Tteokbokki, Fried Snacks, and Sundae
"Ahh, that hit the spot!"
"Me too! It's been forever since I had a proper ice cream!"
Jiyu and Yumi came out of the ice cream shop looking thoroughly satisfied. I'd enjoyed mine just as much, so I had nothing to complain about—though the ice cream seemed to have left my stomach a little empty.
Lunch was long behind us, and a child's body digested food at a ridiculous speed. Mine was already growling. It was nothing like an adult's metabolism, and I finally understood why kids seemed to go through life with something to eat permanently in hand.
I offered Jiyu and Yumi a way to fix the hunger.
"Hey, let's go to a snack bar! You're hungry, aren't you?"
It felt like an excellent choice. The moment they heard me, both of them nodded hard.
"Yes! Hana, I was starving!"
"Me too, me too!"
"Then the snack bar it is!"
I started sweeping the storefronts with a hawk's eye. This close to an elementary school, there had to be a snack bar somewhere. Elementary kids and snack-bar food were bound together by fate!
We didn't have to wander long before we found a good one, and Jiyu, Yumi, and I charged straight inside. School had let out a while ago, so there weren't many people in there. If we'd skipped Baskin-Robbins and come straight over, we might have run into kids our age, but too much time had passed since dismissal. Nothing to be done about it.
We settled into a decent spot and started flipping through the menu. Our minds were made up almost at once. At a place like this, the food was all of a kind anyway. Nobody walked into a snack bar hunting for a fancy steak.
"Hana, is it really okay to order this much?"
"Obviously. Just trust me! I'll eat every last bite!"
I declared it with absolute confidence. Jiyu and Yumi, however, were watching me with open doubt. Their eyes weren't what I'd expected, and mine twitched as I spoke.
"Wh... why are you looking at me like that...?"
Yumi must have caught the tremor in my voice. She sighed.
"Because I've got this feeling we're going to end up with a mountain of leftovers..."
If she knew how much room I'd been saving in my stomach today, she wouldn't dare say that!
We were still chatting when the ajumma who ran the place came over with her arms full. I let out a cheer as the dishes landed on the table. Sundae, tteokbokki, and fried snacks arrived one after another—the undisputed house combo, tteok-twi-sun. These were foods no child could possibly dislike. Among teenagers, they might as well have reigned as absolute gods.
"Dig in, dig in!"
"Whoa!"
I launched a concentrated assault on the sundae. Dipped in salt, it was almost unfairly good. This being Seoul, salt was all they had. People said Jeolla dipped it in chojang, a vinegary chili paste, and Gyeongsang in ssamjang, but the truth was salt—or a dunk in tteokbokki broth. No other seasoning was acceptable.
"Hana, slow down. You're going to make yourself sick!"
Yumi sounded uneasy as she watched how fast I was eating. I answered with a gesture that meant don't worry, thumping my chest with a fist as I started inhaling the food. It must have looked exactly like I was choking, because Jiyu brought me water.
Her timing, unfortunately, was just about perfect. I really did have something stuck in my throat, and I gulped the water she'd handed me as if it were the water of life. Once I'd managed to get it down, I dipped a fried gim-mari—a seaweed roll packed with glass noodles—into the tteokbokki sauce. The crunch on the outside and the generous noodles inside tasted like something else entirely. Fried food, as expected, belonged in tteokbokki broth.
That sauce was a miraculous harmony that went with absolutely everything. How had the person who invented tteokbokki created a seasoning this good? It was astonishing.
"Haaah..."
I'd been eating in a daze, and my stomach was already swelling. I looked at what remained on the table with pure regret. Just as Jiyu and Yumi had said, I couldn't finish it. It was so unfair. Back when I'd been a man, this amount would have been easy, but a child's stomach was absurdly small. I'd never imagined I wouldn't even be able to eat this much.
Jiyu and Yumi looked at me with the faces of people who had seen it coming.
"Knew it."
