The First Button, Fastened Wrong
The engine hummed as Kim Sehee drove toward the Starlight Research Institute. Morning had already passed, and the roads were quiet.
Nothing delayed her. She reached the institute without a single interruption. A personal driver would have been an extravagance. Business might be looking up these days, but until now the company had known nothing but losses, and she had lived with her belt pulled tight.
She had no secretary, either. Every appointment on the calendar was one she had set herself. The factory's fortunes had improved enough that she had resolved to hire one, yet arranging her own schedule had become such a habit that she still couldn't feel the need.
Perhaps that was why Starlight Food looked hardly any different for her being there. Set beside the other great food conglomerates, it seemed slipshod and half-finished. She could almost believe a reputable mid-sized firm would put them to shame.
"Their facilities are better than ours..."
That was Kim Sehee's first impression, stepping onto the grounds of the Starlight Research Institute. Compared with Starlight Food and its factory, the institute—three buildings in all, an office block, a laboratory, and an exhibition hall—was not lavish, yet it had the look of a place that had been properly put together.
Starlight Food did not even have an office yet. The difference was night and day, but it was also inevitable: a research institute did not have to prove itself in the market, and a food business did.
For the first time in a long while she had left her work clothes behind and dressed in a crisp suit. She headed inside. She had sent word ahead, so the guards made no move to stop her.
Today she meant to meet the living thing that supplied hair to her factory. No one had ever told her what it looked like, and she had decided to see the real article for herself. To her surprise, the institute had answered that she should come to the office building. Wasn't the creature kept at the laboratory? She chose to take it as a request that she pay her respects first. Once they had met, the rest would surely follow.
Inside, she worked the elevator and rose toward the floor she wanted. The car was glass, and the view outside came through clear.
Someday...
Someday, she wanted a building like this of her own to work in. An office left sitting awkwardly beside the factory was not a sight anyone would be proud of.
No one came out to receive her, which suggested the institute's own systems were not especially well run. If the president of Starlight Guild headquarters had arrived, people would have come running barefoot, but Kim Sehee was clear-eyed enough to know she was not of that rank. Comparing herself to him would have been rude in the first place. She was someone who had been cast out to the margins.
The elevator climbed, little by little, and at last reached her floor. A chime sounded, and the doors slid open.
What greeted her was not the bustle of a busy office. A corridor so plush it might as well have been laid with red carpet welcomed her instead, and a child stood ahead of her, a piece of candy in her mouth, staring straight at Kim Sehee.
A researcher's daughter?
The hair and the eyes were extraordinarily unusual, but surely no one would be mad enough to keep that creature in the headquarters building. Kim Sehee kept her thoughts inside the bounds of common sense. She was about to ask the girl where Researcher Kim Bora was, but the child with the candy spoke first.
"Who are you, auntie?"
A single sentence, and it hit far too hard. For Kim Sehee—an unmarried woman only just into her thirties—the blow was brutal. She already had a complex about growing older, and however old she might look, she had never imagined she had reached the point of being mistaken for an auntie.
Still, wasn't it said that a child's innocent eyes saw the truth more clearly than anyone's? The little girl who had called her auntie was being cheeky, so Kim Sehee crouched down and seized both of her cheeks, stretching them out.
"You little rascal. You're supposed to call me big sister, not auntie."
"Mmph—ehhh..."
The cheeks were so soft it was addictive. They stretched like glutinous rice cakes, and Kim Sehee tugged them this way and that, setting about brainwashing the child into understanding that she was not an auntie.
Then, from far down the corridor, someone came rushing over in a panic.
"Hana, are you all right!?"
So the child's name was Hana. Something flickered through Kim Sehee's mind. Hadn't the creature that produced the ingredient for that green tea also been called Hana...?
Her hands stopped. She could only stare at Hana, blank.
First impressions mattered, and she had the distinct feeling she had gotten this one wrong. She eased her fingers from the cheeks she had been pulling and braced herself to drop to her knees.
Talk had turned to Starlight Green Tea, the very thing currently setting the internet on fire.
The effects were not, broadly speaking, all that extraordinary, but they lingered in a quiet way, and even setting that aside, the tea itself simply tasted too good. Most people were not drinking it as a buff to wring more strength out of their bodies. They drank it to enjoy the fragrance and the flavor of green tea for its own sake. The effects were slight, in any case.
Once Starlight Green Tea made its shocking jump to five thousand won a pack, though, people found themselves drinking less of it than before. Leave aside those who had never drunk green tea at all, and nearly everyone else could be said to have favored Starlight Green Tea—yet after the price went up, the number of people limiting themselves to a single cup a day rose sharply. At the old price they would have drunk it like water. The new one made that difficult.
In exchange, hoarding and reselling fell off just as sharply, because fewer people were hunting for the tea. Even so, most of what left the factory still sold within a week.
Lately, though, it had begun selling out again. Either the supply really had grown thin, or someone in the middle was hoarding once more.
The amount of Starlight Green Tea on the market had begun to plunge so sharply that it called the old frenzy back to mind. Part of it was that Starlight Food itself had reduced the volume it shipped.
Consumers decided the shortage was tourists from abroad buying the tea up in bulk—above all, visitors from the nearby countries of China and Japan. Travelers from farther off, after all, did not mainly drink tea.
The hotter-tempered among them went further and called Starlight Food directly to complain. Most of what they got back was a canned reply. Owing to circumstances at the company... things would improve before long... Consumers were not inclined to swallow that quietly.
Amid a market boiling over, the worries of Starlight Food's executives only deepened.
In a meeting held without Kim Sehee, one of the executives spoke.
"With output cut in half, the sweep through the market is getting worse. We deliberately metered the supply to stop the hoarding, but it had no effect at all."
Starlight Green Tea had blown up in so short a time that the company had painfully few ways to prepare for a shortage like this. Selling too gleefully on the strength of a fine ingredient had come back as a boomerang. It was like gulping seawater for a thirst.
The factory manager spoke from beside him.
"If this isn't resolved within the week, we may have to halt the plant. That's about all the hair that goes into Starlight Green Tea we have left."
Park Jeontae, the vice president, could only let out a low groan as the reports of defeat came flooding in.
Only a week ago the mood had been good, and now all of that felt like a dream. President Kim Sehee had gone to the institute herself, so they could do nothing but hope she would return with good news. Unfortunately, there was not a single thing Starlight Food's headquarters could do from here. Like cheerleaders, they could only shout encouragement from the sidelines.
"For now, all we can do is wring out every last drop. I'll have to ask you to keep at it a little longer, and shipments need to stay at the bare minimum. More than the market's reaction, what matters is not getting hit with penalty fees."
Park Jeontae knew the customers' loyalty to the tea ran deep, and so he decided they would ship only as much as would keep the company from taking a loss.