Back to School
Summer vacation was over, and that was that. I could not bring myself to accept this cruel reality. It felt as if hardly any time had passed at all, and already the break was finished.
Of course, a large part of it was that I had spent the vacation in another world. I had burned nearly a whole month there. And an elementary school break was nothing like a university one. Set beside a college vacation, it was maybe half as long. This was a day for missing my university years. I stayed buried in bed, denying reality, but it was not long before Maru came in.
"Hana, you've got to go to school."
"Waaah!"
Once Maru stepped into the room, I had no choice but to burst into tears. It was not that I hated going to school. My body and my mind simply refused to agree with each other. All vacation I had slept until nine every morning, and now I was supposed to be up at seven. It was brutal. Even now, sleep kept drifting over me.
Maru, however, was merciless. She scooped me up, quilt and all, and headed for the bathroom. I kicked and flailed, but there was no escaping her arms. I was a pitiful little creature with legs too short to do any good. She set me down in the bathroom and started washing me, and all I could do was submit to her hands.
The one mercy was that she only washed my hair. If she had tried to scrub the rest of me, I would have made a huge fuss and told her to stop. I was perfectly capable of bathing on my own. We had bathed together at the start, but there was no need for that anymore. I was used to this body now.
"Let's go eat, Hana."
Once I was washed and out, Maru took my hand and led me off to breakfast. That, at least, was nice. I did not have to lift a finger. Go down to the first floor, and a delicious meal was already waiting. Even this early, the dining hall was busy with staff hurrying back and forth. I could not begin to imagine how early the people who worked there had to clock in. Come down around seven, and the tables were already full of good food.
I knew they worked in two shifts. Honestly, asking the same people to prep breakfast and then lunch and dinner on top of it would have been close to abuse. So the morning crew clocked out around lunch, and the people who came in around lunch worked through dinner and then went home. It might have looked like a waste of money, but the Starlight Research Institute's budget was overflowing anyway, so it hardly mattered.
And I would never have stood for seeing them worked like that. I wanted the people at our company to do their jobs in comfort and make plenty of money. In a way, they were the benefactors who had saved me from inside the gate. I lived off them now, but if I had not been pulled out of that gate in a rescue that was closer to an abduction, there was no telling what the monsters in there might have done to me. The inside of a gate was a place crawling with monsters of terrifying power.
"Nom!"
With those thoughts in mind, I ate with all my heart. Maru watched me enjoy the food, looking thoroughly pleased. It felt a little like being treated as a child, but I was a third-grader, so the treatment seemed about right. Judging by appearances alone, I was a child.
After breakfast I went back up to the tenth floor and changed. Then, all floppy and limp, I took Maru's hand and went down again. It was time to get in the car and go to school. Summer vacation was over, and yet the world outside was still deep in a heat wave. How nice it would be, I thought, if summer break simply lasted longer, and school started again only once the weather had cooled a little.
"So hooot..."
"Just hang on a little, Hana. I'll blast the air-conditioning once we're in the car."
I dragged my melting body into the car. Inside, it was even hotter.
"Waaah, it's too hot!"
That was only to be expected. The car had been parked under a blazing sun. It would have been strange if it were not hot. Maru took one look at me and switched the air-conditioning on at once. A few minutes later, the air inside had gone cool. What a relief. If cars did not have air-conditioning, I hated to imagine what would happen. In the middle of summer, with nothing but the windows down and no AC, a person would go soft and melt clean away.
"Let's go!"
With summer vacation over, my heart thumped at the thought of seeing Jiyu and Yumi. Watching how much my friends had changed over the break was a pleasure all its own.
Walmart.
It was a global behemoth, vast beyond measure, with America's retail industry clenched in its fist. The way even the most forgotten back roads of Korea still had a Notteria burger joint, you could find a Walmart standing in places where people were scarce and traffic was thinner still.
Among every company on earth, it ranked first in both revenue and employment. In a sense, it was the most successful retail company on the planet. Lately, though, in this transitional age when business was shifting from physical stores to online ones, a rival had appeared.
A formidable competitor called Amazon. From an American's point of view, the arrival of a rival was something to welcome. The harder the two companies competed, the cheaper a person could buy things. That was good for consumers. For Walmart, it was not a welcome situation at all.
It was around then that Walmart heard a rumor: a company in Korea had recently begun selling a most unusual fruit. Walmart operated across the whole world, but it had no interest in a small market like Korea. Even so, checking was the sensible thing to do. They had meant to send someone next year, but the moment word spread that the fruit could overcome baldness, they dispatched staff at once.
"How's Amazon looking?"
"They're probably sniffing around too, don't you think? But they won't be faster than we are. If we hadn't heard that this Tangle, the one that's supposed to be good for hair loss, had come out, we'd have shown up sometime next year ourselves."
Layla held a Tangle in her hand. Inside the glass jar, she could see it packed full of tiny jelly-like pieces. Eat one of those jellies a day, and hair would grow. It was an extraordinarily precious medicine. Officially it was handled as a fruit, but looking at the miracle Tangle performed, calling it medicine rather than fruit would not have been out of line.
"Lucky for us. At least we don't have to worry about losing Tangle to that greedy Amazon."
James tried to picture Tangle falling into Amazon's hands. He would want it badly enough to go down on his knees. And then he would suffer the humiliation of standing at a competitor's counter, Tangle in hand, and paying for it. So long as the stuff grew hair, it was a fight James could never win.
"We'll have to see about that. The owner of Starlight Food doesn't seem especially hungry for control of the group, but you never know."
After arriving in Korea, Layla had mapped out Starlight Group's share structure and a rough picture of the family relationships. However well Starlight Group did in Korea, on a global scale only Starlight Electronics sat anywhere near the top ten, and the rest of the companies fell outside the top hundred. Stretch across the world, and monstrous corporations were simply everywhere. There was no helping it. Korea was a small market of fifty million people, and the existence of North Korea above it meant the business carried risk. The country lived on exports, but lately the minimum wage had risen and labor costs with it, and it was slowly becoming a setting sun.
You could think of it as a ship taking a slow beating from cheap-labor goods out of China or Southeast Asia, and gradually going under. It was an inevitable phenomenon. Korea itself had grown on cheap labor, after all.
"Kim Sehee is the sixth daughter, you said?"
"That's right. Below her, the only one left is the youngest, President Kim Semin. And while she is attached to Starlight Food, looking at Starlight Group as a whole, she doesn't seem to have any desire to become chairman. She doesn't hold all that much of the group's stock, either. If anything, the real estate she took in place of shares comes to more."
"Then this could get a little difficult..."
Put bluntly, Kim Sehee had no ambition to rule the group, so if a negotiation went sour she could simply walk away. A President Kim Sehee who wanted nothing from the group was someone with essentially no weakness. Then Layla brought him a piece of information he had not expected.
"They say President Kim Sehee has a child she adores. Nothing's been confirmed in detail, but there's information that she likes the kid enough to come and go from the Starlight Research Institute every day. It's not certain, of course."
Hearing that, James smiled a sinister smile.
"If the negotiations don't work... what if we just kidnapped the child?"
Layla's face went dead serious at her superior's joke.
"Don't joke about that."
"When you shut me down that coldly, it rather hurts my feelings."
James was thinking that Layla, subordinate or not, was a difficult woman to handle.