Grapes Growing by Leaps and Bounds
Once Hana's grapes had come in, Kim Sehee found suitable farmland and set about planting grape seeds at once. She already owned land bought in advance. Ever since coffee had appeared, she had made a habit of purchasing farmland ahead of time, anticipating that still more of Hana's plants would follow.
She concentrated her buying on farmland between Seoul and Gangwon Province, where the prices were not especially high. Being close to Seoul made the land easy to manage, and she also trusted what Hana's plants could do. Scatter them across barren ground and they still grew far faster, and far better, than anything planted in rich black soil.
Without that vigor, raising the plants would have run into serious trouble. Korea's farmland was not particularly fertile. If anything, it leaned poor rather than good, and it could not begin to compare with the United States—the country gamers liked to call a host's cheat map—or with China and its plains that ran on out of sight.
At any rate, because Kim Sehee had already finished every preparation for the sake of saving time, the grapes were cultivated at a staggering pace. To put it bluntly, it had not even been a few days before they were out sowing grape seeds across the fields. And Kim Sehee, who was not a woman easily startled, had no choice but to be startled.
This was a world in which gates had appeared and hunters with supernatural powers stood thick on the ground, yet the speed at which Hana's plants grew still defied imagination. Had a little more than a week passed? Already Hana's grapevines had become trees, heavy with fruit.
"Does this even make sense..."
A perfectly respectable grapevine would have taken offense at talk like that, but Kim Sehee and the party who had come to inspect, having heard the grapes were ripe, could not hide their astonishment. At this rate, supplying grapes to the entire world would be no great feat. Expanding their sales overseas might even prove wiser than settling for the domestic market.
The home market was small to begin with, and the government was doing what it could to keep monopolies in check. And so they were able to sample, by way of a test, the grapes that had ripened on the vines.
"With flavor and sweetness like this, I'd say they're the finest grapes grown anywhere in the world."
"We ran all sorts of tests on the grapes from that very first vine, and it turns out they can be made into wine as well."
"They're excellent quality. Good for eating, and good for winemaking too."
Grapes were commonly divided into table grapes and wine grapes.
Table grapes bore larger berries than wine grapes, and thinner skins, though their sugar content tended to fall short of the winemaking varieties. Wine grapes, by contrast, had smaller berries packed more tightly together, with thick skins and very large seeds, and the sugar held in their flesh was extraordinarily high.
For grape juice to ferment into a wine with the proper level of alcohol, that high sugar was essential. If the sweetness ran low, fermentation failed to produce alcohol as it should, and you ended up with nothing but grape juice.
Hana's grapes were different. What had been born was a monster that joined the virtues of table grapes and wine grapes both. The berries were large, the skins had a certain thickness, and the sugar was extremely high—sweet enough that you started to worry your teeth would rot as you ate.
One could say with confidence that grapes of this sweetness did not exist anywhere else in the world.
"We've already opened a gap in taste and quality so wide that no other grape can catch up. All we have to do is sell them."
And over the time that had passed, Starlight Food had already opened a great many sales channels. When it came to distributing food, they put ordinary couriers to shame. Like any major food conglomerate, Starlight Food had so many employees that the moment an order came down from above, every route snapped open at once. Within Korea, at least, delivery was possible almost anywhere that was not some truly remote corner of the countryside.
So thoroughly had the domestic routes already been laid out that people said the only thing left was overseas sales. Starlight Food's quality and flavor were so widely recognized that they sold out faster than they could supply the goods. There was no need to worry about dead stock. Put them on a stand and they vanished in a flash.
The warehouses that held products supplied by Starlight Food were small for the same reason. There was no time to store anything. The moment the trucks loaded with Starlight crops arrived at dawn, the goods had to be turned straight around and sold.
The day had come. Not, of course, the Day of Judgment one only ever saw in movies, or the day the Earth came to an end. Today was the day the theatrical film of Little Magician Rumi opened. I had set an alarm ahead of time and was up from six. Six in the morning—I used to rise this early back in the army, but since I had changed into this body, it felt like the first time in ages. I opened the window and met a fragrant summer breeze.
Yet even though the sun had not climbed high, a hot wind came blasting in, and I shrieked and slammed the window shut. I, the delicate creature who had always lived under the air conditioner's blessing, had no choice but to shrivel before a summer wind as merciless as they came.
The person who invented air conditioning could be enshrined as a great figure for all I cared. They had made something that revolutionary. Korea, of course, was different, what with its winters. Given time, once the cold winds started to blow, that same great figure would stop being a great figure at all and become a chief culprit of environmental pollution.
"Haaah!"
I came away from the window and, still in my dinosaur pajamas, decided I would take a lap around the building—and eat breakfast while I was at it. The person on night duty just then was not someone I was particularly close to, so sharing a meal would have been awkward. It took someone on the level of Bora, Haru, or Maru before I would eat with them.
Tiptoeing, I walked to the elevator without a sound and pressed the button, and managed to catch a car. It was morning, so few people were using it, and it reached my floor in no time. The cafeteria opened at six, which meant I could eat even now. It used to open a little later, and I would have to wait before I could eat; these days it was practically a twenty-four-hour restaurant.
Not actually open twenty-four hours, of course. The cafeteria staff were people too, and they clocked out around evening. They did not come in on Sundays, either. So on Sundays I always ate the simple meals kept ready in the refrigerator, or else I went out with the staff and ate somewhere outside.
I pressed the button for the first floor, steadied my pounding heart, and drew a deep breath. I could not afford to get hurt, or to have anything strange happen, before I went to the movie, so I had to move as safely as possible. This was the hour when even a falling leaf demanded caution. Stepping out into the first-floor lobby, I exchanged greetings with the staff at the desk.
It was something I always wondered about—when, exactly, did the desk staff come to work? Unless it was the dead of dawn, there always seemed to be someone at the desk. Security guards had to watch the building, so one could accept that they stayed on site around the clock, but the desk staff only worked during business hours, didn't they?
At any rate, after tossing off my greeting, I dashed for the cafeteria. I meant to eat heartily, starting with breakfast. Filling an empty stomach before a movie was simple common sense.
"Graaah!"
The moment the elevator doors opened, I let out a great roar. Anyone who had come up to the tenth floor ought to have trembled head to toe at the sound of it. The reaction I was hoping for, however, never came.
"Hana, you're up already?"
"Morning, Hana~"
They took one look at me and smiled as they said hello. Dressed in dinosaur pajamas, I was a wild beast. If anyone else had seen me, trembling would have been the normal response. But there was nothing about them that looked frightened, and nothing that shook.
Even so, I was the sort who kept at a thing until it was done.
"Graaah!"
"Eek!"
Maru nearly dropped her phone at my shout. I ran straight for her.
"Maru!"
"Hana, you startled me!"
Maru scooped me up as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. The other employees had not been surprised, so it had nearly been no fun at all, but Maru gave me exactly the reaction I wanted, and I was thoroughly satisfied. Wearing that satisfaction on my whole body, I went into the office. It was full of people getting ready for the workday. Bora, however, had not arrived yet.
Like a retriever waiting for its owner, I sat down in an office chair and waited for Bora to come. I was only going to see a movie, and yet it felt like an eternity. The thought stole over me—what if the movie isn't any good? Of course there was no way the Little Magician Rumi film could be boring, but a worry that welled up unbidden was beyond my control.