Chapter 1: You're Free
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 1: You're Free
“F-Fifty thousand gold! Are you serious?”
In a grand mansion in Kalia, the capital of the Traul Kingdom.
Count Bryan, the master of the mansion, shot to his feet in horror.
“My, my. Isn't she the apple of your eye? It seems money is more important to you than your daughter, Count.”
“Of course not! She's my only daughter. I... I just don't have that kind of money right now. That's all.”
“The House of Count Bryan, owners of the Dawn Travel Company, doesn't have a mere fifty thousand gold… That's not even a funny lie.”
“It’s n-not a lie. I've invested in a recent business venture, so I'm short on cash at the moment. It's true. Just wait until this deal is done. I'll get you the money you want, somehow.”
The merchandise being negotiated.
A woman with fine, silk-like red hair that fell to her hips and provocative crimson eyes.
Narsha Bryan stood a step back from the sofa, observing the situation.
Before her were her parents, whom she hadn't seen in two years.
Her mother was sobbing uncontrollably, while her father tried to soothe her and carry on the negotiation.
It had already been two years since she was abducted by ruffians during a carriage ride and sold into slavery. Both of her parents were noticeably gaunt, as if they hadn't been able to eat properly out of worry for their daughter.
Narsha felt a slight pang in her chest.
“I need the money now. If you can't pay, the deal is off.”
And across from them.
The man negotiating with parents who had lost their child, a man so cold-blooded he wouldn't bleed if you stabbed him.
Her master.
The man known as the Slave Reaper, Karami.
Fifty thousand gold, even for the only daughter of a count. They'd have to sell the entire Bryan estate to get a little over fifty thousand gold. How could they possibly prepare such a huge sum when he’d shown up without any warning?
Narsha knew.
That man had no intention of returning her to her family. This was nothing but a cruel charade, a vulgar spectacle designed to toy with people's emotions for his own amusement.
Because that's the kind of man he was.
“Then I suppose our business is concluded.”
While she was lost in thought, the negotiation seemed to have reached its end. The final words were exchanged, bringing the situation to a close.
If they parted ways here, she would never see her parents again until the day she died.
Perhaps her parents knew that as well.
Her father rushed over and pulled Narsha into an embrace. He sobbed his heart out, his arms tightening around her as if he would never let go again.
Her master didn't stop him.
It was a final act of mercy.
“Hic.”
Narsha buried her face in her father's embrace. She didn't swallow the sobs that escaped her.
‘…What a relief.’
She wasn't crying in the first place. What she swallowed instead of tears was a smile.
She was relieved she didn't have to go back.
It was an immense relief not to have to return to this suffocating prison.
How stifling her time in the mansion had been. She had realized during her two years as a slave that the outside world, with its infinite freedom, suited her nature.
And.
That her place was not by her family's side, but by her master's.
‘Ah, Mother. Father. I'm so sorry. My body and soul were tamed by this man long ago. I can't even imagine a life without him now.’
Please, do not forgive your wicked daughter who sighs in relief, ignorant of your pain.
Swallowing her silent apology, Narsha gently patted Count Bryan's back to fulfill her final duty as a daughter.
“Thank goodness. I'm so, so glad. I'm so glad you're healthy, Narsha.”
“Glad? But I have to leave again. Thank you for giving birth to me and raising me, Father.”
“Leave? Where are you going? This is your home.”
“I have to follow my master, of course. I'm not a noble lady, I'm a lowly slave.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Pardon?”
The disjointed conversation made Narsha lift her head.
Had her father lost his mind from the shock? But he simply blinked, his expression one of genuine confusion.
Beside him, her mother was beaming with a smile Narsha had never seen before, watching them with delight. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief as if witnessing a touching scene.
…Something was wrong. Narsha glanced around and finally realized what it was.
Her master, who had been sitting on the sofa just moments ago, was nowhere to be seen.
“F-Father. Wh-Where did my master go?”
“Master? You don't have to call him that anymore. You're no longer that bastard's slave.”
