Chapter 57
Chapter 57
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 57
Chapter Title: I've Already Started the Pet Rock Business
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I'm a pathetic little creature scrambling desperately just to stay alive.
Survival is the most primal and fundamental principle for me as a person—and for all life itself.
Life operates for the sake of life itself,
and the dignity of life is merely a byproduct that comes along in the process.
And I was born on 21st-century Earth,
a citizen of South Korea who grew up with a standard education.
Humanity, the species that built a civilization capable of escaping the atmosphere, redefined the abstract concept of "life" in countless ways,
and succeeded in elevating dignity to one of the core components of "human life."
People on 21st-century Earth can't survive without dignity.
And in this world, the notion of "inherent human dignity" hasn't been invented yet.
It's like a carbon-based lifeform evolved to feed on water and oxygen suddenly crash-landing on a barren planet with neither.
'Saying it like this makes it sound kinda sci-fi.'
I defined this as a kind of "terraforming."
The process of reshaping the soil where I can't survive into soil where I can—from the roots up.
The only difference from actual sci-fi is that the target isn't a physical planet.
'So, does that make me a mental lifeform that treats the minds of living beings as soil? Come to think of it, given how I possessed this body—like a Body Snatcher—it fits pretty well as a metaphor.'
I'm a Body Snatcher.
So, let's think like the alien Body Snatchers from sci-fi.
Attempting terraforming on a planet with no foundation is way too inefficient.
Terraforming should recycle the resources already present on that planet.
In other words, it can't be wasteful.
Creating a new environment must be a productive endeavor that yields returns greater than the investment,
and in business terms, that means investing in ventures that "make money."
'No matter what I do, it has to satisfy the condition of "making money." Whether it's cost reduction, profit maximization, long-term asset appreciation, or whatever—reforms without guaranteed productivity will inevitably fail against backlash and complacency.'
It's not just to avoid getting on House Riddle's bad side.
At this point,
the chance of Torsso betraying me is practically zero.
Even if I squander a fortune.
Hm. Not quite zero—maybe 10%?
Anyway, given all the money I've made him so far,
he'll tolerate a certain degree of "waste."
But.
The scale of what I'm about to pull off is too massive to rely on such complacency.
'I'm trying to change the world here. For sustainable, fundamental change, I have to constantly prove it can produce "useful value." It's not about shoving the world along—it's about making the world move in the direction I choose on its own.'
In the end, what matters is productivity and efficiency.
Morality and justification come after.
For a moral paradigm to writhe with enough vitality, it first needs real, tangible power—political and economic kinds—to compete with the existing paradigm.
'History from my past life proves it. Moral growth and the development of universal ethics were dazzling, but underneath lay the logic of capital and politics.'
The great powers of the past abolished slavery in the name of justice and faith,
but it wasn't because they'd undergone some grand moral transformation.
The root cause of abolishing slavery was that the system simply wasn't as productive as thought.
Slaves are certainly useful property,
but the slave system doesn't blindly benefit capitalists.
In a capitalist system driven by division of labor and factories,
amid exchanges between the New and Old Worlds,
in an imperial system bloated by conquering every conquerable continent,
slavery was an inefficient institution.
As division of labor advanced, the value of slaves—who handled multiple tasks while eating and sleeping on-site—plummeted.
Capitalists wanted workers who got paid exactly for the work they did.
New World slaves were inferior in quality to healthy African ones.
Malicious inventory overflowed the market.
Some filled their self-esteem through vertical power structures, violence, and abuse.
Slaves were supercar-level expensive goods, making it hard to beat them to death recklessly.
Slaves slacked off when unsupervised.
To make slaves work, you had to hire extra overseers to manage them.
'That's why nationalism and liberalism, the new moral paradigms, brought even worse side effects.'
A slave isn't a person.
It's a commodity with a fixed value, a machine for boosting productivity.
And.
The way people turned other people into parts wasn't limited to slavery.
In that world, the lives of "liberated" slaves,
those newly redefined as "workers," were harsher than slaves'.
After all, they became beings invested with even "less cost" than slaves.
'This world probably would've gone the same way if left alone.'
I gave the fate of this "slave class" a slight twist.
Slave dispatch business.
Turning slaves into "rentable by the hour" commodities,
allowing more efficient hiring of "just the right amount" of slaves.
In exchange for shouldering the social costs,
I profited through economies of scale for cost reduction, info gains from the vast slave network, and rising slave values baited by talants.
And.
Tofu production, which isn't hard to make but requires lots of labor and experience;
circuses needing high-end and specialized talent;
long-term education ventures like schools and daycare centers—
I ceaselessly launched and expanded new businesses where I could invest surplus manpower.
'What I own isn't just companies—it's the economic paradigm of "term employment." A generous but high-ceiling version. That's my biggest strength.'
Among all trades, dealing in people is the most profitable.
Something I'd emphasized to Torsso multiple times.
Though I'd built many ventures,
my core business was none other than the "slave dispatch business" itself.
And.
Until now, I'd used it in too "honest" a form.
No.
This primitive world only had room for such uses.
"Torsso."
"Yes."
"At this point, we can say we've completely dominated the labor market, right?"
"Indeed."
What I have is a weapon.
The vast, universal network formed by the "slave dispatch business" rooted across the entire empire.
I monopolize it.
So now, I'm going to wield that "monopoly power" freely.
"Now that we've monopolized the market, it's time to use it to make money. Slave dispatch is our biggest business, but its profit margins have been the most disappointing compared to others."
"Raise the rental rates?"
"No."
That's not how you use market monopoly.
Raising prices on a monopolized market just breeds consumer backlash.
They'd turn to cheaper, lower-quality slaves or laborers instead.
What matters in a monopoly isn't the product itself.
It's the monopoly's dominance over daily life.
The power to profoundly influence personal lives—that's a monopoly's greatest strength.
"We're going into the marketing business."
"Marketing...?"
I'm going to assign value to something this world lacks: "universal human dignity."
To achieve my ultimate goal,
mere capital-based interactions aren't enough.
I need something more fundamental:
the ability to intervene in "perceptions" and "intuitions."
And.
This superpower of imbuing value into the valueless—
in the 21st century, they called it "marketing."
"Simply put, it's the business of making people believe 'valueless things' have 'value.'"
"Like hypnosis or brainwashing?"
"More insidious and vicious than that."
With hypnosis or brainwashing, at least you can resist with "I won't break no matter what."
Marketing manipulates people in far more sophisticated ways.
"Well. You'll get it once you experience it firsthand."
I'm planning to sell "dispatch slave" billboards.
But just selling billboards,
people in this world won't grasp how amazing that is.
Even Torsso's face shows he can't imagine it.
So, I'll show them directly.
The power of marketing.
"To start... I need to make people pay money for 'rocks littering the streets' first."
"...So it is hypnosis or brainwashing?"
"I told you it's not."
If anything, it's closer to "scamming."
"Bring the con artist. I've got another job for him."
"Understood."
I feel like I'm piling too much work on the con artist,
but hey, consider it karma.
Thanks to you, he's made money and fame.
"Pet rock business...?"
"Yeah."
"...You think that'll work? Selling rocks as pets—anyone would dismiss it as ridiculous nonsense."
"That's why you have to make it sell."
"Pardon?"
"You're the con artist."
"......"
"Come up with a compelling reason for people to choose 'pet rocks' over 'pet animals.' Give it your all."