just how the world works—and here I was, winded at ten percent of that.
"Huff... huff!"
When the air jammed all the way up into my throat, I quit and stood there catching my breath, thoroughly spent. If my stamina was this weak, the right answer was to split it into sets of a hundred. Keep at the rope long enough, and someday I'd be strong enough to do a thousand in one go.
Starting today, I meant to exercise for real.
"Today's the day I go harvest strawberries~"
Brimming with joy, I put on a straw hat and planted myself in front of the office. If I wanted to go outside, it was easier to bring at least one person along.
"Hana! Bora! Maru!"
Calling their names, I stepped inside. There wasn't a soul in the office. Where had everyone gone? Then again, the staff each had their own work and were bound to be busy. Thinking of it that way, an empty room felt perfectly natural.
"Is nobody here?"
I wandered the office, still calling out. I opened the conference room and every other door I could find and peered inside, but no one was there. In the end I plopped down in the seat Haru usually occupied. I'd wait until somebody came in.
I was sitting in Haru's chair, amusing myself by balancing a pencil on its end, when I heard movement outside. My ears perked straight up as I watched to see who would walk in.
"Haru!"
Luckily it wasn't a stranger. Someone I knew well came through the door, and the moment Haru saw me she strode straight over to where I was sitting.
"Hana? Off to the garden plot again today?"
One look at me and she already knew where I was headed. Fair enough—I'd been broadcasting my desire to go with my entire body. Straw hat, work clothes: she knew perfectly well I never dressed like this unless I was bound for the garden. On an ordinary day indoors, I'd have been in simple loungewear, or my dinosaur pajamas.
"Haru! Let's go to the garden!"
I said it with my tiny trowel held high. Haru nodded and scooped me up into her arms.
"All right, all right. Harvesting strawberries again today?"
"Yeah!"
I'd seen them hanging ripe and luscious just yesterday, and I was already drooling at the thought of picking that delicious fruit. Yesterday my stomach had been too full to bother bringing any back. Hungry as I was now, my mind had changed. I meant to haul home a huge load—and share them with the people working in the office, too.
"What are these, Mincheol?"
Mina asked as she stepped into the office. She'd only come up for a bit of work coordination, to the floor where Hana lived—a place she'd known until now by rumor alone—and the moment she entered she was met with every kind of fruit laid out across the room.
"Oh, these are crops Hana grows. Every so often she harvests them and shares them with the staff here. Isn't she sweet? I really wish I had a daughter like Hana. All I've got at home is one hopeless son, haha."
"Hmm..."
The strawberries looked so luscious that Mina's mouth watered. She had never seen a strawberry this visually violent. Blazing a fierce red, it flaunted that scarlet figure as if begging to be eaten, and under the office lights it glittered as though someone had coated it in sugar.
"Mincheol, would it be all right if I tried one?"
She didn't usually want to say things like that, but faced with a strawberry this tempting, she had no choice but to swallow her embarrassment and ask. It felt a little like walking into someone else's office and requesting the snacks from their break room.
Mincheol, though, answered as if this were nothing new.
"Oh! Go ahead and have one. Fair warning, though—nobody who comes through here is ever satisfied with a single strawberry. It doesn't have to be one. Three or four is fine."
"Is that so...?"
Saying so, Mina picked one up and popped it into her mouth. She hadn't felt a hunger this fierce since the last time she was on a diet. Fortunately the top had already been cut off, so it slipped right in, and as she chewed, slowly, her eyes went wide. She had never tasted a strawberry like this.
Juice burst out with every bite, so wildly it hardly seemed like a strawberry of this world. All that flavor from a single berry. If a strawberry could taste like this, then braving the embarrassment to eat it had been entirely worth it.
Watching the look on her face, Mincheol laughed.
"You're exactly the same, Mina! Most people who visit our office take a bite and have a huge reaction."
It felt a little like being experimented on, but the flavor was good enough to justify even that. A strawberry that tasted like this would surely be recognized as the absolute top grade on the market. Even at twice the price of an ordinary strawberry, there would be plenty of people willing to buy.
And if you skewered these for tanghulu—the candied fruit that was all the rage lately—the profits would be enormous. If even Mina was thinking that, the people in this office had surely already mapped out every other way to make money off them. Still, she was curious enough to risk being rude, and she put the question to Mincheol.
"Is this going to be a company product soon? Something you'll sell?"
Starlight Foods had lately been pushing in earnest into green tea, coffee, and all sorts of other foods, so she asked just in case. Surely Mincheol, in the department that looked after Hana, would know more than she did from another department.
What he said, though, left her badly disappointed.
"Ah, this is just something Hana grows as a hobby. We absolutely can't sell it. Growing it is already a problem, and before anything else the cost is outrageously high, so no."
"Really? I'd buy them even at twice what strawberries go for on the market..."
"Haha, twice wouldn't come close. Even ten times still wouldn't be enough. That's how much this is a strawberry only Hana can grow. Tell anyone else to copy it, and they still couldn't."
Swallowing her regret, Mina followed Mincheol off to do the work she'd originally come for. The longing stayed with her, though—and helping herself to a few strawberries on the way back to her own department came as a little bonus.
"Huh?"
When I woke up today, something felt caught in my mouth. I spat out whatever was in there. Ptoo.
"A tooth!"
The third one I'd lost. If I smiled now, would I look like some gap-toothed cartoon kid? Growing a new one back would take a fair amount of time, after all. The fortunate part was that this body grew fast; in the very first spot a tooth had fallen from, another had already come in partway.
It clearly wasn't an ordinary person's body. The difference from the pace at which a normal person grew was unmistakable.
Naturally, I carried the tooth straight to the office. A sprout had already pushed out from the base of it—naturally.
What kind of plant would it be this time? Preferably something hanging heavy with delicious fruit!