“Not a slave? B-But you didn't have the money, so the deal fell through…”
“The man asked for our family heirloom instead of money. It's a precious thing, to be sure, but how could a mere trinket like that compare to my one and only precious daughter? I told him to take it and get the hell out.”
The negotiation hadn't failed.
It wasn't a lie. The slave's shackles that had bound her soul were gone.
She was no longer his slave.
Narsha trembled as she turned her head. Far in the distance, outside the window, the man who had been her master was leaving the mansion with a brisk stride.
Their eyes met for a moment. He gave a small, cheerful wave. His lips clearly formed the words.
-Take care, Narsha.
The color drained from Narsha's face. Her father, oblivious to her state, looked at his pale daughter with the pity one would reserve for a tragic heroine.
“Oh, you poor thing. You must have suffered so much. Don't worry now. You can rest as much as you've… Huh? Narsha?”
Narsha roughly shoved the Count away and pressed herself against the window.
“N-No! No! Master, don't leave me! Master? Lord Karami! Hey, you son of a bitch! You promised we'd be together forever!”
“N-Narsha! Calm down! What are you all doing! Narsha's not in her right mind! Call a doctor at once and take her to her room to calm her down!”
Narsha slammed her fists on the window and screamed, but she was dragged away by the servants, who treated her like a pitiful victim.
Narsha's desperate cries never reached Karami. The only sound in his ears was his own cheerful humming.
“Yoo-hoo~”
Karami left the estate with light, brisk steps, tossing the jewel in the air like a ball. He saw the window that appeared before him and smiled with satisfaction.
[Liberation of 'Narsha Bryan,' daughter of the House of Count Bryan, complete]
────────────
Narsha Bryan, the heir to the Dawn Travel Company. Two years ago, she left the city to conduct business with another merchant group, but her caravan was attacked by bandits.
The caravan was decimated and most of her party was killed. Thanks to her high status and striking beauty, Narsha survived, only to become a lowly slave.
Narsha, once a noble lady and the future head of a merchant company, was reduced to a prostitute, fated to be used until her mind broke. But she was saved by a certain man and returned home safely.
The story began as a tragedy but ended as a comedy. Narsha decided to cherish this journey as a special memory she would never forget.
So much so that, in a way, she was glad she had become a slave.
────────────
Narsha Bryan's liberation is at 100%.
Reward: 5,000pt have been awarded.
You have acquired the Crimson Jewel.
Additional Reward: The effect of the [Master of Negotiation] skill has been enhanced.
* * *
Chapter 1.5: Slave Carnival
“Well, well, look who it is. If it isn’t the heartless Slave Reaper, Karami.”
“Good to see you, Mr. Bolt. I knew you’d be here.”
“Of course. Any slave trader worth his salt has to be. It’s the day of the Slave Carnival, the biggest event in the kingdom, held only once a year!”
The Slave Carnival.
It was the largest slave auction in the Traul Kingdom. A wide variety of rare slaves, the likes of which were never seen on a normal day, were put up for sale.
It drew the attention of not only slave traders, but commoners and nobles alike, to the point that it was often called a ‘festival’ by the public.
“I’m only telling you this, but they’ve got a pink goat beastkin on the block this time.”
“And is that supposed to be some great secret?”
“A slave trader who doesn’t even know this! Nothing compares to how tight and springy a goat beastkin is!”
“Ah… is that so?”
“Judging by your lukewarm reaction, you must be inexperienced. In that case, you should buy one this time. Once you fuck one, your body will never be satisfied with anything but a goat beastkin.”
That furry gay, Bolt, left me with his shitty advice and disappeared in the direction of the auction house. It’s a secret that a blush crept onto his face just before he left.
I shook my head.
Sigh. A man should strive to be a kind slave trader like me. What’s the world coming to? Tsk, tsk.
Thump.
As I was standing there blankly, I bumped into someone passing by. A muscular woman. The shackle around her neck was the mark of a slave.
Seeing the bag in her hands, she must have been running an errand. Because she collided with me, her groceries spilled all over the ground.
Even though she was a slave, I don’t let status get in the way. Like a gentleman, I offered a polite apology.