"Told you there'd be leftovers."
"Waaah!"
All I could do was pour my sorrow out onto the food I'd failed to finish.
Starlight Food was currently running farms across the whole of Gyeonggi Province. Operating a farm in Seoul itself would have meant costs too astronomical to bear. Letting the land sit idle and watching its price climb might well have earned more than growing crops and selling them.
The company's registered address was in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. The reason was nothing special. They hadn't had the money. As recently as last year, Starlight Food had been a mid-sized firm with annual revenue of only a few hundred billion won. The sole reason it possessed a building of its own was Kim Sehee's bloodline.
Without the properties she already held, they would have had to throw together a container office somewhere out of the way. Now, though, things were different. Annual revenue had long since climbed into the trillions of won. Operating profit was even more outrageous. It was hard to believe this was the growth of a company that hadn't even had a full year, and with more than ten thousand employees, it was already brushing the scale of a major corporation.
Add the subcontractors and the workers tied to the company by contract, and a staggering army took shape. They ran factories, but what Starlight Food mainly did was farm work. It was the kind of work that needed a great many people, and the number of full-time hires and day laborers they took on defied imagination.
To what extent? People registered with staffing agencies in Seoul were more inclined to head for a Starlight farm than for construction work putting up buildings. Work a Starlight farm and you got plenty of breaks, the meals were good, and—above all—nothing about it was dangerous.
A day's pay ran close to 200,000 won, and the work wasn't particularly hard. They treated laboring outdoors under a blazing sun as grueling work and gave a generous rest after every two hours. The farm jobs were simple enough that ten minutes of instruction let you do them like an expert.
In the first place, all you had to do was pick fruit. There was nothing difficult about it. That was why the people who showed up were mostly those chasing short-term cash, or freshmen who had only just entered university. The decisive point, though, was that you weren't going to suffer an industrial accident. You didn't risk dying on a farm the way you might putting up a building.
The collateral damage was that logistics centers couldn't find day laborers and were left looking miserable. With Starlight Food scooping up the temp workforce, day labor had become painfully hard to hire. Considering how hard those jobs were, it was only natural. Loading and unloading freight was thoroughly known across the internet as one of the most brutal jobs there was.
At any rate, Kim Sehee—who had, before she quite noticed, become the head of Korea's foremost agricultural company—had a worry these days. For the employees at headquarters, and for Hana, there was something she needed to do.
"Isn't it about time we moved headquarters?"
That was it. She wanted the company headquarters in Seoul. When the roads were jammed, the drive from Paju in Gyeonggi to Seoul took more than an hour. Watching Hana ride to school by car every day left her with an unpleasant feeling.
So she was considering a building as close to the school as possible. Hana was too well-behaved to say anything, but it made no sense for an elementary student to spend more than two hours a day just getting to school and back. And Kim Sehee herself was tired of commuting from Seoul out to Paju.
Of course, not long ago the idea would have been unthinkable. No money, and buy a building on some of the most expensive land in Seoul? Now that wasn't a problem at all. Money was overflowing.
"Then let's look into buildings in Seoul. As close as possible to Starlight Elementary, where Hana goes to school. So I can see her whenever I want."
The building they were using belonged to the Starlight Research Institute, but Kim Sehee owned every share of the institute anyway, so it hardly mattered whether the name on the door was research or food. All she needed was one building from which Hana could come and go in comfort.
The institute's staff could keep working where they were. She was thinking of moving Hana into whatever building Starlight Food bought, to live there. From Hana's side, there was nothing to lose. Living in a building near the school might well be better than a two-hour car commute every day. And a company of Starlight Food's weight really ought to own at least one building on the choicest land in Seoul.
Buy the closest one, and the drive to Starlight Elementary might not even take ten minutes. Kim Sehee would be glad of it, too, because she could see Hana's face often. As things stood, Hana was in the Starlight Research Institute building, and she couldn't see her whenever she wanted.