A Surefire Success
Crunch. Crunch.
Every time I bit into the watermelon, juice flooded my mouth. This was the flavor I had taken up farming for. Of course, I farmed far more comfortably than any other farmer. Anyone who poured blood and sweat into the fields day after day would take one look at how I did it and let out a hollow little laugh, utterly deflated.
Still, it had to be better than turning into a child. My original body had vanished; the least the world could do was offer some compensation. Maybe it was a gift sent down by God. Being stuck in this child's body with no abilities at all would have been, no matter how I turned it over, a complete bust.
"This is incredibly good, senior."
A man I'd never seen before said it around a mouthful of watermelon. I'd lived at this research institute long enough to know most of the faces, and a face I didn't know almost always meant a new hire.
"Ta-da. This is watermelon even the president can't eat whenever he feels like it. Only people who work at our company get to have it."
That was the truth. It was watermelon you could eat only if I gave it to you. If I didn't grow it, no one tasted watermelon this good. It had been made from my hair, so even if someone carried the seeds off and planted them somewhere else, they would never grow into the same fruit.
"So yummy!"
I devoted myself to the watermelon. I thought I ought to come hang out every weekend. From the look of things, though, dropping by once every two weeks would be plenty.
"Nnngh..."
I sat up in bed. My eyes refused to open. I'd slept too sweetly for that, most likely. Out of habit I climbed out of bed and started getting ready for school.
Last time I had asked whether I could skip school entirely, sit the qualification exam, and just graduate. The proposal was rejected. They said the real purpose of school was playing with your friends and stacking up memories. They weren't wrong. School wasn't only a place for studying. It had a social life to it, too—a place where you learned how to get along with people and live among them.
"Hmm..."
Today I had to choose which uniform to wear. Someone might think the two looked identical, but they didn't. One was for summer, the other for fall. The summer uniform's cloth was a little thinner. Autumn was creeping in, and if you left the house in the summer uniform in the morning, you could already feel the chill.
The trouble was that by lunchtime it turned hot. I chose the summer uniform. I could dress myself perfectly well on my own now. The figure in the mirror was exactly that of a third-grader in elementary school. No matter how many times I looked, the proportions and the face were pretty enough to model. Somehow this body didn't feel like mine. If I had brought a child like this into the world, I could have become the most hopeless girl-dad alive and still have died without a single regret.
The catch was that I had turned into a child myself before I ever even married a woman.
And so, as usual, I walked to school. They had said we would be making something out of balloons today, and I was looking forward to it. Hands-on lessons where you actually moved your body were more fun than dull classes. That much was obvious. Nothing was more tedious than sitting through material I already knew by heart.
At my age, still learning three-digit addition so obvious it hurt, or multiplication done with fractions, didn't even make sense. They were problems I could solve at a glance. I was the only one, though. The other kids worked through them diligently, writing every step into their notebooks.
I felt a little sorry for them. I was the only one coasting. They all studied hard, but none of them could surpass what I was. No matter how gifted a child might be, the gap between a third-grader and someone who had lived more than twenty years could not be closed, try as you might. Unless they were the sort of genius whose IQ got them into Mensa, an ordinary prodigy still wasn't enough to get past me.
Anyway, I walked into the classroom again today, traded greetings with Jiyu and Yumi—who had arrived far earlier than I had—and sat down. Another day was beginning. The greeting was the same as always, except for one small difference. Today I had stood a little crooked while I said hello.
Kim Sehee meant to give the civil servant—who looked as if he couldn't even breathe—a little air. Leave him like this, and he was going to pass away from lack of oxygen.
"The drastic collapse of the domestic Hanwoo market that you're worried about is not going to happen."
"Pardon?"
"You see, we intend to export our beef primarily overseas."
"Overseas, you say?"
The section chief simply could not understand it. Starlight Food hadn't even entered the domestic market yet, and they were going overseas? This wasn't beef that had been thoroughly tested and proven at home. Shipping it straight out to sell made no sense.
"We're thinking of selling mainly in the United States. And, while we're at it, Europe as well."
Kim Sehee's reasoning was simple. Korea was too small a country to raise as many as five hundred thousand head. They could do it if they were told to, of course, but it would take far too long. They could hardly sit around sucking their thumbs while they waited.
So they planned to sell the beef first in high-income markets. The domestic market was attractive enough on its own, but cattle raised on Starlight rice straw were delicious enough that buyers overseas would come looking for them. Get addicted to that flavor, and you wouldn't be able to buy it even if you wanted to. It was that good.
"America? Or Europe?"
"Yes."
"Aigoo, Chairman..."
The section chief knew the chairman didn't have much of a track record in livestock. Come to think of it, he realized Starlight Food had been in the industry for less than a month. To someone who had worked in livestock for decades, Kim Sehee's move was no different from a child's whim.
"Chairman. Breaking into overseas markets isn't as easy as you think. Even our own domestic Hanwoo is struggling to get a foothold abroad."
"We have confidence."
"No... Please consider the countless cattle operations in America. You would have to compete with the cattle raised there, and it won't be easy. What's more, those cattle are raised on cheap feed. You won't even be able to compete on price."
"Do you imagine we don't know that?"
This civil-servant section chief had no idea how delicious the beef Starlight Food produced actually was. If he had known, he would never have offered quite so much advice. But because that fact was still unknown to most people, he had no choice but to pour his heart out.
"But..."
He couldn't get another word out. Inside, there was far too much he wanted to say.
If Starlight Food fails to break into America and Europe, where do you suppose all that beef will go? Just to claw back the cost of the feed, they'll ship every one of those cattle onto the domestic market, and the shock will fall entirely on our livestock farms. Starlight Food has so many hit products that a failed beef expansion won't shake them much. Domestic farms, though, will take a blow they can barely recover from—enough to wipe out at least half of them.
Kim Sehee sent the section chief on his way. She had wanted to let him taste the beef their company made. If he had tasted it, he might have cheered Starlight Food on as it pushed overseas.
Give it a little time, and these livestock officials probably wouldn't be chasing Kim Sehee around anymore. By then they would more likely be fretting over how to wedge a spoon into Starlight Food's pot. The cattle Starlight was raising were far too precious to unleash on the domestic market. They would enter it, of course, but only in small volumes. Sell the same cattle overseas and you could charge more, so there was no choice but to sell them overseas.
And when it came to price, Starlight Food already stood above its rivals abroad. They fed the cattle nothing but rice straw, a byproduct of rice. There was no way the meat could cost more than cattle raised overseas.
James and Layla stepped out of the airport in Korea. The autumn air, cool now, came out to greet them. James looked like a different man entirely. He was no longer the bald man with his head shaved clean. His abundant blond hair shone brilliantly even beneath the open sky.
"Hmm. I heard Korean weather is wildly changeable, and it really is different."
"Let's just get to Starlight Food already, James."
"Don't rush me, Layla. A person ought to leave a little room to breathe."
The James who had burned like fire back when he was bald was gone. All that remained was a James so benevolent you could have believed Jesus himself had come down. Hair, or the lack of it, had been enough to change the man.