Studying Is Hard
The hour that made my head hurt more than any other was closing in. Study time. Haru came to my room with her arms full of something that looked an awful lot like textbooks.
I didn't want to study, so I had burrowed into the bed, but she found me anyway—don't ask me how—and dragged me straight to the desk. I thrashed and kicked for all I was worth. It did no good. With a firm little hup, I was planted in the chair whether I liked it or not.
"I don't wanna study..."
"Hana! Studying every single day is important. If you don't want to grow up into a useless person once you're out in the world, studying is not optional!"
Was that true...? Listening to Haru hold forth on the necessity of education, I had to admit it sounded strangely convincing. Moved by her words, I squared my little shoulders and resolved to study with all my might.
"All right, then. We'll start with dictation."
"Can't we do math first...?"
"It's Korean, English, then math, in that order. You're a good girl, Hana, so you'll sit quietly and listen to all of it, won't you?"
"Ugh... okay..."
Of all things, it had to be dictation—the one subject I trusted least. Tense, I waited to see what kind of problem Haru would set in front of me.
The old me would have had a perfect score already in the bag. Ever since I had been reborn in this body, though, something about my head felt off. Things I was certain I used to know kept tangling themselves into knots.
Still, I was bright enough. A little studying, and I was sure I'd be fine. I'll have you know I used to be smart!
"All right. These dictation lines aren't hard, so you can handle them, can't you?"
"Yeah!"
I closed my small hand around the pencil and answered as if confidence were overflowing. She wouldn't give me anything difficult. All I had to do was write down exactly what Haru said, and nothing could go wrong.
Haru looked at the book and spoke slowly, each syllable crisp and clear. Her enunciation was so clean it reminded me of the announcers I used to hear during exams, back in the old days.
"Hana went home today and ate lots and lots of food."
I smiled to myself and took down what she had said, perfectly. I had enough control now that I no longer scrawled anything like those strange ancient characters from before.
Of course, if I let my mind wander while I wrote, the ancient script came right back. Right now, though, I was in a state of absolute focus, so a slip like that was out of the question.
The problem was so easy I had to fight down a yawn that kept trying to escape. Haru really did underestimate me, handing over a dictation exercise fit for an elementary schooler. I could already see it, vivid as anything: me, later, brandishing a perfect score.
"All done?"
"Yeah. I wrote every single word you said, neat and clear, without one mistake."
"Oh? Then I'll give you the next one."
"Okay!"
Lee Haru never lifted her eyes from the book. She kept reading the elementary dictation sentences aloud, one after another, straight off the page.
I listened and copied each one down cleanly. The pencil snapped partway through, but there was a sharpener, so it hardly mattered.
Just as I'd thought, elementary dictation was far too easy. She read five sentences in all, and I got every one of them into the notebook without missing a single letter. When the page was full, I carried it over to Haru.
No need to even look. All five are right.
Dictation for elementary schoolers was nothing to me. If they wanted to rattle me, they'd have to bring out the kind of problems that showed up on television.
I sat in the chair with my nose in the air while Haru bent over my notebook, grading with fierce concentration.
But... was there even anything to grade?
It had to be a perfect score. There was nothing to mark. And yet her pen never stopped, dancing wildly all over the page.
I waited a little while. When she seemed to be finished, she set the pen down and spoke.
"You got one right...?"
"One...?"
That couldn't be. I snatched up the graded notebook and the answer sheet and compared them every which way.
Just as Haru had said, a rain of red marks had fallen across my page. I couldn't believe it. Eyes wide, I checked the answer key against what I had written—but there wasn't a single place where her grading was wrong.
"It's all right. You're learning another world's language for the first time, and this is already genius-level, you know?"
"Really?"
"Of course it is~"
The moment I heard that, I puffed up with pride. The problems had definitely been hard, so getting even one right was something. I held my chest high, perfectly justified.
"Then on to the next one~"
"Hnnn..."
Her very next words left me wilted all over again. Korean really was difficult.
"I'll step out for a moment. Please keep the discussion going."
Kim Sehee caught the vice president's eye and called them out with her. They had been debating the price to no particular end, and with both the president and the vice president still in the room, she suspected everyone else would only be watching their faces.
Out in the hall, she drew two coffees from the vending machine, passed one to the vice president, and asked, "What do you think?"
"I agree that we should raise the price. As for how much, though, I think both arguments are fair. Raising it a great deal and raising it only a little each have their strengths and weaknesses, so it feels a bit hasty to declare that one side is simply right."
"If we raise it too far, though, it stops being a product for ordinary people. No matter how good Starlight Green Tea is, someone who isn't earning—or someone making an average monthly wage—isn't going to buy tea that costs ten thousand won. It's an everyday indulgence. No one is going to pay ten thousand won every single time they drink it."
"That's true."
"Our output is limited, so even if only the wealthy drink it, we can still move the volume we have. What I wonder is later, when we're producing much more. Will consumers still buy our tea at a high price? That's the question, as I see it."
"It sounds as if you've already given the price some thought."
The vice president smiled faintly. "I think ten thousand won is a little much. Five or six thousand strikes me as reasonable. Look at the cafés on the street—that's about what they charge for coffee. This would only be that, swapped over to tea."
"You're right. You've been at this far longer than I have. I only just came into Starlight Food, so I'll follow your judgment. Your sense for that side of things is better than mine."
They talked in the corridor for several dozen minutes, stood a little longer, and then went back into the conference room.
She had expected to walk in on raised voices and a debate still in full swing. Instead the room had already settled, more or less; whatever decision had been reached, no one was shouting anymore.
"We've concluded that five thousand won is the appropriate price for our Starlight Green Tea."
Kim Sehee listened as one of the executives spoke. They must have come to an agreement, because it seemed the group had decided that a single person would present it.
"Yes. Please go on."
"Green tea isn't a daily necessity, so we had a free hand in setting the price, and choosing a number wasn't an enormous dilemma in itself. The real worry was how high we could push it."
"I see."
"We felt the existing price of three hundred won was absurdly cheap next to what Starlight Green Tea actually does. After the executive team discussed it, this is the figure we settled on—a price that won't shrink the tea-bag market, while protecting our share of it as far as we can."
"Couldn't we raise it to seven or eight thousand?"
"It's already gone up nearly twentyfold. If we push it that high, we expect consumers will pull back. And Starlight Green Tea's output is limited only for now. Once the volume explodes later on, we could just as easily end up with tea left sitting unsold."
"I see."
Sehee agreed readily with the proposal the executives had put forward. One look at the vice president's face told her the figure lined up, more or less, with what they had had in mind.
The moment she consented in a single stroke, the executives let out breaths of relief.
"Then we'll pass it along right away."
"Thank you. I appreciate the work."
The moment Starlight Food made its sweeping price increase public, the streets went mad.
When cigarettes had gone up by two thousand won, the hoarding had been fierce enough. The gale now tearing through the market over Starlight Green Tea made that look like nothing.
"One per person! One each!"
Walk into any mart and you found the same sight: a line stretching out the door. The astonishing part was that every single person in those lines had come for Starlight Green Tea.
Word that a three-thousand-won box of ten would turn into fifty thousand won next month was enough to make eyes go wide from one end of the country to the other. Put bluntly, buy one box a day, sit on ten of them until next month, and you could clear four hundred and seventy thousand won.
The market was, quite literally, pandemonium.