Tobacco
"Hana, wake up. Let's go get something to eat!"
It was the weekend, and still Maru had come into the company. Our office wasn't the sort of sweatshop that hauled people in on Saturdays and Sundays—though I couldn't speak for the other departments. Ever since I'd vanished in a whoosh the last time, they'd taken to posting guardians around me in a tight little net.
"I wanna sleep more..."
I buried my face in the pillow and turned her down. A glance at the clock told me it was only nine. A normal office worker might be up by six or seven, but I was an elementary schooler, and on weekends I didn't go to school. Back in my day we'd gone on Saturdays too. This generation, though, took every red-letter day off with military precision.
"Take that!"
"Ahaha!"
Maru's tickling dragged a laugh out of me anyway. She went straight for the armpits, and once that landed, sleep flew clean off me. I sat up with a sullen face. Her tickle attack had woken me completely.
"Let's go, Hana!"
Maru held out her hand. I ignored it and walked right past, and she trailed after me as she spoke.
"I'm sorry, Hana! Don't be mad~"
My heart was no swaying reed. Today, Maru would have to weather the full force of my sulk, and no one could say when I'd thaw. My grudges ran absurdly long.
"It's so good!"
The moment the meat hit my tongue, the juices spread and my mood soared. I had no idea where they found beef this delicious. It must have been raised on ingredients from heaven, because every chew slammed a whirlwind of flavor against my tongue.
Stranger still was how unnaturally fast my body recovered. A tooth had fallen out, and a new one had grown in completely in less than a month. Normally it took a long time for a baby tooth to fall out and a permanent one to come in.
The first tooth I'd lost already had a fully grown permanent tooth in its place, which was probably why eating didn't bother me at all. Ordinarily I would have been chewing around that hollow gap.
Even so, the feeling of a tooth growing in again was deeply strange. I'd been sure I would never grow another tooth for the rest of my life, and that was only natural. Once a person's permanent teeth came in, teeth simply did not grow again.
But I was the exception. Maybe because I'd been remade in a new body, I had baby teeth once more, and having new teeth felt good. My old ones had been full of cavities, probably because I never brushed often enough. This body's teeth, though, were spotless, and maybe that was why I was looking after them so carefully. Brushing after every meal had become part of the routine.
I'd tried to skip it, honestly, because it was a hassle. Then Bora had fixed me with a look so sharp I'd had no choice but to brush while on the verge of tears. Skip it, and she looked ready to drag me straight to hell.
I was eating with real enthusiasm when I realized something was wrong with a tooth. Chewing hard, I felt a pain in it. I'd been brushing diligently, and these were baby teeth, so it wasn't a cavity. I swallowed and wiggled the sore tooth with my fingers.
It wobbled badly. Maru was busy eating and didn't seem to have noticed.
"Hmmmm..."
Should I just not say anything? Even if the tooth fell out, hiding it and growing it by myself didn't sound half bad. Or raising it on my own! It absolutely was not because she'd woken me earlier. I wasn't that petty.
"Hm?"
Maru must have caught me wiggling it. She set down her spoon and looked at me.
"Hana, is your tooth loose?"
I started to say it wasn't, then just told the truth. If I tucked it away in a corner and tried to grow it myself, I'd obviously get caught. And pulling a tooth alone sounded incredibly painful, so I decided to take the help.
"Yeah. It's really wobbly, Maru."
"Aaah!"
Maru scooped me up at once. I stared at her, spoon still in hand.
"Maru, we should finish eating first!"
"We can eat later, Hana!"
Cradled in her arms, I was carried off somewhere. Probably the private clinic inside this building, where a doctor worked who looked after the employees' health and checked on mine at regular intervals.
Maybe because the place sat a little outside the city, they'd built a medical system of their own. Starlight Research Institute had money to burn, so hiring a single doctor was probably a piece of cake.
"Uuuugh...!"
Still held in Maru's arms, Hana arrived at the clinic inside the building. The room was stocked with just about every machine you could want, and teeth could be pulled there too.
Hana lay on the operating chair with her mouth stretched wide. She was putting on a brave face, but her eyes, swimming with pure terror, trembled. Pulling a tooth hurt. Clinging to Maru's hand, she got through it, then took an ice pack and pressed it to the empty spot.
It wasn't badly swollen, but nothing beat an ice pack for dulling the pain. Once the whole business was finished, the executives of Starlight Food gathered at the research institute. Assembling every time one of Hana's teeth came out had become an annual rite. Those teeth were gold itself, generating a staggering amount of added value.
Kim Sehee, bouncing Hana in her arms and pinching her cheeks, wondered what plant would come of this one. Hana's body held far too many secrets—not in a bad way, but in a good one.
Hana's plants grew at a dazzling speed anyway, so within a week it would be obvious what was sprouting from the tooth. Since she was already at the institute, Kim Sehee indulged herself and played with Hana until deep into the night.
In less than a week, the plant from Hana's tooth had fully grown, and they summoned a plant expert to identify it. Plenty of employees were curious what it would be this time, but the place where Hana's plants grew carried a high security clearance, so ordinary staff could not enter.
"This is..."
The expert, studying the plant, spoke at last. Plant forms were fixed things; even without a machine's help, they could be told apart well enough. What would this one be? A great many people wanted to know. It was a plant they had not seen in a long time.
"These are tobacco leaves."
"Tobacco leaves?"
The plant grown from Hana's tooth was confirmed to be tobacco, identified by comparing it against a range of photographs.
Tobacco was, for humanity, an object of love and hate. A product as harmful as a narcotic, it wrecked the health of countless people, and yet it had sunk deep into everyday life. Humanity and tobacco could no longer be pulled apart. An age without cigarettes was all but unimaginable.
Countless people died of the complications of smoking, and still few actually quit. Or rather, "quit" was not the right word. Ask most former smokers and they would say you did not quit tobacco—you endured it. The addiction ran that deep.
Worldwide, more than a billion people were steady smokers, and in South Korea the number exceeded ten million. Young people's smoking rates were falling as time went on, but the habit still held.
If these tobacco leaves could be commercialized, they would clearly become a cash cow with reliable sales. In Korea alone, tobacco already had a customer base of ten million, and because people consumed it every single day, there was no need to worry about stock piling up. If it came to that, they could always export. Cigarettes were a favored indulgence, welcomed in every country.
The researchers couldn't help thinking that, since the plant had come from Hana's tooth, it might not be bad for the body after all. Every plant from her teeth so far had either carried some special ability or tasted extraordinary.
So they harvested Hana's tobacco leaves and ran all kinds of experiments, gathering the test subjects the research required along the way. Few of the people working inside the institute smoked, and the more samples, the better. By now, no one even entertained the thought that the experiments might be dangerous.
And through those many trials, they arrived at a shocking result.