Preparing the Broadcast
I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. For once, it seemed I'd slept deeply, without Bora coming to shake me awake. Lately I'd gotten into the habit of rising early, so it wasn't unusual for my eyes to open before she arrived.
I climbed out of bed, toddled over, and drew the curtains. The wall was a single sheet of glass, and the morning sun poured straight onto my body. I basked in the warmth and rolled around on the floor.
Too much sunlight wasn't good for you, so I slept with the curtains drawn—but soaking it up the moment I woke had a strange, addictive pull. I wanted to loaf around like this all day long.
I'd been sprawled there rolling about for quite a while when I heard the door open. It was Bora.
"Hi!"
"Morning, Hana~"
The greeting barely finished before Bora rummaged through her bag and pulled something out—a device that looked vaguely like a camcorder, along with all sorts of files.
Curiosity got the better of me. I went over to her side and asked.
"What's that...?"
"Oh, this? This is the thing that's going to make you famous."
"It is...?"
Bora lifted the camera as if searching for something worth filming. Was she planning to film me? But I couldn't do anything. If you wanted content, didn't you at least need a concept?
Bora didn't seem to care. She held the camera up and tapped it a few times, as if checking whether it even worked. I stared at the whole scene, wide-eyed, like someone seeing a camera for the first time. She must have felt my gaze, because she stroked my head and said,
"You have to get famous before you can become a person, Hana. You still don't even have a resident registration card."
She was probably talking about registering this life-form with the government. I didn't think it mattered much, but Bora seemed to worry about it a great deal.
Fair enough. This place was so comfortable I'd forgotten, but in the end I was still treated as a monster. Rights, and all the benefits the law set down for people—none of that applied to me. Frankly, if I'd had no abilities at all, I didn't even want to imagine how I would have been treated.
"All right. Today it's your turn to be a princess."
With that, Bora dragged me off somewhere from the very morning. She must have known I had no strength to speak of, because every employee we passed looked at me with kindly eyes.
Well, even I thought I looked like a cute little girl. Anyone who saw me couldn't help but relax. A small benefit of being born in this body.
If I'd come into the world as a monster with a repulsive, bizarre appearance, I'd probably be sitting in an isolation room by now.
Today's preparations, though, were unusually intense. Normally I would have gotten a massage and then gone back to my room to rest, but Bora hauled me off somewhere instead.
"Bora, where are we going?"
"To get your hair done, obviously."
The research institute had every kind of shop imaginable. The place itself might as well have been a mixed-use complex. My hair was cut every single day, so I didn't really bother taking care of it.
As a result, it stuck out in wild, jagged tufts. Here and there, strands floated up as if I'd just rolled out of bed.
Most days I was too lazy for anything more than a wash and a ponytail, but today was different. It would only last a day anyway, and still they spent a full hour at the salon trimming my hair.
At first I watched them work. Before long my head began to nod, and I fell asleep. This body still seemed badly short on sleep. It was absolutely not because I slept too much or anything like that.
Of course, they didn't actually cut much. At most they worked in some nice oil and trimmed the slightest bit.
My hair was valuable, after all. In a way, it was more precious than I was. Sad to say, but it was more or less true. I resented losing to my own hair, but there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn't as if I had the ability to stop it from growing.
Once the makeup was finished too, the face in the mirror was a completely different person from the one who had woken up that morning. A trace of childishness still lingered. Even so, this was remarkable progress.
Looking at me like that, Bora took out the camera.
Every supermarket was in an uproar over Starlight Green Tea. Starlight Food had switched from hundred-count boxes to ten-count boxes, so there was relatively more product to go around—but the number of people trying to buy it was far greater still.
With only the last two boxes left on the shelf, Kim Sejin barely managed to buy a single one and get out. The mart he left behind, abandoned to everyone who hadn't gotten a box, was hell itself.
People grabbed part-timers by the hair and demanded they bring out more. Others ransacked the aisles, certain the stock was hidden somewhere. If a riot were ever going to break out, this would be the place.
Hell. Absolute hell... If I want to buy any from now on, I'll have to show up two hours early.
From what he'd heard about daily restocks, this particular mart would draw a heavier crowd than most, and sales were sure to climb. Once you'd already made the trip, you were bound to pick up something else while you were there.
"Excuse me, sir..."
Kim Sejin was heading home with the tea box clutched like a precious treasure when someone suddenly spoke from behind him.
"Yes?"
The stranger looked young. He wondered why someone that age would bother speaking to a man as old as he was.
"That green tea box you're holding—I'll buy it for twenty thousand won. Would you sell it to me?"
They looked like a student. The eyes were so pitiful that Kim Sejin meant to refuse, but a pang of guilt stopped him.
So he took the twenty thousand won and handed over one box. He still had tea at home from an earlier purchase anyway.
The student who received it from Kim Sejin went off toward home beaming, practically skipping.
Huh?
Now that he thought about it, a box he'd bought for three thousand won had just transformed into twenty thousand. He'd sold it for nearly seven times the price, and the buyer didn't seem to think they'd overpaid at all.
Flipping this... this could be serious money, couldn't it...?
The thought struck him as he went home empty-handed. This time he'd given it away because the student looked pitiful. Next time, he decided, he wouldn't.
There were several reasons Starlight Green Tea was selling like wildfire. Drugs that claimed to boost concentration were nothing new. There were psychiatric medications, and plenty of byproducts from monsters hunted inside the gates that raised focus as well.
But each of those had its drawbacks. Psychiatric drugs meant to sharpen concentration could cause side effects in healthy people, and even when you took them, they didn't reliably improve your focus. Plenty of people were also reluctant to set foot in a psychiatrist's office at all.
Medicines derived from monsters didn't last long, and the supply was tiny to begin with. On a good day you might see a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands at most. Hunters who worked the gates mostly took them to keep a hunt running smoothly. They were far too expensive to swallow just for the sake of studying.
Starlight Green Tea was different. The supply was relatively ample at four hundred thousand units, and the boost to concentration was unmistakable.
Of course, drinking it didn't turn a child scoring a Grade 5 into some superhuman who suddenly landed a Grade 1 or 2. Sit an exam after a cup, and a Grade 5 might become a 4.8 or a 4.9. The effect was real, but it wasn't powerful.
At the top of the rankings, though, the story changed. In this brutal fight, where a single point on the standardized score could decide which university you entered, the sheer cheat-like power of Starlight Green Tea's focus boost was beyond words.
In the long race of exam study, it raised concentration with no side effects. The price was incomparably kinder than anything comparable. And it wasn't illegal.
Not only people studying for the college entrance exam, but office workers and those preparing for the national exams would drink the tea with tears of gratitude streaming down their faces. Famous cram schools were already serving it every morning before study began.
Word of mouth about Starlight Green Tea, passed along by the mothers of examinees, was beginning to spread slowly across the internet.