A New Plant
"Yaaawn!"
Hana woke late. Vacation had arrived, and with it any reason to get up early had vanished. A beauty, as it turned out, was a sleepyhead. She didn't particularly enjoy the fact that she herself was the beauty in question, but surely she was still allowed to sleep as much as she liked?
At any rate, by the time she climbed out of bed the sun was already high overhead. Bora or Haru—or Maru, for that matter—might easily have come in to wake her, and since none of them had, Hana decided she must have been sleeping far too soundly.
Still in her dinosaur pajamas, she stepped outside. Office workers, regrettably, were granted no such thing as a vacation. Hana might have had her closing ceremony, but the people who worked at the Starlight Research Institute still had to show up.
A mischievous little grin tugged at her mouth. She found herself wondering what sort of thing would happen today, because over vacation something entertaining was practically guaranteed. She only hoped that whatever fun arrived wouldn't end up hurting anyone else.
Today, though, no chance to make mischief ever came. Her tooth was loose. Count this one, and she would already have lost four. The tooth would grow back, of course, but she still hated the gaps that opened in her smile and made her look like a gap-toothed cartoon boy.
Even so, the staff had to be told, so she went to the office, where the employees were hard at work. With the ease of long habit, Hana walked up to Bora and caught hold of her sleeve. Bora looked down at the small hand tugging her cuff, a question already forming.
"Bora, my tooth is loose."
"What?!"
The words were barely out before Hana was gathered into Bora's arms and whisked this way and that. They took her to a place with the finest facilities and a dentist on hand, and the tooth came out. Every time Hana lost a tooth the fuss grew so enormous that it seemed the president himself might turn up next to do the pulling. That was how explosively the number of people obsessed with Hana's teeth had grown.
Well, Hana thought, it only made sense. There were an awful lot of people making their living off the plants that grew from her teeth. They had expanded overseas as well, and in Japan, word of mouth was quietly carrying Starlight rice through ordinary households.
It was rice that surpassed Koshihikari, they said—delicious, and priced kindly enough that it would be stranger not to buy it. Aside from the more conservative restaurant owners, kitchens were steadily switching over to Starlight rice. That it was Korean-made gave some of them pause, but the restaurants themselves hardly cared. Patriotism had never been what put food on the table.
What frightened them far more was bland cooking driving their customers away. Diners who turned their backs once never came back. From an owner's point of view, a customer who left without so much as a review was someone you wanted to meet even less than a devil in hell.
And so my teeth were raised under security so tight it would have put the president's own guard to shame. They were fruit that grew on trees, sure, but they came out fully grown in a matter of days, so there wasn't much to worry about. Honestly, you could skip the concrete entirely and toss them onto any patch of bare soil, and the plants from my teeth would still shoot up, lush and vigorous.
In sheer will to survive, they were every bit the match of weeds. I had no idea why. A few days passed like that, and then I could finally see the plant coming out of my tooth.
"Hana lost another tooth?"
The moment Kim Sehee arrived at work and heard the news, she hastily gathered her things and raced for the Starlight Research Institute. Every plant that came from Hana was, without exception, something worth anticipating, so the fuss was more than justified.
Only after clearing several layers of security did she finally get to see it. An open stretch of ground lay spread before her, and inside a building of enormous glass walls—raised as if to tell the weather it had no say in the matter—Hana's plant was growing.
"Th-this is...?"
Kim Sehee found herself staring at grapes hanging in heavy clusters from the tree. First had come cherry tomatoes, then coffee, then rice, and now grapes. Every last one of them was a fruit or crop people craved in enormous quantities, and grapes in particular would sell astonishingly well if they chose to sell them.
There were simply too many things made from grapes to count; listing them one by one would wear out her tongue. The first that came to Kim Sehee's mind was wine. The world had no shortage of famous brands, but none of them would be a match for Hana. Even the coffee was already flying off the shelves, and if she tried to imagine a wine made from Hana's grapes, she couldn't begin to picture how well it would sell.
She had wanted to branch into makgeolli brewed from the rice, rice cakes, and plenty more besides, but regulations had so far kept her from even attempting to sell them at home. Wine was different. It was easy enough to distribute domestically, and because it was famous the world over, widening their outlets abroad struck her as something that would be genuinely wonderful.
Makgeolli and rice cakes might enjoy plenty of demand in Korea, but appetite for them overseas was thin. Wine, on the other hand, was a drink the entire world enjoyed.
Starlight Food still lived in large part off the domestic market, yet the products it sold abroad were steadily multiplying. The rice was already being sold in Japan, and they were carefully taking the measure of overseas markets for the coffee, the cherry tomatoes, and the rest.
"Could I try one of these grapes?"
Just looking at the clusters hanging from the tree made Kim Sehee's mouth water. They were top-grade at a glance—plump, heavy berries whose looks alone were extraordinary. At her words, an employee plucked a bunch from the tree and set it down in front of her.
Kim Sehee peeled a single grape and ate it.
"Mmm..."
It did not betray her expectations. The juice that burst across her tongue the instant it entered her mouth startled her. Grapes this sweet—Hana truly seemed like a gift sent down by heaven. If she had never met the girl, she would never have escaped the lot of a pitiful company president.
True, if she added up the stocks, the real estate, and the cash she had inherited, she could have lived as comfortably as any respectable rich woman. Kim Sehee simply hadn't wanted that kind of life. She had wanted to leave behind some great mark that she had existed in the world, and that was how she had come to take on Starlight Food as it crumbled.
"This is excellent."
A smile of deep satisfaction found her face. She didn't yet know how many fruits they would go on to sell, but at least with grapes there was no reason for the government to try to hold them back, and they had only to carry their market out into the world. It was an immensely satisfying crop.
"First, I have to see Hana!"
She had bought candy for the girl, who was surely grieving the loss of a tooth. Meaning to rock her and fuss over her while she was at it, Kim Sehee headed up into the building. Simply seeing Hana, who felt like a niece to her, was healing in itself. So this was why uncles doted on their nieces and nephews.
A child to whom you had only to give endless love—how wonderful was that? It wasn't like being a parent, when there were times you had to discipline. You simply took the child in hand and poured out infinite affection, and nothing else required your attention. Arms full of gifts, Kim Sehee went to visit Hana's room.
Today, too, she meant to play with Hana with everything she had.
Hana's grapevine was moved with painstaking care by heavy machinery, and the matter of the land was settled as well. What they had in abundance was the ground all around them, so they had been able to buy farmland at a reasonable price. The one regret was that they could not raise everything in a single place. They needed to hold as much acreage as possible, which left them no choice but to grow the crops separately.
There was, after all, an old saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Should a typhoon or some other disaster strike later, the risk could be kept to a minimum. Once the grapevine had been transplanted, they raised a building of concrete and glass to protect the tree as thoroughly as possible, then moved it inside. So long as they guarded this one vine, the others grew perfectly well on their own. There was nothing to worry about.
They carefully gathered the seeds from the grapes growing on the vine and transplanted them into the fields. Given nothing more than the proper fertilizer, Hana's plants flourished regardless of temperature, climate, or any other condition. Coffee had never been a crop suited to growing in Korea, but the coffee that came from Hana's body paid such things no mind.
Water and fertilizer alone, and it grew just fine on its own. It had once demanded exacting conditions; now it shot upward as if those conditions were unnecessary. It also resisted blight and the diseases that plagued other plants, so the difficulty of raising it was genuinely low.
It felt tougher, and far more fiercely alive, than any ordinary weed.