I'm Rich
A neighborhood that looked like it ought to have nothing more than a village headman—and yet thousands of people lived and worked here.
"It's thanks to you, Hana, that this many people have jobs and food on the table. If you hadn't been around, they'd all be out job-hunting, or just unemployed."
"Oh."
I got the story from the president. Starlight Food, which hadn't even numbered a few hundred souls, had hired close to several thousand people in the span of half a year. Every last one of those thousands was a full-time regular employee, and I could hardly picture how many people that meant under a single roof.
Was there really enough work to justify hiring that many? And it didn't stop at several thousand regulars. This was Korea, where irregular labor was simply how things worked, so beneath the regular staff there had to be plenty of subcontracted workers as well. The subcontracted headcount was probably three or four times the company's own.
From running the factories to growing cherry tomatoes and coffee—primary industry, all of it—the place demanded a great deal of labor. And then, as if that weren't enough, rice had entered the picture, and they said they were still short-handed. No matter how many farm machines you had, farming still took people.
Could the president ever have imagined something like this? Only last year she must have been fretting over how to keep the company afloat at all. She certainly wouldn't have expected this much work to come pouring in.
If I suddenly vanished, ten or twenty thousand people would be out on the street. Some of them were married, too, so once you counted their families and children, something like thirty or forty thousand people were working because of me. The thought left me strangely unsettled.
I was only a little kid, and yet I was responsible for the livelihoods of this many people! Pride welled up inside me, and right alongside it, a creeping anxiety.
I had thought of myself as an ordinary child, but seeing my special ability with my own eyes like this, I felt once again that I really was something unusual. It wasn't a delusion of grandeur. If I alone disappeared, tens of thousands of people would genuinely lose their jobs.
"Shall we look around somewhere else, Hana?"
Finished tidying the desk, the president took my hand. I nodded.
"Okay!"
What was already done couldn't be undone. All I could do was pray that those crops would grow even better. And they were, in a way, children who had come from my own teeth, so wandering around to see how they were growing was fun in its own right.
When we stepped out of the building, the sun was blazing. I put on the straw hat the president handed me and walked toward the section where people were hard at work. Guards had already fallen in beside us. The president was dressed much as usual, but I could tell she'd taken extra care somewhere. An outfit that seemed to declare, I am the president—was that the way to put it?
Maybe that was why, as we walked, I could feel the workers glancing our way. I felt those eyes on us and looked at the rice growing in the paddies. There was no reason anyone would strike the plants or shout at them, so the rice was growing just fine.
Out of curiosity I ran a hand over the stalks, and they shivered as if with joy. It reminded me of a soldier meeting his parents on the day of his discharge. Watching the rice grow, I felt a quiet pride rise in my chest.
It would be nice if this rice could be sold in Korea, too. The thought that only the Japanese would get to taste rice growing this delicious made me angry. I'd overheard something before—that they couldn't sell it domestically because of some regulation.
"Boss!"
"Yes, Hana? What is it?"
"Why can't we sell this rice in Korea?"
"Well... that's..."
The president looked uncomfortable, as if it were difficult to say. She probably figured that, being a child, I wouldn't understand the politics tangled up in it, or the fallout that would follow. Maybe that was why I puffed my cheeks out and told her:
"I want to eat Starlight Rice too!"
I did think of them as my children, but still—it was delicious. And unlike vegetables, rice was made so that the grain formed in ears upon the plant itself, which eased my guilt a little. I wasn't eating the rice plant, was I?
"Is that so? That, I can take care of!"
The president told me to leave it to her.
After I said that, Starlight Rice began to be supplied to our institute. I had no idea how she'd gotten the permit. As a bonus, the cafeteria at our Starlight Research Institute became even more popular.
The Icheon branch of P Bank was, as expected, quiet and peaceful again today.
When people thought of Seoul, they pictured glittering towers shooting up without end into the sky. That was true enough of Seoul itself, but drive an hour or two out of the city and the outer reaches of Gyeonggi welcomed you with scenery that brought the countryside straight to mind.
Icheon was one of those places. An outlying part of Gyeonggi, and not a particularly important one, so there weren't many people. This P Bank branch was, in its own way, turning in results worthy of being merged with another.
Not in a good sense. Its results were bad. The branch wasn't in a great location, and people didn't come looking for it.
Was this perhaps the lowest-performing branch in the entire country?
"Weird. Still no customers today."
"Right? Even a bank robber would walk right past us."
That was fair enough, since there wasn't much in the way of deposited assets. What sat in a key city branch and what sat in a quiet branch where hardly anyone came were not the same amount.
"We've been open for two hours and there's not a single person. Does that even make sense?"
Today the lack of customers was especially stark. Normally someone showed up within thirty minutes to an hour of opening, but two hours had passed since the bank opened and not one person had come through the door.
It was the sort of thing that could have made a segment on a can you believe it show. Even a tiny corner shop in some remote village would probably see more customers than this bank right now.
"Are we seriously about to go under?"
No matter how hard things got, P Bank itself would be fine. The people working at the Icheon branch, though, could very well go under. The branch might be consolidated, or shut down entirely.
"I know. But we only just got merged."
In truth, there had been so few people that this was already the result of a consolidation. Headquarters was probably lamenting that there were no more branches left to merge. They could abolish it outright, but that was a last resort.
"I always say it—getting paid to do nothing, perfectly legally, feels great."
"It does, except for not knowing when we'll get fired. Wouldn't it be nice if we were civil servants?"
"True. If we were civil servants, we could collect a paycheck for doing nothing without worrying about getting cut."
They traded half-joking talk under the threat of never knowing when they'd be let go. People said you didn't get humorous when you were in the middle of a real crisis—or something like that.
While they were talking, the automatic doors opened and the first customer came in.
"Welcome."
The security guard greeted the customer entering the bank. Today's first customer looked like a mother and daughter. Of course, given the child's unusual green hair, that might not have been the case.
"Please take a number."
There were no other customers, so it was a meaningless gesture, but procedure had to be followed, didn't it?
The moment the ticket was drawn, a chime rang out.
"Customer number one!"
Kim Sehee, with Hana held in her arms, looked at the number on her ticket. The bank probably opened around nine, and now, past eleven, there hadn't been a single customer?
"Am I the first customer today?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Wow. This place is kind of like the countryside, but it's amazing that nobody's been in until eleven."
"It's a rather quiet town."
The teller picked up Kim Sehee's remark and kept the conversation going.
"How can I help you?"
"Ah, we came to adjust the transfer limit on our Hana's account. I've brought all the paperwork."
"Yes, of course."
Raising the transfer limit on a child's account was something she had done plenty of times, so the teller took the documents without a second thought.
She entered the account number written on the paperwork and pulled up the account—and her mouth fell open and would not close.
A balance she had never once seen in all her years on the job filled the screen.
Wh... what on earth is this amount?
Staring at an account holding hundreds of billions of won, she couldn't breathe for a moment. She could say with certainty that no minor in Korea—not even an adult, let alone a child—possessed cash on this scale.