Branching into a Cattle Ranch?
I slung my bag over my shoulder and wandered here and there. Out on the busy main road, I could feel the glances sliding over me. It had to be the hair. The color was simply too strange.
Green hair. I doubted there was another person alive who had it. People preferred blond, as a rule, and as far as I knew almost nobody actually wanted green. By the time I started up the hill toward the elementary school, I could feel how little stamina I had.
It was a slope meant to be driven, and climbing it on my own two legs left me short of breath. Struggling on a hill like this...! Maybe I really would have to take up some secret training later. With stamina like mine, I couldn't do a thing.
Even so, I tossed my usual wave to the sturdy security guards and made it into the classroom. The moment I stepped inside, the bustle of children washed over me.
Jiyu's and Yumi's voices were somewhere in the mix.
"Hana, you're here?"
"Yeah! Hi!"
I returned their greetings and dropped into my chair, then pulled out the snacks I'd brought today. My schoolbag wasn't the sort of bag you put books in. It was a snack bag, packed with snacks. If Hansel and Gretel ever laid eyes on it, they'd drool and scheme to make off with it.
I'd long since taken to leaving my textbooks in the locker at the back. There was no reason at all to haul heavy books around and make my shoulders ache. Textbooks still came out these days, but pads were replacing them, and the value of paper books had fallen even further.
"Whoa!"
"Snacks! Snacks!"
Jiyu's and Yumi's eyes lit up at what I'd produced, and they dragged their chairs over. I tore the packaging completely apart so they could eat without any fuss. For a second I failed to control my strength and nearly flung the snacks into the air.
"It's good!"
"Snacks you bring really are the best!"
I didn't pay much mind to what Jiyu said. Put like that, I felt as if I were turning into a golden goblin who went around hauling snacks. Anyway, as we chatted, the cafeteria came up. The kids' topics were all over the place, but lately the one that kept returning was the cafeteria.
"They say the cafeteria opens today?"
"For real? Thank goodness. I'm so sick of packed lunches I can't eat another bite."
"Me too... At first the tteokgalbi and the meat were delicious, but once you keep eating them it's like chewing on a tire."
I'd still thought they tasted pretty good. Kids just seemed to have short patience. I could have happily gone on eating them for another week.
"Instead of class today we're going on a cafeteria tour. I wish it were time already!"
"All at once?"
"No. They're splitting it up by grade."
"That's a relief. If the whole school stampeded in together, it'd be a mess."
My eyes lit up at what Jiyu and Yumi were saying. The chairman had mentioned it too, and I wanted to see the renovated cafeteria as soon as I could. I remembered her telling me to look forward to it. That confident look of hers had me expecting something good.
"Third grade goes at one, they said?"
"Yeah?"
"From noon on, one grade every thirty minutes."
"Then the sixth graders won't eat until after two? They must be starving."
"Yeah."
Our grade had landed on a decent time. Whether the chairman had arranged that on purpose, I couldn't say. It wasn't like the old schools anyway, with more than four hundred students crammed into a single grade.
In my day a class had over forty kids, and there were more than ten classes. Now it was completely different.
A class couldn't even fill twenty seats, and there weren't five classes to begin with. A whole grade didn't break a hundred students. You could feel how far the numbers had fallen. Even cafeteria service, which used to take forever, could be finished quickly now.
Give it another ten years, and filling even ten seats in a class might be a struggle. The numbers were already shrinking like this. Wasn't the future only going to be an age when people had even fewer children?
I was turning that over when one o'clock drew near. The cafeteria made it impossible to focus on class, and right on cue my stomach was perfectly empty.
"All right! We're going to the cafeteria! Line up outside!"
The teacher came in and told us so. We poured out the door and lined up to head for the cafeteria. Normally it would have been a mess, with nobody bothering to stand straight, but now the formation was as crisp as the army. Hungry children, it turned out, could not be stopped by anyone.
Every business was running smoothly. Once a week Kim Sehee received her reports, and every time she watched the ventures swelling larger, she felt a pleasant fullness, as if she herself were being fed. So this was the flavor that kept entrepreneurs in business. She hadn't known.
Like raising a child, watching Starlight Food shoot up put a satisfied smile on her face. Nothing stood in its way.
There was, however, one thing she wished would not grow.
"Hana..."
Kim Sehee was stroking a photograph of Hana laughing wide and bright. Of course Hana would grow. She only wished that day would come later. Was this how every parent felt, watching a child grow up?
Growing itself wasn't the problem. But this childhood Hana existed only now. The more she grew, the more she would change, wouldn't she? Hana was a person too. Puberty would come, and once she was grown she would be quieter than she was now. Seeing that version of her, Sehee thought, would make her heart ache.
She let out a small, bracing huff, stood the frame that held Hana's photo on the desk, and set herself moving toward the next venture.
Plenty of people looked kindly on Starlight Food's expansion. The company had a domestic market, yes, but it had also contributed a great deal through exports. It carried none of the image of a firm that only sucked the home market dry.
Kim Sehee herself actively encouraged Starlight Food's push overseas. South Korea's domestic market was small. Fifty million people was not a tiny population—countries with that many were not all that common. Asia simply had a great many people. Look at Europe and elsewhere, and you found plenty of nations with ten million citizens.
And the only news out of the domestic market was bad. The falling birth rate kept shrinking the population. Fifty million now; who knew how far it would drop in twenty years. The current generation still numbered about eight hundred thousand to a cohort, but children born in the 2020s were barely scraping two hundred thousand a generation.
Barely twenty years had passed, and the numbers had been cut to a quarter. So Kim Sehee had decided to focus overseas rather than at home. The shortage of supply was being solved bit by bit as well. They were aggressively expanding farmland and hiring more staff, and productivity was rising.
Hana's plants set fruit at a staggering speed. Harvest them on time, and their yield was at least several dozen times that of ordinary crops.
"Hmm..."
Kim Sehee was reading the report on the next product. It laid out the foods Starlight Food might choose in the future, and she meant to pick the ones that were sound and good. In her heart she wanted to do all of them, but Starlight Food's capacity had not reached that far yet.
Kim Sehee was touring plots of land on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province with her entourage. One of the employees put a question to her.
"Chairman, has another new plant come out, by any chance?"
Ever since Hana had begun creating new plants and the like, Starlight Food had made a habit of buying land on the Gyeonggi outskirts and in other regions. Thinking of all the different plants Hana would make from here on, it was simply easier to secure the ground in advance. Choosing land after a plant appeared wasted time they could not spare.
Have everything ready, and the moment Hana's plant arrived they could start farming and move straight into production. That was efficient, and it was easy.
But Kim Sehee shook her head at the question. Hana's next plant had not appeared yet. There had even been a joke—pull one of Hana's teeth by force and make a new plant that way. When Kim Sehee heard it, she thundered that it was nonsense and sent the speaker packing.
Even if the tooth would grow back, there was no reason to yank it out by force. Hana would not want that either. Pull a tooth against her will, and she would certainly hate it. They had built this relationship with Hana so carefully. Destroying it over a single plant made no sense at all.
"No. No plant has come out."
"Then there isn't really any reason for you to look at the land yourself, is there?"
"I'm looking at something else."
"Might I ask what that is...?"
Cattle that ate the straw from Hana's rice were, without exception, excellent in both the quality of the meat and the flavor. Kim Sehee intended to move past farming and step into livestock as well.