Housewarming Party
"Come on, let's go in, Hana!"
"Okay!"
Maru and I stepped into the newly built tower together. It was plainly, unmistakably better than the building we had left behind, and that was only inevitable. A place that had barely finished going up was bound to outshine one that had stood for decades. People loved to mutter about shoddy construction these days, but no one was going to throw a tower this size together like that.
I had heard that when they built something on this scale, they did the work properly. I hadn't watched the construction with my own eyes, so I couldn't be certain—but still, it had to be better than most buildings, didn't it?
"Welcome."
The security guard greeted us. The first floor was in the middle of a major renovation, all to make room for a restaurant worth eating at, and half the ground floor looked as if it would become dining space. Was there any other building that put a restaurant this enormous downstairs? Other towers had places that served food, of course, but none of them would turn the space into something as lavish as a high-end buffet the way we were.
"Hello~"
I offered the guard a greeting as we went in. He was the one watching over our building, so there was every reason to be polite. And if I ever meant to slip out of the tower unnoticed later, it mattered that I bank a little goodwill now.
He seemed to know my face too, waving as he welcomed us. Most likely every employee in the company knew who I was. At Starlight Foods, I was the heart of the whole thing. You could call it an inflated sense of my own importance, but it was a fact. I had heard that without me, Starlight Foods would go under in a day.
I had planted myself in the middle of the lobby and was turning in a slow circle when Maru looked over at me.
"Hana, what are you doing?"
I had been here once before, and the lobby had still stolen my heart. Seeing the plants kept so carefully put me at ease. I decided I would have to tell the president later to bring in even more of them.
"Coming!"
Now that I thought about it, I felt a pang over the greenhouse where I had farmed at the old building. I had heard they spent a great deal of money putting it up... Even so, it wasn't a problem. If I never went back, the plants there would lose their strength and wilt away, but I meant to visit steadily, at least once a week. It wasn't even that far from here.
An hour by car was more than enough. Rather than riding two hours every day to school and back the way I used to, going to the old building myself once a week was far more comfortable. Thinking that over, I stepped into the elevator. My room was on the tenth floor, just as before.
As we shot upward I turned to look out behind us, and the city of Seoul lay spread below. The elevator was walled in something like glass, so the view outside was perfectly clear. I plastered myself against it and stared. The old building had never offered a sight like this.
There had been nothing but mountains and trees. I had never seen buildings packed so tight it looked like SimCity. Gazing out at the Han River running wide and bright, I couldn't help but marvel. I had never imagined owning a building with a Han River view, and now that I did, the feeling went deep.
People joked that the only way an ordinary person got a Han River view was to walk into the river themselves—and here I was, ten years old, with one of my own. The apartment I had bought before had shown the river too, but never this open, never this clear.
The moment the elevator reached the tenth floor, the doors opened, and I marched straight out. Maru had been sneaking glances at her phone the whole time, hardly saying a word. I wanted to ask why she kept looking at it. Checking her phone was her own business, but she had been acting like someone with a pursuer at her heels. It wasn't like Maru at all.
"Haa... Hana, shall we stop by the office first?"
"Huh? I was going to my room first."
"Come on, don't be like that~"
She asked so pleadingly that I went into the office. I opened the door. I still couldn't see why she was so fixated on the place. A moment later, I could.
Pop!
"Congratulations on Hana's move~"
"Waaaaah~"
The office staff were holding up an enormous cake and setting off party poppers. I shrieked in surprise for an instant, and then I caught on.
"Whoa!"
I broke into a bright smile and blew out the candles on the cake. Now I understood what Maru had been doing all along. I threw myself into the little event the employees had prepared. Living among a crowd really was more fun than living alone.
Kim Jeongchil struck a light and touched it to his cigarette. Then he drew in a long, deep breath.
"Khhh..."
It was his first smoke in two days, and it was glorious. Whether that was simply the character of this cigarette or not, the flavor was strong. Set beside what he used to smoke, this was far better. No wonder he had taken such a liking to Starlight Cigarettes. He was convinced the time had come to switch for good.
Cigarettes weren't good for the body, of course, but these Starlight Cigarettes felt different somehow. The advertisements said they contained neither chemicals nor toxic substances, didn't they? If you were going to smoke anyway, a healthier cigarette like this was much the better choice. The nicotine inside still wasn't good for you, of course. It constricted the blood vessels and brought on other complications besides.
The moment he finished one, he couldn't help drawing another straight from the pack. Maybe because it had been so long, the smoke sank into him all too easily. The looks from the people around him were less than kind. Here he was in a hospital gown, smoking. The spot sat a little ways off from the hospital, and no one else in a patient's clothes was out here with a cigarette.
Kim Jeongchil smoked a while longer, without much care, then returned to his room. Perhaps it was the nicotine recharge after so long, but his mind felt taut and humming. The day of his surgery wasn't far off, and he seemed to have found himself a good cigarette.
Kim Jeongchil came through his lung cancer surgery with success. The doctor called it a very gentle cancer. There was no such thing as a kind cancer or a cruel one, and yet it hadn't metastasized, and no one had said it sat in any truly fatal place.
Cases like his were spreading all across the country—stories of lung cancer patients whose operations ended in success. Even people whose disease had advanced a great deal were coming through surgery intact. Patients whose cancer had progressed quite far were returning to ordinary life almost at once, without serious aftereffects. A long convalescence in a hospital bed was supposed to be the normal course.
At first everyone wrote it off as luck. When it kept happening, it stopped being luck. The hospitals managed to find one thing the lung cancer patients had in common. Not every person who smoked came down with lung cancer. Some developed it for entirely other reasons.
But the ones whose surgeries ended in success were smokers devoted to Starlight Cigarettes. Patients who didn't smoke them—who didn't smoke at all in daily life—showed the same results as before. Severe aftereffects, and a long recovery.
In a sense, word began to spread among the patients that these Starlight Cigarettes helped with lung cancer surgery. The doctors still told people not to smoke something so dangerous to the lungs, since nothing had been confirmed, but even they were starting to guess, dimly, at what the cigarettes could do.
The absurd claim that cigarettes were good for lung cancer spread all the way through the cancer forums.
On the boards that dealt mainly with lung cancer, people were going so far as to write this:
Ask a hospital whether Starlight Cigarettes were good for lung cancer, and the answer came back along the lines of "Since when is a cigarette good for you?" But the results refused to lie.
It got so bad that people even started hoarding Starlight Cigarettes. They tasted good, and they held neither toxic substances nor chemical additives. Smokers had no reason to dislike them.