The World Is Wide, and There Are More Humans to Sell
"This is your first time, so I'm pricing them especially high for you. You know that, right?"
"Thank you."
Four gold coins in my hand. Two per head.
A gold coin from the other world, judged by size alone, was no bigger than a chocolate coin. The problem was what filled it. Not chocolate—99.7 percent pure gold. By weight each ran about fifteen don, a shade under two ounces, so four of them came to sixty don, nearly half a pound. At roughly four hundred thousand won a don, some three hundred dollars, the lot was twenty-four million won. Eighteen thousand dollars.
That was what I'd been paid for selling two adults into slavery. You could call a human being cheap at that price, depending on how you looked at it. For a first deal closed, it still wasn't a bad start.
Work at a trading company and you travel overseas plenty, and you learn plenty too, but at the root of it you're a merchant. You move from country to country, buy where things are abundant, and carry them off to sell where they're scarce. The margin lives in between—sometimes a little, sometimes so much it amounts to outright gouging. Crossing nations or crossing dimensions, the principle was exactly the same.
Once I'd found my feet in this other world, the shortages leapt out at me like an old occupational habit. Dozens of them caught my eye, but one stood out above the rest for sheer profit.
After the empire's wars of conquest, the land had been carved into countless domains, and the wars between those domains never let up. Demand for able-bodied men on this side always ran ahead of supply. Healthy male slaves, especially, went for whatever price the seller cared to name. And aside from magic, this world was no further along than the Renaissance, while people from Earth were well fed to the point of excess. I could ask a good price, and get it.
I saw it the moment I captured the two bastards who had dragged me out into the desert, put a bullet in my gut, and left me there, then turned them over to a slave trader passing through the village where I'd been staying. He could barely keep the delight off his face.
The trader, a wholesaler, offered me one gold coin a head. I shook mine.
"One each? Hell no. On your way. I'd just as soon not sell 'em—they can hug each other and farm the dirt right here."
In the end he came up to two. I turned it over for a moment. There was the matter of opening the door to future deals, and if I meant to live here, I'd need to widen my connections. I nodded.
That was how the first transaction closed. Two coins apiece. Four in all.
It felt good. The same rush and thrill as when I'd closed my first deal as a new hire. All the better for the fact that I'd sold into slavery the pieces of shit who had tried to kill me over a handful of pocket change.
I had a rough grasp of how this place worked now, and I'd confirmed how to pass between the other world and Earth. The ones who'd meant to kill me for pocket change were dealt with.
What remained was going after the bitches and bastards who had pressed that pocket change into their hands and told them to kill me.
What I would do with them once I had them was settled this time.