46. How to Tame a Slave
Slaves you can currently own: 15
A little disappointing.
"Ah. Should've spared two more."
In a farming game, you never have enough hands. Hiring NPCs who actually help costs Farm, and burning through it nonstop is a losing play until you've locked down a steady way to earn more. A slave you can work to the bone for nothing but meals, on the other hand, is both useful and brutally efficient.
Newbies, of course, start complaining the moment they take their first ones.
The easiest fix is to remember that a slave is a person too.
One of the biggest mistakes newbies make is picturing some pre-nineteenth-century image of Black slavery and working theirs the same way. Monsters wearing slavery's shackles will follow orders regardless, but you won't hold their obedience for long, or bend them to what you actually want. There's exactly one situation where that pays: when you need to burn through their labor as fast as possible. If you mean to use them for the long haul, you have to think of a slave as a human who happens to eat cheap.
"Here. Meat. This is your food."
Gob-rings eat meat. In the Level 0 Biome, monsters weaker than they are barely exist, but there are still plenty of ordinary animals worth hunting. That doesn't mean meat is guaranteed. Hunts fail, and with the village smashed by someone or other, expecting them to follow my orders and still scrape together their own meals was too much to ask.
So the village had kept fruit, vegetables, and whatever else on hand for the days meat ran out. Gob-rings are omnivores, built to survive however they have to. I made a point of bringing them the leftover meat from the house anyway.
"Krek. Master... krek. Thank you."
"Meat. Meat."
Which is why, in Farming World, you never throw a resource away. Everything has a use somewhere. You leave it sitting until that use shows up.
Big Rat meat. It had started to rot past its shelf life while I was back on Earth, but for Gob-rings this barely counted as a problem. Even monsters get stomachaches from spoiled food—still better than starving. They were already delighted to be holding several days' worth.
"Every morning, you come to the cabin and work."
"Krek."
"First priority is growing Sunro Mushrooms. Second is helping with the farm work at the cabin. Stick to those, and I'll keep you fed so you can live safely, and I'll push the territory out so other predators can't come after you."
"Kerruk. Krek. Good. Krek."
"Meat good."
"But the mushrooms, krek... the Black Monkeys are after them, krek."
"I'll kill those monkey bastards. You like monkey meat?"
"Kerruk! Monkey meat good!"
"Good. First job. Harvest the Sunro Mushrooms properly and bring them to the cabin. There'll be some female orc waiting. Hand them over, do whatever she tells you, and when you clock out at night, go home and sleep."
"Got it. Master."
Treating them like people isn't hard for anyone who's played Farming World for any real length of time. Carrot and stick. Wield both in moderation, and state only what you want, firmly. That's how a master and a slave get the relationship straight.
If anything, twenty-six years as a shut-in deadbeat rotting in his room, social skills to match, might be what makes it easy. My opinion comes first. Other people's circumstances are none of my business. Whether the slaves are suffering or not, what matters is that they do what I told them to do.
I watched the Gob-rings edge off, reading my every cue, then picked up a few of the cultivated Sunro Mushrooms and headed home.
Out in the widened yard, Kim Sujeong was huffing and straining on her own, pushing the field wider. The moment she saw me, she hurried over.
"How'd it go?"
Instead of answering, I held out a Sunro Mushroom.
"What? A mushroom? Wait, wait—a Sunro Mushroom? Is this a real Sunro Mushroom? That dungeon truffle?"
"Yeah."
"What about the Gob-rings? And the mushrooms?"
"Gob-rings are handled. Turns out they were the ones growing them. About fifty plants' worth, so I took a dozen or so as slaves. They should harvest and bring the crop in within a few days. Keep it safe. We're selling mushrooms this time."
"Whoa... fifty plants is how many?"
"No idea. At a glance, a few hundred."
I had no idea how much they grew before offering it up as tribute. Maybe they only harvested what they needed to hand over and left the rest, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. Then again, humans eat Sunro Mushrooms like a seasoning. To Gob-rings, they might not even be decent food. Would they eat the things that were practically their lifeline just because they were hungry? Worked out nicely for me either way.
