An Unexpected Crop
These days Kim Sehee spent far more time outside the company than in it.
She could have stayed at her desk and reviewed the work from there, but it simply wasn't in her nature. She felt easier when she walked the grounds herself and saw things with her own eyes.
Taken together, everything they knew so far about the plants Hana had brought into the world came down to this.
Using the crop that had sprouted from the tooth as the center, plants would grow anywhere inside a circle of twenty kilometers. Stray even a single meter past that line and trouble followed. They might still grow, but they failed to set fruit properly, among a host of other problems.
Move the crop somewhere else and it would hold for about a day. Let two days pass, though, and the fruit on the plants still growing in the original zone shriveled, withered, and died. Perhaps that was why protecting the very first crop to come from Hana's tooth mattered more than anything else.
So the plant was kept on display inside a building raised so solidly that neither a typhoon nor an earthquake capable of turning the country upside down could so much as rattle it, and under security of the strictest kind. Dozens of guards watched over it with ironclad vigilance.
Even if the plant died, Hana's ability might simply designate a new one, and that plant might carry the same power. The thought had crossed her mind. It stayed a thought. Kim Sehee did not have the nerve for an experiment of that sort.
"We'll need to put up buildings that won't so much as flinch in a typhoon or any other disaster, and farm inside them."
Assuming the worst, she had arranged things so they could still farm. With byproducts drawn from the gates, they could raise enormous glass greenhouses and secure more than enough space to grow.
"We're building them with everything we've got, just as you ordered, Chairman."
For the moment they were patching things over with plastic greenhouses, but Kim Sehee had no intention of settling for that. Her final aim was to raise the plants the way America and the great agricultural corporations did—inside buildings put up for the purpose.
Only a few years ago, saying as much to her staff would have gotten her written off as someone who had lost her mind. Now she had the earnings to match the ambition. Cherry tomatoes, coffee, and green tea were bringing in a considerable sum.
A company that had made a few tens of billions of won a year was now pulling in several hundred billion a month, and the operating profit was handsome besides. Later, once the royalties were adjusted and Hana's share grew larger, the margin would shrink. For the present, though, they were taking in every won they could.
Spending rose with earnings, as it always did. Economies of scale: the more you invested, the more profit came back. Do something foolish and you could lose every bit of the money you'd put in, of course, but Kim Sehee wasn't making the sort of attempt that sent capital up in smoke. She was only making the safe one—expanding the ground where they farmed.
Even finding suitable farmland for a twenty-kilometer radius was hard enough, given how little land Korea had. The cherry tomatoes, the very first crop they had found, still hadn't filled half the usable area.
Hana's plants, though, set three or four times as much fruit as ordinary ones, so even confined to limited ground they could turn out a considerable yield. A small mercy in the middle of the trouble.
While Kim Sehee was deep in talk with her executives, her phone rang in her pocket. She glanced at the number, drew a steadying breath, and answered.
"Ah—yes. Hello?"
"Chairman!"
The call was from the Starlight Research Institute. They almost never rang, so she couldn't help a prickle of tension as she took it—and she already had a faint, uneasy sense of why.
"Yes. Has something happened?"
"Hana! Hana lost another tooth!"
"I'll be right there."
She traded a few more words, then slipped the phone back into her pocket.
"Please finish up here for me."
The executives beside her seemed to have caught the call. None of them tried to keep her. Kim Sehee set about leaving for the Starlight Research Institute at once.
"Driver, the Starlight Research Institute. Right away, please."
She still drove herself from time to time, but she now had room enough in her life for a driver, and from the back seat the request came out as naturally as anything.
"Oh—and before the institute, could we stop by a shop?"
If she meant to buy Hana a present, she had to drop in somewhere on the way. It had been so long since she'd seen the girl that her hands itched. Going to that darling child—so precious she could have set her in her eye and felt no pain—without a gift in hand was simply not done.
"Mmm..."
The crop growing from Hana's tooth showed a staggering rate of growth. Put bluntly, it finished growing in less than a day. Plant the seeds that came from it and raise them again, and that took about two weeks. Even that was a speed that made no sense.
Ordinary plants had to be tended for nearly half a year before they bore a proper crop.
This time, though, the sight of the crop from Hana's tooth left her a little deflated. It was a plant you could see anywhere.
"This is... rice, isn't it?"
"I think we're looking at the same thing."
The plant that had come from Hana this time was rice. For a Korean, it was the one plant you couldn't do without at any of the three meals a day. The trouble was how common it was. Of course, being rice that had come from Hana, neither the quality nor the taste would bear any comparison.
"Even so, there are an awful lot of grains on these stalks."
At a glance there were at least five or six times as many as on ordinary rice. Plant this and raise it, and they could probably cover a fair share of the whole country's consumption.
The heads were bowed low under the weight. Rice naturally drooped as the grains ripened, but the angle here was far steeper. They hung their heads at nearly ninety degrees, like civil servants greeting the president.
Even so, Kim Sehee couldn't help the disappointment. Wasn't rice too ordinary a crop? And wasn't it what most of the farmers working the land in Korea already grew?
She might well be accused of muscling in on the neighborhood trade. Crops the public lived on, rice among them, were under government control besides. Even so, she made up her mind to grow it.
If regulations kept them from selling much at home, they could sell it overseas. And she herself had been scraping by until only last year. To hold an opportunity like this and still find something to complain about struck her as pathetic.
For now she would grow it with everything she had and think about the rest later. As the one in charge, she only had to lay down the guidelines. The people under her could do the rest. Wasn't that why she paid them those expensive salaries?
Set against last year, the staff had grown at least threefold. Most of them were experienced hires, granted. There wasn't time to take on new graduates and raise them, so she had no choice but to recruit people who had already worked in related fields.
Under that same ironclad security, Kim Sehee carefully carried Hana's rice away.
The ground for farming was already secured. Even before the tooth had come out, she had thrown everything into locking down enough land, so the moment a new plant appeared they could start growing it at once.
"Woooow!"
In front of me sat a bowl heaped full of rice, and beside it a grilled mackerel that made my mouth water just to look at it.
"Hana, they say this was cooked from rice that came out of your tooth! I heard it's amazing."
"Really?"
Bora told me from beside me. I was pretty sure that was the one they'd handed over last week, and they'd already grown it enough to cook. I really had to be something special. This rice had come from me, after all.
I lifted my spoon and set a flake of mackerel on the snow-white grains.
Soft and tender just to look at, it made my mouth water all on its own. It had been a long time since food tempted me this hard with nothing but the way it looked. I grinned, raised the spoon, and put it straight into my mouth.
Nom, nom.
Rice isn't supposed to taste like much of anything. This was similar, but the feel of it between the teeth was wonderful. Next to ordinary rice, this was far better eating. Set beside the plants that had come out before, though, it was a little plain.
Is this the kind that makes you healthier when you eat it?
I scraped the bowl to the last grain, right up until my stomach was round and tight. Rice cooked from the new crop was, in its way, a success.