“My apologies, my lady. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“The fuck? You think a sorry fixes everything? What am I going to do with all this? My master’s going to fucking kill me… Black hair, black eyes? N-n-n-no, the Slave Reaper, Karami?!”
“Haha, I am sometimes called by that moniker.”
The woman’s face turned deathly pale.
She prostrated herself in the middle of the street with the speed of light.
“I am so sorry for bumping into you with my filthy body! You can stomp on my head until your anger subsides, just please, spare my life!”
“Haha, how could a gentleman do such a thing to a lady?”
“A gentleman? Gen… gen… Reaper! The Reaper! Gurgle.”
The woman foamed at the mouth and fainted.
“Hey! Karami broke another slave!”
“What? I heard he bought a ton of slaves recently, but he doesn’t have a single one with him.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He played with them for a bit and then threw them all away.”
“What? All of them? No wonder they call him the Slave Reaper. What a guy.”
The people on the street whispered as they looked at me. My reputation grew once again today.
In the wrong direction.
It had been a year since I was transmigrated into the body of the slave trader, Karami. I, who had dreamed of being a kind slave trader, had somehow become the Slave Reaper.
‘Where else could you find a slave trader as benevolent as me?’
This is so fucking unfair.
*
Tycoon of Slave.
TOS for short. It was a game where the user became a slave trader and enjoyed a happy life with their slaves.
A tycoon game is a genre of business simulation game.
For example, there are games where you make and sell coffee using good ingredients and good machines, and the game money you earn allows you to grow your coffee shop.
TOS was the same, only you sold slaves instead of coffee.
You buy a slave, raise them appropriately, and then sell them to receive a reward matching their value. You can use that money to buy a new slave and raise them, or you can use it for other things.
You could clear dungeons with the slaves you raised, open a shop and do business, or, if you verified your age, you could even raise them as sex slaves and do all sorts of ‘ehehehe’ things.
It was a world with various non-human races like elves and beastkin, so you could buy any slave you wanted and raise them to your liking.
It was a fairly popular game, praised for its high degree of freedom and charming female characters.
Then, a bomb dropped that turned TOS to dust. And it was self-detonated.
The starting point of this shitshow was a certain update patch. The fucking game company announced, ‘Ta-da! We’ve prepared an update you users will love!’
And what they rolled out was a 40-year-old elf.
Using the elven trait of longevity, they pulled the classic ‘she’s an adult by human standards, but her growth is slow because she’s an elf~’ trope, a common method for creating a ‘legal loli’ in fiction.
A legal loli?
Fine, whatever. There’s a pretty big demand for petite but mature characters. But she had to be reasonably small. The kid’s head didn’t even reach my waist. How the fuck is that an adult?
A cutscene of lifting and fucking that elf was included, and just as you’d expect, the game was taken down for violating child protection laws. A rumor circulated on the forums that the developers had been arrested by the police.
The game I had poured my entire college life into vanished overnight.
What about my time?
What about my lovely slaves?
My precious daughters, whom I had maxed out affection with and painstakingly raised, even turning away their temptations when they whimpered, ‘I want to have Master’s babies,’ were gone.
That day, I copy-pasted a 570-billion-character rant and spammed it everywhere—the community forums, the company’s email, the TOS review section—and the result was, ta-da.
‘You have been transmigrated into the game.’
The slave trader, Karami.
That was the character I possessed. He was a broke, pathetic character on the verge of starvation, let alone owning any slaves. How was I supposed to survive after being suddenly dropped into the Middle Ages?
The silver lining was that since I had played the game with considerable affection, I had memorized a good number of the strategies.
The misfortune within that fortune was that while I knew the strategies, I lacked the minimum capital to execute them.
Worse, this was reality, not a game, so I had to worry about food, clothing, and shelter. Forget raising slaves; I first got a job at an inn.
By a stroke of immense luck, I was transmigrated one year before the start of the main event, the Slave Carnival, which gave me time to prepare.
‘Though it’s a pretty tight schedule.’
