Tangle Goes on Sale
"Whoa!"
They'd come to fix the air conditioner in my room and, while they were at it, tidied the whole place until it was spotless. The interior had already been redone, so that didn't need touching, but every appliance was swapped out for the very latest model. They'd been new to begin with. Now the TV, the computer, and even the air conditioner were newer still, and somehow, changing nothing but the electronics made the room gleam. It hardly felt like my room anymore.
"Hana, if anything bothers you, just tell your big sister, okay? I'll take care of it right away."
"Okay!"
Nothing was really uncomfortable at the moment, so I nodded along to Haru. If something came up later I'd say so, but for now there was nothing in particular, and I meant to just live with it. The little things I could handle myself. I didn't expect I'd have much reason to call her.
Dragging Haru in over every small matter left me feeling guilty. Unless I needed help on a real scale, I intended to take care of it on my own.
"Is this how you're supposed to use it?"
That was the trouble with cutting-edge appliances. They were so new that they came crammed with functions no one could make sense of. Once, all you needed to know about a machine was how to turn it on and off. These days, in the name of the cutting edge, they stuffed in feature after feature written in a language you couldn't begin to parse. For anyone a little older, the manuals might as well have been alien script—utterly unusable. I was young enough to read the instructions and mostly follow them, but I would have bet everything I owned that if seniors bought these things, they wouldn't be able to work them properly. People already struggled just to operate a kiosk. Appliances loaded with this many functions would be nearly impossible to handle.
Haru stood there with the remote, her face uncertain. She had never been much good with machines. It wasn't that she was hopeless with technology. The fault lay with manufacturers who insisted on packing in piles of useless features. For an appliance, knowing how to switch it on and off ought to be plenty!
"There we go!"
The moment Haru finished fiddling, the TV powered on. Just getting it started had taken a ridiculous amount of effort. But one look at the screen and I had to admit it: expensive really was better. The picture was far sharper than anything the old set had managed.
"Wow, Haru. Has a TV ever looked this clear?"
It was an enormous screen, and the image quality was absurdly good. I had no idea how high the resolution actually was, but even on a set nearly the size of the dining table, every image came through crystal clear. When it came to televisions, pricey was best.
"Must be because it's a fifteen-thousand-dollar TV? I was going to buy something even more expensive this time, but they said this was the only one you could actually get right now, so I just went with it. I'll swap it for a better one later, Hana."
Haru said it as if it were nothing. A fifteen-thousand-dollar television. It wasn't even a car—what possible reason did it have to cost that much? Of course, if you went looking, there were cars that ran well into the hundreds of thousands, but those weren't anything ordinary people could afford. Set it beside a normal midsize car and it was hard to see why a TV should be this expensive.
Still, I liked a good picture, so I didn't say much. I was well on my way to becoming a slave of capitalism. Measured against the money I was bringing in, this wasn't even a handful. I didn't know exactly how much I earned in a day, but like Bill Gates, wasn't simply going about my ordinary day worth more than stopping to pick a few hundred dollars up off the floor?
If money were lying on the ground I'd snatch it up at once, and yet I kept forgetting that I made that much. Maybe it was because I was young, or because I still hadn't had many chances to spend it—either way, it didn't feel real. I wouldn't truly start spending until I was grown, and by then who knew whether I'd even be able to feel how much I earned.
Attending elementary school, there wasn't much to spend money on. Even back when I'd lived as a man, before I died, I hadn't been the type to spend a lot. I'd never picked up the habits of the rich who plastered themselves in luxury brands, so I wore simple labels and had never once put on clothes that cost thousands for a single outfit.
If I ever set foot in a department store, I'd probably end up wearing nothing but those. Expensive clothes just hung better, after all.
Tangle's effects had already been verified. Even so, they still had to leave behind results proving it was good for hair loss, which meant trials were unavoidable. Unlike actual medicine, which had to slog through a long and mindless approval process, this was nothing but a fruit, so it could go straight to market. All it needed was a simple clearance from the food and drug authority.
The fruit itself was small, so Tangle was sold the way candy was—packed to the brim inside glass jars. And there was hardly any need to advertise. The confidentiality period had ended, and vivid firsthand reviews from people with hair loss were already flooding the internet.
Countless reviews were going up online. Most of them showed a majestic satisfaction rate of ninety-nine percent. Of course, half of the people with hair loss hadn't seen any effect, but after reading the notice—laced with hope—that further improvements from Starlight Wellbeing might yet cure them, they couldn't help but feel expectant.
If it could free them from this miserable hair loss, they would have handed over a fortune. Hair loss truly deserved to be called a punishment from the gods, because socially, it handed you a death sentence. No matter how handsome a man was, hair loss left him looking shriveled and worn.
People with hair loss who had seen the reviews online rushed to the pharmacies. The pharmacists, however, looked utterly bewildered.
"Why aren't you selling Tangle here? You don't want to make money?"
"S-sir, Tangle isn't a medicine. It's a fruit."
They had come to the pharmacy believing it worked on hair loss, but Tangle was classified as a fruit. It wasn't something a pharmacy sold. It was something you found at the supermarket down the street.
The footsteps of the hair-loss crowd turned, swiftly, toward the marts. Neighborhood markets were stunned to discover just how many people with hair loss had been hiding from society, or disguising themselves with wigs. They had walked the streets and never once seemed to see any—and yet there were this many?
It stood to reason. According to a government survey, South Korea alone had ten million people dealing with hair loss. And given that it mostly afflicted men, there was no getting around it.
It wasn't a precise survey, so the real number might have been lower, but several million was, at the very least, a fact.
"You don't have any Tangle?"
"Give me Tangle! Hurry up, shut your mouth, and take my money!"
"I'll pay whatever you want, just please, give me some Tangle!"
They had prepared in advance and released a generous supply, but the crowd hit so hard and so fast that Tangle sold out anyway. Starlight Wellbeing knew it, of course, and the moment each harvest came in they loaded it onto trucks and scattered it across the country. It was a plant with an enormous yield, and they expected things to stabilize before long.
The number of people with hair loss was fixed, but Tangle's harvest was increasing exponentially. Production was so high that if they expanded the farmland, they could even start looking overseas. There were even more people with hair loss abroad.
Then word began to spread, quietly, that Tangle had another effect, and the whole thing took on a different shape.
Several million people with hair loss were eating Tangle, so the word spread quickly.
Demand for Tangle was no longer limited to people with hair loss. It had sprung up among everyone struggling to grow their hair as well.