Salvation for the Bald
The seeds grew with a will. They stormed upward so fiercely that hardly a day passed without another surge, and watching them filled me with a quiet pride. In less than a week they had even set fruit.
Within a husk as large as a pomegranate's, countless kernels were packed tight. We would still have to set aside proper ground before we planted, so mass production would take a little time; farmland had to be secured around the research institute and the crop raised there. Fortunately, every last field surrounding the institute had already been bought, and there was no need to purchase more. I had heard that back when the cherry tomatoes went in, the neighboring land was acquired at two or three times the going price. Situations like this came up often.
They were buying land in other regions as well. Starlight Food and the institute, working hand in hand, had been snapping up farmland without mercy. Give it a little longer and—allowing for some exaggeration—they might well hold fields the size of all Gyeonggi Province.
"Whoa..."
Maru must have been watching me farm with everything I had; wonder spread across her face. I rose onto my toes and plucked a single fruit. Peeling back the husk to bare the flesh inside lifted my mood at once. Farming, as ever, was rewarding work, and a joy besides.
"Is this the plant that's good for hair loss?"
Curiosity got the better of her, and she asked me outright. It was a plant brought from another dimension; there was no way Maru would have known it. I only knew because I had heard the story from Rinea. Had I never been told, I wouldn't have known such a plant existed at all.
"Yeah. It's a real miracle cure for hair loss."
Maru contacted the higher-ups at once. For a whole week she had watched me raise the plant and never quite caught the right moment to report it. The thing had been shooting up by the day, after all.
I took one of the fruits—packed full of blue berries—and ate it. The taste was excellent. If I had to name the feeling, it was like eating blueberries.
Kim Jiho was a very fine young man. He had graduated from a top-tier university with outstanding marks, and the moment he finished he joined Starlight Group—a name any Korean knew on hearing it. The group's reputation was such that anyone who didn't know Starlight might as well have been a spy.
He worked at Starlight Food, the affiliate said to be doing the best of any in the conglomerate these days. True, its success was still young, and its revenue didn't yet reach even a tenth of steel, shipbuilding, or automobiles. Even so, he had joined a company with staggering room to grow, and he had done it by breaking through a public recruitment whose odds ran to hundreds of applicants for every seat.
And yet, to this day, he had never had a girlfriend. It was not a flaw of character, nor of his body. He stood five foot eleven, comfortably among the taller men, and his looks were handsome enough that women would have called him a catch. He worked out diligently, and he had the muscle to show for it.
"Ah!"
Getting ready for work, Kim Jiho discovered that his wig had given out. Yes—young as he was, a man in his twenties, he was already losing his hair. The mirror gave him back a crown laid cleanly bare. He had made his peace with it to some degree by now, but while the loss was still advancing, the stress had been so fierce he had wanted to smash the glass.
Overseas, hair loss was tolerated to a point, and plenty of people hardly cared. Foreigners' skulls were shaped differently from Koreans', so shaving it all off did not leave them looking wrong. In some cases a fully shaved head even looked sharp.
But Kim Jiho, born Korean, cursed his hair loss. Go on a blind date, and nine women out of ten soured the moment they saw the bare patch. A few kept a decent attitude, yet none of those stories ended well. The choice of shaving his head completely had been struck from his heart a long time ago.
Picture himself with every hair gone, and the result was obviously grotesque. Kim Jiho rummaged through a drawer and took out a spare wig. With it on, he was perfection itself. The moment it came off, he was a pitiful bald man.
He had tried to hide it, but his colleagues had seen through him long ago. Even so, a wig was mandatory if he meant to step outside. Going out without one was the same as going out naked.
"Shi—"
The refined internal energy in his body stopped the curse from running all the way out, but it could not make the figure in the mirror disappear. All that remained was his miserable self, crown laid bare, looking nothing like a man in his twenties. The strange part was this: put the wig on, and Kim Jiho looked his age; take it off, and by some magic he became a man in his forties. If removing a wig aged a face that drastically, what was it if not magic?
He should have known, back when his father went bald... The medicine had stopped doing any good, and so Kim Jiho hauled his heavy body off to work. Bald or not, the company still had to be attended.
"Good morning!"
He had not been a new hire for long, so he threw himself into the work with a crisp, eager air. Now and then the department head—bald himself—would lead him out to a restaurant and treat him to something good. Perhaps it was the fellowship of the afflicted, but that kindness did not sit well with Kim Jiho. The department head was completely bald, every hair dead, nothing left that could ever grow again, while Kim Jiho was a man whose sides and back were still alive. The difference was enormous. At least the hair at Kim Jiho's sides and nape still lived.
Of course, thinking that way did not let him forget that he, too, was losing his hair.
"Haa..."
After another brutal day, Kim Jiho got ready to leave. Maybe it was because so many more people worked at Starlight Food now. He had heard the overtime used to be endless, but these days there was none at all. When the hour came, people went home. There was, of course, a reason for that—one Kim Jiho would never know, not if he died and woke again.
That was when he saw the flyer pinned to the company bulletin board.
A fruit that's good for hair loss...
Colleagues dealing with hair loss, welcome...
"Hair loss?"
It seemed Starlight Food was producing a fruit of its own and putting it up for sale. Working there himself, he knew the fruits they sold very well indeed. There was Starlight Coffee, which tasted of heaven from the first sip, and the Starlight Cherry Tomato, which left you full after a single bite. That tomato was Kim Jiho's breakfast of choice. For a man whose stomach sat heavy in the morning, one of them worked a small magic and filled him up.
Best of all, breakfast was over in a minute. A meal that usually took ten or twenty had been cut, dramatically, down to one, and his mornings on the way to work had grown generous because of it. There was Starlight Rice as well.
After the gates appeared, all sorts of wondrous ingredients had come into the world, so people no longer found it strange when Starlight Food released a food of its own. But the moment they tasted what it could do, they had no choice but to be astonished.
Because it tasted extraordinary.
In any case, Kim Jiho, as if spellbound, typed the phone number printed beneath the flyer into his phone. If something was good for hair loss, he could have chewed down a stone to get it.
Of course, everything that had ever claimed to help with hair loss had, without exception, been a scam. Unless it was a drug with proven effect, like Propecia, nine times out of ten—no, ten times out of ten—it was a fraud. As if to mock the desperation of people losing their hair, every product that promised results had failed, uniformly, to produce any.
They were expensive besides. But Kim Jiho believed in the name Starlight Food. It was the company he worked for, and judging by every product it had released so far, he could be sure it would not lie to him. Shouldn't an employee trust his own company?
And beneath the notice, in print almost too small to notice, there was another line.
Still in the testing stage. Please refrain from telling others, or from posting about it online.
Reading it, Kim Jiho understood well enough. If they claimed the fruit was good for hair loss and it did nothing, it would be no different from dragging Starlight Food's name through the mud.
He made the call, and he was accepted into the trial. He did not even hope for a complete cure. He only wished that the hair on the bare crown of his scalp might grow, even a little. If it did, he could get a transplant and live, more or less, without a wig.