A Strange Book
My days, simple enough to begin with, grew simpler still.
With a cast on my leg, the world was mine. I could lie in bed and do absolutely nothing, and this was a day for feeling, down to the bone, exactly why being a layabout was so wonderful. I sprawled there watching the Little Magician Rumi anime until even that grew dull.
Lying flat all day was, in its own way, hard work. It wasn't exactly a pleasure. But the cast made walking a bit of a stretch, so I went on killing time in a daze until, for no good reason at all, I wanted to go outside.
The things you're told not to do are precisely the things you want to do. I eased myself up off the bed and got ready to slip out. It was lunch hour, which meant the halls were empty. This was my chance. Moving the casted leg was possible, more or less.
Walking sent a thin thread of pain climbing up from below, but it was bearable enough. Hobbling along on my good foot, I spotted something lying on the hallway floor.
"Huh?"
It was a book whose cover showed a woman in a provocative outfit. I glanced around, then picked it up. I had nothing else to do anyway. I might as well take the magazine back to my room and look through it.
Book in hand, I returned to my room, lay down on the bed, and settled in for a comfortable read. Until now the only books I'd seen were fairy tales and picture books, and those had been quietly enjoyable in their own right. People like to dismiss fairy tales as obvious and boring, but the more you read them, the more you realize they're the real thing. When good finally triumphed over evil at the end, the thrill ran through my whole body.
This book, though, was different. Weren't swimsuits something you wore at the beach or the pool? The woman on the cover was wearing one and having her picture taken.
"Hmm..."
The further I turned the pages, the more an unknown world opened up. The men wore nothing but swimsuit briefs, and the women, just like them, wore nothing but bikinis. Why were they taking pictures half naked? The models looked terribly cold. It was the dead of winter out there, with a knife-edged wind howling, and they were shooting in nothing but swimsuits...
Of course, the models in the book didn't feel the cold.
"Whoa..."
Every last one of them had an amazing body. The men were thick with muscle, and the women were slim and elegant. Should I try working out? The longing to have muscles like that rose in me like smoke up a chimney.
I was staring so hard I felt as if I might fall into the magazine, and before I knew it lunch hour was over. From out in the hall came the laughter and chatter of office workers coming back from their meal.
"Hana, what are you up to?"
Bora came into my room after eating. Once lunch was done, either she or Haru would look after me for about an hour. And this despite the fact that I was a fiercely independent child who needed no one's protection.
But the moment Bora saw the magazine in my hands, her face went strange. It was the look of someone thinking, Why is that here? She came toward the bed.
"Hana... where did you get this?"
Huh? So it wasn't just an ordinary magazine? She was wearing an expression I'd never seen on her before, and speaking to me in a voice to match. For no reason at all, I felt as if I'd committed a crime.
"It was just lying on the hallway floor!"
I told the truth. I hadn't stolen it from anywhere. I'd only happened to pick up something that was already on the ground. Bora's mood had turned ominous, the way it had that time I'd drunk the beer, so I confessed everything on the spot.
"This is something you still aren't supposed to look at."
With that, she took the magazine away from me. I had no choice but to let it go. I'd been about to say something in my own defense, but one look at her face and the words crawled right back down my throat. She looked furious.
"Unbelievable... with Hana right here... if I catch whoever left this, they're dead..."
Watching her mutter under her breath only made me more uneasy. I felt as if I'd committed some dreadful crime I was never meant to commit. But a moment later she was stroking my head.
"Hana, if something weird like this magazine is lying around, you have to tell me first, all right?"
"Okay!"
She took my answer, picked up the magazine, and left the room. I thought I heard her voice raised out in the office, but I decided to let it pass. It was time to watch Little Magician Rumi.
Kim Sehee was out diligently touring factory sites. Ever since Starlight Food had latched onto Hana and begun living off her, the company's finances had grown plump. If Hana were suddenly to vanish, or if her hair ran out, a terrible disaster would follow, but there was no need to think that far ahead.
Assume the worst in any business and you would never get anything done. An earthquake bringing the factory down, or a war dropping a nuclear bomb on it? Anyone who tried to run a company by predicting things like that ought to be a shaman, not a businesswoman.
In any case, Starlight Food was unmistakably in the middle of an expansion. They were hiring more employees than the old company could ever have imagined, and the money coming in was at least several hundred times the old revenue. All of it had happened in a span of not even a few months.
Word had it that the core figures of the Starlight Guild might already know. Even so, they had no pretext for taking back what they had already handed over. And with Kim Sehee gripping the shares tight, so long as she kept both eyes wide open, the company at least would not be stolen out from under her.
So she worked the field herself, while the staff under her fanned out to other sites, sleeves rolled up, hunting for land. With the survey more or less complete, it was time to decide where the factories would actually rise.
"These are the sites where we propose to build."
A large map of Korea had been hung in the conference room, and the employee indicated the circled locations.
"In my heart, I'd love nothing more than to put a factory in every metropolitan city. Realistically, though, we had to be practical, so we selected a more suitable set of locations."
At present, the only plant Starlight Food owned was the one in Gyeonggi Province. A single factory had once been more than enough to meet demand, but they had now reached the limit of what one plant could produce. And since the business was clearly going to grow still further, building more factories could only help.
They also meant, in time, to release products other than Starlight Green Tea. The efficiency of Hana's hair had been improving as the months passed. Where a single strand had once been enough to brew ten cups of green tea, that same strand could now make something closer to twenty.
The stockpile of her hair was ample, and they had surplus capital enough to branch into other ventures. To possess a material this good and use it for nothing but green tea would be an enormous waste.
"Every region has its advantages and its drawbacks. Going by the criteria we used in choosing sites, a plant in Paju would cover volume for the Seoul area, and one in the Daejeon area would cover the provinces. That pairing looks best."
A factory in Paju for Seoul, and another in well-connected Daejeon for the rest of the country: it sounded entirely reasonable. Unless they were foolish enough to build on some remote island, or off in inconvenient Gangwon Province, every region came with its own mix of strengths and weaknesses, so there was little worth agonizing over.
Even so, the pressure of deciding with her own hand on a megafactory that would swallow several hundred billion won bore down on Kim Sehee. She had felt a weight like this before, at Seollal and Chuseok, when the elders of the family all gathered in one room.
She was the president, though, and decisions of this kind would come without end from here on. The moment she signed the final plan, a thrill she had never known before ran through her.
She had always assumed Starlight Food would remain a thoroughly mediocre company until the day she died. It had been a zombie firm with nothing left but a pulse, and then she met Hana, and everything changed. Revenue had climbed several hundredfold, and the road ahead looked bright.
The businesses her older brothers and sisters owned belonged to industries that had nothing whatsoever to do with Hana's hair, so she didn't have to worry about anyone snatching this away from her. Her older sister Seyoung did use the hair, of course, but that much she could live with.
In heavy industry, in automobiles, and in the firms that made weapons for other hunters, Hana's hair was useless. Was there any part of building a car that called for a strand of hair? Would it matter, in any important way, when you were building a ship? The hair might yet reveal some other effect, but so far nothing of the kind had appeared.
It was just as useless in finance, insurance, and the rest of the money-shuffling trades. For the time being, there were few people inside the Starlight Guild who could actually put Hana's hair to use. In a way, Kim Sehee thought, that was a blessing.