My Body Hurts
I meant to spring out of bed into the morning sunlight. A mighty, glorious morning!
But my body had no interest in matching that lively spirit. I lay there with my eyes wide open for a long while, seized by the feeling that something which ought not to come was already on its way.
"Ugh..."
When I forced myself upright, my head spun, as if someone had grabbed my skull and shaken it violently for minutes on end. I had no choice but to sink back into the mattress. I was too dizzy to walk, and pushing myself would only make it worse, so I surrendered to the bed.
I lay there in the morning sun for a long time, my mind flickering in and out until I could no longer tell whether I was awake or still asleep.
Hours might have passed. Then, as if the hour for work had finally come around, Bora opened my door and stepped inside.
"The kid who's at the office every morning isn't there... Hana, are you still asleep?"
She came in muttering to herself, dressed in a simple outfit for work. On any other day I would have shot upright and greeted her the moment she walked in, but today I couldn't manage even that.
"Bo... ra... hi..."
My throat was bone-dry. I had to wring the words out in a voice so hoarse it barely came, and even Bora seemed to sense that something was wrong. She took one look at me lying there and came running in a fluster. She was the sort who always lined her shoes up neatly; the fact that she had kicked them off at the entrance and rushed straight in told me just how urgent this felt to her.
"Hana! Are you okay?"
She closed the distance in long strides and pressed a hand to my forehead. It had to be burning like a live coal. When I had checked it myself earlier, it had been scorching.
"Oh my, oh my! Hana, your forehead's hot as fire!"
The moment she felt how high my temperature was, Bora showed me a panic I had never seen from her before. Watching her dart about in such a fluster, I found myself laughing despite how sick I was. I had just stumbled onto a side of her I hadn't known existed.
She moved fast, hurried out, and I heard her running down the hall. A moment later she was back with a towel and a thermometer.
"Hana, mind if I take your temperature real quick?"
She laid a towel she had soaked in cold water across my forehead and slipped the thermometer into my ear. The ticklish touch of it pulled a helpless little giggle out of me.
But whether my condition was truly worsening, or whether having Bora beside me had simply let the tension drain away, the pain kept deepening.
Cough. Cough.
A cough I never usually had escaped me. With a beep the reading finished, and Bora drew the thermometer from my ear and glanced at the number.
"Bora, how many degrees am I?"
"Uh... huh? Hana, it's not that high."
Her expression seemed to shift in a strange way... and yet, just as she said, my temperature didn't appear to be all that high. Even so, the worse the coughing grew, the worse my body felt.
"Bora... I'm cold..."
Even under the blanket, it was as if I were standing between buildings in the dead of winter with the wind ripping straight through me.
"Just a second... wait..."
With that, she peeled away the towel covering my forehead. She laid a hand on my brow again and flinched, startled. Was I still that hot?
She took the towel and went back out. It must have warmed through, and she was going to rinse it in cold water again.
The moment the cold cloth left my forehead, a violent chill seized me. My brow burned, but everything below my neck was freezing.
Tremble. Tremble.
Cold sweat poured down my whole body, and even buried under the blanket I felt so cold that tears streamed down my face. All I wanted was for someone to come and save me, fast.
"Bora! Haru! Baldy!"
I called the names of the subordinates from the office I had grown close to, and felt the world in front of my eyes go black.
As I slipped under, I surfaced now and then just long enough to feel someone kneading my body and swapping out the towel on my forehead. Probably Bora. Or Haru.
The momentum behind Starlight Green Tea was anything but ordinary. You could almost have called it a frenzy.
The moment a shipment landed at a supermarket or a convenience store, it sold out in under a minute.
Ordinarily a store would keep reserve stock in the back, but no supermarket or convenience store had any reason to warehouse Starlight Green Tea. The second it went on the shelf it vanished, so there was no point leaving it in storage. There had even been an incident where a customer discovered a case that had been tucked into the stockroom and all hell broke loose, so managers made a habit of putting the tea straight on display the moment it arrived. Once the price went up, this kind of chaos wouldn't happen anyway. They treated it as one last bit of fuss and got on with the work.
Of course, it wasn't only the distributors. Retailers hoarding Starlight Green Tea was just as common. The moment the product came in, they would scan the barcode, mark it sold, and quietly set those bottles aside somewhere else. Sell them next month and you could pocket nearly twenty times the margin. Not doing it would have been the foolish move.
And so, from the distributors on down to the people behind the register, everyone was of one mind, busily stockpiling Starlight Green Tea, each of them dreaming of a future bright as gold.
Even in the middle of all that, the Starlight Food factory kept running — around the clock, day and night, just to meet the volume.
"Chief, there's a problem on green tea production line two."
"What? It picks now to break down, when we're slammed the hardest?"
"Tell me about it."
"Machines and wives — both of them nothing but hard to handle. You never know when they'll throw a fit!"
The employee who had brought word of the breakdown hadn't known much about the plant manager's wife, but he was starting to get the picture. The two of them were not on good terms.
The plant manager grumbled the whole way to the line. Before Starlight Green Tea launched, the factory had been a fairly easygoing place. Now it was a different world entirely.
The old Starlight plant could meet everything the market asked for on an eight-hour day. These days the tea was selling so well they had to run the factory from morning to night just to barely keep up. It was because the Starlight Food plant itself had always been small. If the company had already been doing well before the tea came out, it could have absorbed this kind of volume without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, that had not been the case.
He didn't know the exact figures, but Starlight Green Tea probably accounted for something like ninety percent of Starlight Food's sales. Hell, call it ninety-nine. Every other product was clinging to the market with nothing but an oxygen tank.
"Chief, it's great that Starlight Green Tea sells so well, but what happens to our plant if we ever can't make it?"
"Right. Far as I know, the ingredients get delivered fresh every morning, same day. If something happened, I don't even want to think about it."
"I heard they don't turn all of it into tea — that they set some aside as a reserve..."
The plant manager and his subordinate didn't know exactly how the tea was made, but they had a rough idea. Every morning, under tight security, a delivery arrived, and the tea was made from whatever was sealed inside it.
And that material was small enough for a single person to carry with ease. If the plant manager had to guess, he would have said it was something like the fur of some creature. The way saber-tiger mane worked — a raid byproduct that sold well through the Starlight Guild — this was probably the same kind of ingredient.
Having a fair guess at what went into Starlight Green Tea, the plant manager knew just how absurd the product was.
The material cost sat infinitely close to zero, and the price was five thousand won. He would have bet that no product anywhere in the country could beat Starlight Green Tea's net profit. Factory costs, labor, materials — subtract all of it and there would still be plenty left over. He had even heard they only really advertised at the start and barely bothered after that. Word of mouth spread so well they didn't need to.
In a food business where ingredient costs usually ate most of the margin, no product posted a net like this. Nearly two billion won a day in tea revenue, and not a single other thing Starlight Food sold came anywhere close. They probably couldn't even catch the dust off its heels. Nothing else the company sold did anywhere near that well.
"All we have to do is keep the plant running. The rest, the people upstairs will handle. Our job is to keep the production line moving. No need to think about anything else."
"Still, I can't help worrying what happens if the ingredient for Starlight Green Tea vanishes all at once..."
"When that day comes, we'll think about it then. Don't fret over something that isn't going to happen. Think about the obstacle in front of us. The line's down, and we can't even handle that properly."
"Yeah. That's true."