"Dad's gonna lose his mind... A dungeon truffle this size has to go for at least two or three million won."
"What do people even eat these for? The flavor?"
I'd been curious enough to smell one. There was a deep, heavy aroma, but nothing that promised it would actually taste like anything. Sujeong shrugged.
"I don't exactly have a refined palate either..."
Then she stole a glance at me and asked.
"...We've got some now, though. Can't we try a little with the meat tonight?"
She darted inside and came back with beef. No freezer, so the shelf life was short, but she'd brought it meaning to eat it soon. I nodded.
"Might as well find out how good it is."
There were still plenty of Sunro Mushrooms. And they'd settled something for me. In the rift dimension, resources precious enough to be treasures on Earth really were scattered across the ground like sand. It wasn't called a supreme-grade dimension for nothing.
"Oh—and when they bring the mushrooms, I told the Gob-rings to follow your orders. Work them in the fields and send them home at night."
"Wait, seriously? I can actually order them around?"
"You're the one in charge of the farming."
"This is gonna be fun."
Ruru looked a little frightened.
"What? Scared?"
"Master. You have to handle slaves carefully. If you slip up, they might rebel."
"Did that happen with the Previous Master?"
"...Yes."
"How did the Previous Master even get chosen for this place? Was she pretty?"
"..."
"Relax. Handling slaves was the easiest, most comfortable part of Farming World for me."
Only later, once Farm could be supplied without limit, did I switch to NPCs you manage by paying them—convenient, and they didn't need watching. Before the operation found its footing, the farm had been so packed with slaves of every race that calling the place Farming World would've been stranger than calling it Slave World.
"You'll have to handle them too, so when you've got a spare moment, you two can hand out the food."
"E-eh... you're giving us this, Master?"
Ruru startled, her eyes flying to the food in the PP box—the packaged snacks she treated as hers. The look on her face said it plainly. That's mine.
"Why would I give them that? There's plenty of meat in the crate."
"A-ah... yes?"
I'd already handed over every piece of Big Rat meat today. All that was left in the outdoor crate was meat from the Gob-rings I'd killed.
Butchering here turns a carcass straight into meat you can eat, so anyone who doesn't think about it just sees meat and digs in. Anyone who cares what it used to be might find it hard to stomach, which is why I hadn't eaten any myself. Throw it away, though? Meat, wasted? Impossible. Not for someone ten years into Farming World. I'd set it aside on the assumption a use would appear, and one had, right away.
"Oppa. This is Gob-ring meat, isn't it?"
"Yeah. So?"
"If you give that to the Gob-rings..."
"Are you a psychopath?"
"Huh?"
"Just give it to them. Why would you need to tell them what kind of meat it is?"
"..."
Big Rat or Gob-ring, if you don't check the item name, you have no choice but to eat it wondering whether it's pork or beef.
She had a campfire going, and the beef was already hissing on the iron grill pan she'd brought this time. Sujeong checked the wrapper it had come out of once more. Kimchi stew came out still bubbling, rice was set beside it, and a respectable spread took shape under the open sky. It hadn't even been a few days, but she was scoring points all the same.
I took a spoonful of stew and asked Ruru.
"There's a Corrupted Ogre I need to take down to the south. Know anything?"
"A Corrupted Ogre? Do you mean the Corrupted Tree, Master?"
"Yeah."
"Eep... that place is dangerous, Master. The Corrupted Ogre is something even the Previous Master only took down around the time she entered the Level 2 Biome... I believe it's an S- rank monster."
Ruru flapped her wings as she warned me. Good. She actually had information this time.
S- rank. Just hearing it, the thing sounded brutal. And this was the Level 0 Biome. Main quest or not, it didn't feel like something you were meant to clear here. The reward alone gave it away.
The right to choose an SSS+ Rank ability. You could stamp any difficulty on a prize like that and it wouldn't feel out of place. Still, a reward that big ought to make you swallow that much risk—otherwise, where's the fun? Hard, yes. Impossible, no. S- rank meant that with my current stats I could fight it dead even, or with a slight edge.
"Doable."
What to pick for the next SSS+ Rank ability. Wouldn't hurt to start thinking it over.