Chapter 234: Conquering Hair Loss?
Maru was working alone in a lonely office. In truth, there was hardly anything that deserved to be called work. The office on the tenth floor existed for a single purpose: to look after one person.
Once Hana vanished, the department became useless for anything at all. The staff who had filled it scattered in every direction. The one small mercy, perhaps, was that no one had actually been fired.
Fortunately, the plant that had grown from Hana's tooth was developing normally, so the shortage of hands over there was filled with people from this floor. Maru herself was due to transfer to that department next week.
Gazing at the photo taped beside her desk, she sank into thought. In it, Hana was laughing, bright as sunlight.
In that short time, she had grown genuinely fond of the girl. Working at the company meant spending a great deal of time at Hana's side, and now that she was gone, Maru missed her. She didn't know whether they would ever meet again, but if only they could, she felt she would have nothing left to wish for. She wanted, just once more, to pinch those soft rice-cake cheeks.
Maru closed her laptop and started getting ready to leave. Hana's disappearance was no reason to quit. Then she caught a familiar scent. Breathing it in alone was enough to leave her whole body feeling refreshed—the fragrance she had smelled so often back when Hana was here. She whipped her head around. Outside the office stood Hana, a little scruffy, wearing an awkward smile.
Maru shot up from her chair and ran to her. She had missed her so terribly for a whole month. Tears spilling freely, she pulled Hana into her arms.
"Maru, I'm back."
"What took you so long, Hana?"
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I'm just glad you came home without a scratch."
Looking into those clear eyes, Maru could finally believe it. Hana had truly returned.
She gathered the girl up in her arms and asked,
"You're not hurt anywhere? Nothing aches?"
"Nope! I'm perfectly fine, Maru!"
After Hana's return, the Starlight Research Institute was thrown into an uproar. The girl who had been missing for a month had come back more or less in one piece. Hearing that the elf who had taken her was extremely friendly toward Hana, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If that elf had meant her harm, they didn't even want to imagine what might have become of her.
The scattered office staff returned to their posts now that Hana was back. Upper management had intended to shake things up and hold people accountable for failing to look after her properly, but Hana's opinion was immovable. She declared that if the original staff weren't reinstated, she would go on strike, and there was nothing they could do.
The other-race research lab she had snuck into, however, was gone from the vicinity of the building. Rinea's fault in taking Hana away had been too great for it to remain. Now there was nothing around the building at all. The lab had been rebuilt far off, and not a single thing that might threaten Hana was left nearby.
"Hana, where did you go!"
The moment Bora and Haru saw her, they pulled her into a fierce embrace. They were overjoyed that this walking disaster, this little whirlwind, had come home. Fortunately, Hana was spared a spanking. The primary blame lay with the staff of the lab she had slipped into without anyone noticing.
It had become a stretch, by now, to keep calling the place the Starlight Research Institute. It was simply the Starlight Building. Everything related to other-race research had been built far away.
In any case, the Starlight staff were in a festive mood. With Hana back, a month of worry vanished in an instant. Hana, however, still had to be questioned by them.
Of course, it was nothing like the coercive interrogations conducted by prosecutors at the prosecutor's office. Hana was very much the one holding all the cards. Slices of delicious cake and something to drink sat waiting on the table, and she munched away at the cake while chatting with the staff.
They didn't press for details. Hana clearly had no desire to talk about it. Having fortunately witnessed the scene of the elves worshipping her, the staff concluded it hadn't been a dangerous place. And so Hana's long journey of a month came to an end.
Of course, the fact that Hana had been off on an exciting trip while the Starlight Research Institute endured a month from hell was another story entirely.
"Uuugh..."
I was forced to endure Maru squishing my cheeks. A whole day had passed since I came back, and they were still treating me like a baby. And I was a god of the World Tree cult, no less!
Of course, that was a secret only I knew, so I couldn't exactly say it out loud. Not that anyone would have believed me anyway.
"I'm so happy you're back!"
Maru said it with a smile, and somehow my own mood lifted too. Happiness really was better when you shared it.
A day had passed, and life slipped back into its ordinary rhythm. The downside, for me, was that vacation didn't have much time left. Elementary school breaks were short, after all. If this had been university, I could have blown a whole month and still had plenty of break remaining. Elementary school was different.
A mere two weeks or so were left. There was no vacation homework or anything of the sort, so I didn't have to scramble to finish something before time ran out. My thoughts drifted to the plants I had seen in the greenhouse. They had wilted that badly just because I was gone for a month. It felt like something out of a fairy tale.
"Maru! I want to go to the greenhouse!"
Maru startled at my words. She had been so busy pinching my cheeks that she didn't seem to have been thinking about anything else.
"Hana! After you left, we tried taking care of them, but it didn't do any good..."
According to Maru, they had looked after the greenhouse plants meticulously even after I disappeared, and it had barely helped. They had kept the temperature razor-precise and watered them every day, yet the plants had drooped as if they had caught some disease. I had already seen them wilted in the greenhouse yesterday, so I understood the situation without her having to spell it out.
"Don't worry! We can just grow them again!"
As long as I was around, raising plants was about as difficult as swimming with one hand on the bottom. Scatter a few seeds and they shot up on their own—a trick that bordered on the miraculous. If any real farmers had seen the way I grew things, they might have shouted that it was impossible.
No matter how I thought about it, my method of raising plants was simplicity itself.
"Let's go together, Hana!"
Maru followed along behind me. Since we were heading out to farm, changing clothes went without saying. We put on things that wouldn't mind a little dirt and dust. There was nothing worse than wearing something expensive, coming home caked in soil, and regretting every step.
And so I pattered along toward the greenhouse. What awaited us there was a wondrous sight. The plants that only yesterday had wilted and turned brown were steadily finding their way back to a fresh green. A few were still dried and twisted, but there weren't many of them.
"Wow... Did this happen because you came back?"
Maru gaped as if she were witnessing magic. Just as she said, these were plants that until yesterday had seemed beyond any hope of revival, and now they were recovering their vitality as if they had come back from a course of miracle tonic.
"Of course it did. I'm here!"
I shrugged and got to work. Even if seeds grew well when you simply scattered them, there were still things that needed doing. These were plants that thrived without care, but they thrived far more with it, so I threw myself into the crop management I had neglected for a month.
Maru helped beside me. Luckily, we didn't use the whole greenhouse; we divided the space, and the smaller area made tending it easier. We still hadn't used even half of it. The rest had been left open in case we wanted to grow something else later. Today, I intended to use that space.
With great care, I planted a single seed that glowed with a blue light. Maru must have seen it, because she asked,
"Hana, what's that?"
"They say it's a plant that's good for hair loss."
"Hair loss?"
Maru probably didn't know much about hair loss. Women almost never went bald, so their knowledge on the subject tended to be thin. Hair loss was a cursed condition, heavily influenced by male hormones. In my previous life, I had been stressed about having thin hair myself.
I intended to become the Jesus of the bald. An apology was owed to the modern pharmaceutical industry, which poured enormous sums of money into treating hair loss—but only a small one.
Bald people would be praying for a cure to come out anyway, so what did it matter if I unveiled one first? They would pay any price, do whatever it took, to fix their hair.
And so I planted the seed, grinning to myself.