Another Effect
Kim Sehee had been about to drop to her knees right there, but Kim Bora stopped her, and the need to kneel disappeared.
Researcher Kim Bora was the one in charge of Hana, so Kim Sehee moved them somewhere they could actually talk. A hallway was no place for a conversation like this.
Bora gathered Hana into her arms and stroked the child's hair as she headed for the conference room. She did not bring her all the way inside, of course. Partway there she passed Hana to Haru, then stepped into the room, and Kim Sehee followed, suddenly self-conscious, stealing glances as she went in.
She sat with her throat gone dry. She could not begin to predict how this negotiation would go.
The one small mercy was that Hana's fondness for her did not seem to have fallen all that far. Even now the girl had her face mashed against the glass, peering in at them.
Kim Bora looked at Kim Sehee and slowly parted her lips. What was she about to demand?
"Please help me."
"...Pardon?"
Kim Sehee wondered if she had misheard. She had been the one prepared to beg, and Bora had taken the opening right out of her hands. Fortunately, Kim Bora went on to explain.
"Please help Hana enroll in elementary school. If we had President Sehee's influence behind us, I think it would make all the difference."
It was the last thing Kim Sehee had expected. She had come ready to renegotiate the profit split, and what left Kim Bora's mouth had nothing whatsoever to do with business. Elementary school? Out of nowhere?
"Elementary school...?"
"Yes. It would help if you could get society to accept her. Money isn't the problem. Hana can earn more than enough of that on her own."
"That's..."
Kim Sehee turned it over as hard as she could. Just as Kim Bora said, nothing like this being had ever been granted a legal identity. Overseas, perhaps. In Korea, it had never happened.
"If you came about Hana's hair, I think we've simply cut too much of it. This is the backlash."
"Then when can it go back to the way it was!?"
She asked it with desperation bare in her voice. From Kim Bora's side of the table, whether the hair grew back or not hardly mattered. Still, if she wanted Hana in school, she needed a measure of goodwill, so she answered.
"Couldn't we simply leave her hair uncut for about a week and see?"
Kim Sehee ran a rough count of the remaining strands in her head and tried to calculate how long they could hold out.
"That would be a relief, but..."
"Incidentally, if you answer the question I asked first, I can do everything in my power to help her hair grow..."
Kim Sehee did not need to hear another word.
"If that's what it is, I'll help as far as it's within my power to help."
"You don't have to worry too much about the hair. It looks temporary."
"I hope so."
She had expected them to part after that with a gracious little laugh, but contrary to every expectation, Kim Bora demanded a revised contract. Her manner was nothing like it had been a moment before.
And so, after a long tug-of-war, Kim Sehee managed to adjust the contract into something reasonably fair.
"Haa..."
Once Kim Sehee had gone, Kim Bora let out a sigh of relief. Things had resolved themselves just as she had hoped. Hana was still at the glass, cheek pressed flat against it, watching.
"What is there to stare at like that, Hana?"
Kim Bora stepped out of the room and spoke to the girl looking back at her.
"It's just interesting."
From Hana's point of view, chances to watch other people were rare. That was probably all she meant.
Kim Bora hauled a large rubber basin into the room. Hana stood beside her, smiling as she watched.
She mixed hot water with a nutrient solution said to be good for plants and poured it into the basin. Once the water had risen high enough, she set a rubber duck afloat on the surface.
"Hana, let's get you nice and clean today, too."
At first Hana had flatly refused to let Bora bathe her, but time had done its work. These days she surrendered herself to Bora's hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Hana plopped into the water and played happily with the duck. Beside her, Bora massaged the girl's body and made sure she got plenty of sunlight. Bathing her this way, they could actually watch Hana's hair grow.
Hana looked thoroughly pleased with the world, wearing the expression of someone who already possessed everything, as she received her massage.
The only worry was how they would ever hold her attention through a bath if the duck were not there.