If I don’t buy the slaves, they’ll be sold to someone else. If something goes wrong and a slave dies, I’ll be looking at a GAME OVER screen right from the start.
Now that I’m transmigrated, I probably won’t die instantly just because I fail to buy a slave, but if I don’t fulfill the [Condition for Return: Fully Liberate the Main Slaves.], I can’t go home.
I had to raise enough capital within a year to buy the story slaves and raise them perfectly.
I’d saved some money doing odd jobs at the inn, but it was a meager amount, barely enough to feed myself. I had to snowball this small sum and somehow make more money.
So, what was I to do?
‘Buy slaves and raise them, of course.’
*
In a tycoon game, there are usually two ways to make money. Let’s take a restaurant tycoon game as an example.
A restaurant tycoon.
It’s a game where you start by selling street food from a cart, gradually upgrade, and the ending is becoming the owner of a 3-star Michelin restaurant selling steak.
Selling expensive dishes earns you a lot of money. Selling steak at a restaurant is more profitable than selling tteokbokki at a street stall. That’s just common sense.
However, to sell steak, you need the finest ingredients, a chef to cook the food, and a venue that suits the cuisine.
If you can make and sell it, you can rake in a lot of money, but it’s a sales method that’s only possible once you have a certain foundation.
Naturally, your eyes then turn to the lower-tier dishes, but selling street food isn’t very efficient. Considering the investment of time and money, you’d be better off just getting a part-time job.
You can’t sell steak, but selling street food is a bit iffy. For times like these, there’s a perfect dish.
Rice soup.
You get a decent profit from a moderate investment.
TOS also had a product that served the role of that rice soup: beastkin. In the human kingdom of Traul, beastkin were considered lowly animals and were often abused.
Beastkin slaves, broken in either body or mind, would appear on the market at cheap prices, their product value diminished.
According to the game’s system, where liberating a more wounded slave yielded a greater reward, beastkin slaves were the perfect bread-and-butter product.
To others, they were troublesome burdens, but to me, they were a lifeline.
I used the money I earned from my part-time job to buy beastkin, feed them, and treat their wounds. Once their value had risen to a certain point, I led them to the beastkin kingdom of Vestia.
The payment for the slaves from Vestia, plus the system’s reward for liberating them… I repeated this process over and over, and the money steadily piled up!
I raised and liberated beastkin as if running a factory, and as a result, I succeeded in amassing a huge sum of 5,000 gold coins in just one year. It was more than enough to buy the story slaves.
The only problem was that by the time I came to my senses, my reputation had hit rock bottom.
I had even earned the infamous moniker, the Slave Reaper.
‘…But why?’
The reason was simple.
Despite buying an infinite number of slaves, not a single one remained by my side. In the eyes of others, I was a piece of human trash who used them for fun and then disposed of them.
I treated them so well, it’s truly sad. But what can you do? The beastkin I sent back to their homeland all thanked me. That’s enough for me.
Ah, the completion of a world where no one gets hurt.
In any case, I had gathered enough money and, while I was at it, obtained an item from the House of Count Bryan that would help with raising slaves. I also returned Narsha to her family, so it was a win-win for everyone.
The preparations were complete.
It was time to enter the main episode.
“Everyone, this year’s Slave Carnival is already drawing to a close. But the excitement is several times hotter than when we started!”
The auctioneer in charge of the slave auction shouted into a magic tool.
All the slaves from the previous auctions had been sold.
For the record, Bolt bought the pink goat beastkin he mentioned earlier. Turns out, it was a fucking male. From now on, your name is Furry Bolt, the ass-eating gay.
“Before we meet today’s main dish, I will introduce an appetizer.”
Clack! A spotlight turned on, illuminating the stage and revealing a young girl who had been hidden in the darkness.
A petite frame, maybe around 150cm tall.
Wavy hair that seemed to have captured the night sky, and indigo eyes.
She was draped in rags that could hardly be called clothes, and her thin limbs suggested she hadn’t been eating well.
As the slave girl came into view, information about her appeared. She was a girl I already knew.
[Mirabelle, the Abandoned Witch]
She was the first main slave.