Perhaps it was thanks to all of Bora's effort. Either way, Hana's hair began to grow again, just as it had before.
When the lab reported that the hair was growing once more, Kim Sehee could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
People, by nature, are free beings who cannot be controlled. The very existence of product warning labels was proof enough of that.
You could write, in the plainest terms, that something was harmful and not to be eaten, and someone would still shove it down their throat. Plaster the warning in enormous letters and blazing red, and they would ignore it and commit the forbidden act anyway.
Such behavior usually led only downhill. Every so often, though, it led to an unexpected discovery.
That was the case with Kim Gihun, who drank Starlight Green Tea more than anything else. He was a true devotee. Even with his finances stretched thin—thanks to his loans, of course—he was a heavy tea drinker, putting away three or four cups a day.
Today the workload had been especially brutal, and so he resorted to what he only did on his worst days: a forbidden art, the sort of heretical technique you would find in a martial arts novel.
The method was simple. Ordinarily one tea bag made one cup, but on days when work drained him to the bone, one was not enough. He dropped in two or three extra bags and drank that.
The instructions, of course, said to use only one tea bag per cup. Kim Gihun refused to surrender to a mere scrap of paper.
And so, in the break room where the Starlight Green Tea lived, he completed his forbidden art—four tea bags steeped in a single paper cup. Forbidden tea.
The color was as dark as if someone had poured in green ink, and the scent flooded the entire break room. Drink it, and strength surged through his body all at once, as if he had downed a stimulant. The downside was that sleep became nearly impossible afterward.
He was humming a little tune on his way back to his desk, paper cup in hand, when he collided with a coworker at the corner of the hallway.
"Ack!"
They had hit hands, of all places, and the tea he was carrying spilled across his wrist. It was hot enough to tear a scream out of him.
"Are you all right?"
The person he had bumped into apologized. It was mutual fault, so there was no one to blame. Kim Gihun could only swallow his tears over the fifteen dollars that had just gone up in smoke and trudge back to his desk. The small amount of tea still left in the cup was his only consolation.
And so Kim Gihun put in another day as a cog in modern society, clocked out, showered, and only then, without thinking, checked the arm he had spilled the tea on.
Surely he'd burned himself. But when he turned his eyes to his wrist, he saw an effect of the tea he had never imagined.
"Huh? Where'd my eczema go?"
Kim Gihun had suffered from severe eczema around his right wrist since childhood, but now it had receded until it was barely visible.
Absurd rumors had been floating around the internet—that pouring Starlight Green Tea on a skin condition would make it fade, at least a little. Kim Gihun had just realized the rumors were true.
The Starlight Guild was an octopus of a conglomerate, its tentacles in everything. Naturally, among the companies it ran, there was a cosmetics firm.
"Hmm..."
Kim Seyoung—Kim Sehee's older sister, and the fifth daughter of the Starlight Guild's direct line—was reading a report an executive had brought her.
Starlight Cosmetics, like Starlight Food, was hardly a company on the rise. Next to Starlight Food it looked positively angelic, but it still could not claim a single product that was actually doing well.
The monster byproducts the Starlight Guild mainly dealt in were aggressive, every last one of them, so there was nothing among them fit for cosmetics. Keeping them from ruining someone's skin was already a victory.
Perhaps because of that, Starlight Cosmetics kept its factories running at a level that barely stayed out of the red.
The report this executive had brought her, however, gave her a reason to go to Starlight Food.
If the material behind Starlight Green Tea really possessed an effect like this, she could not afford to wait.
Kim Seyoung rose from her office and headed for Starlight Food. By the time she arrived, the lot in front of the offices was already packed solid with parked cars.
"Wait—is that...?"
She could make out executives from companies ranked in the domestic cosmetics top three. They were competitors, so she recognized them easily enough.
Heart in her throat, Kim Seyoung had no choice but to get out of the car and head up to the office. Fortunately, she and her younger sister were not on bad terms. All she could do now was lean on the ties of blood.