"Hey, who's this, isn't it Karami, the bloodless, tearless slave reaper?"
"Good to see you, Mr. Bolt. You've come after all."
"Oh, never mind. Of course a slave trader would come. It's the day of the kingdom's biggest slave carnival, held once a year!"
Slave Carnival.
The largest slave auction in the Kingdom of Trawl. A wide variety of rare and unusual slaves are auctioned off.
It is often referred to as a "carnival" because it attracts not only slave traders, but also commoners and nobles alike.
"For your information only, Suyin, the pink goat, is up for auction."
"Is that some kind of big secret?"
"For a slave trader, you don't know this! The chewy texture of goat suin is incomparable to any other race!"
"Ah... Is that so?"
"Judging from your lukewarm reaction, I'm guessing you haven't experienced it yet. If so, take this opportunity to buy it. You'll never be satisfied unless you're a goat handler."
Perry Bolt Gay left the dog's advice and disappeared in the direction of the auction house. It's no secret that a flush came over his face just before he left.
I shook my head in disbelief.
He's supposed to be a good slave trader like me, not like that, eep, eep, eep.
Tsk.
I stood there and bumped into a passerby. A muscular woman. The shackles around her neck were the mark of a slave.
Judging by the bags she was carrying, she must have been running an errand, but when she bumped into me, her groceries spilled out.
Even though he is a slave, I don't care about his status. Like a gentleman, I apologized politely.
"I'm sorry, sir. My lady. I was distracted."
"What the fuck, is that all you can do, apologizing? What's the point of all this, the master's bastard is going to give me the... black hair, black eyes? No, no, no, no, Karami the Slave Reaper?!"
"Haha, I've been called that."
The woman's face turned pale.
She fell to the ground in the middle of the street at lightning speed.
"I apologize for bumping into you with my filthy body, please feel free to trample on my head until you are relieved of your burden!"
"Haha, how could you be a gentleman and do such a thing to a lady?"
"A gentleman, a gentleman, a gentleman, a gentleman, a gentleman, a gentleman, Gerorok."
The woman bit the bubble and fainted.
"Hey! Karami broke the slave again!"
"What, I thought he bought a bunch of slaves last time, but he doesn't have any of them with him?"
"That's obvious, he probably just played with them for a while and then threw them away."
"Heh, all those slaves? They don't call him the Slave Reaper for nothing, he's quite the guy."
The world is talking about me. My reputation goes up another notch today.
In a bad way.
It's been a year since I was possessed by the slave trader Karami. I dreamed of being a good slave trader, and now I'm a slave reaper.
"There's no good slave trader like me.
It's so fucking unfair.
Tycoon of Slaves.
Taosl for short. It's a game where you play as a slave trader and enjoy a happy life with your slaves.
Tycoon is a genre of games, and games in the management simulation genre are called tycoon games.
For example, there are games where you make coffee with good ingredients and a good machine and sell it to earn money to grow your coffee shop.
Taosl doesn't sell coffee, it sells slaves.
You can buy slaves, train them properly, and sell them for a reward that matches their value. You can use the money to buy new slaves, train them again, or spend it on other things.
You can roam the dungeons with your slaves, open a shop to do business, or even turn them into sex slaves when they reach the age of majority.
In a world where there are many different races, such as elves and water people, you can purchase slaves you like and train them to your liking.
It was a popular game with high freedom and attractive girls as its biggest advantages.
One day, a bomb went off that turned Taosl into dust. It even self-destructed.
One day, an updated patch was the fucking point. "Voila, we've got an update you're going to love!" the game's assholes said.
And out pops this fucking 40-year-old elf.
Using the elven trait of being a long-lived species, they created a legal loli, which is a common trope in creations that says something like, "I'm an adult at human age, but my elven growth is slower.
Legal loli?
Yeah, that's good, because there's a lot of demand for chunky characters, but they have to be small enough. How the fuck is that a grown man when his head doesn't even reach his waist.
There was a cutscene where the elf was trapped and bounced around, and then the game was busted and destroyed. Rumor has it that the creator was taken away by the police.
The game I had spent my entire college career on was gone.
And my time?
And my lovely slaves?
I maxed out my likability and said, "I want to give birth to my master's slaves." I struggled to resist the temptation, and my pampered daughters and sisters disappeared.
That day, I poured out 570 billion characters of comms, game company emails, Tao Scribblings, and rage, and voila.
"Possessed by the game.
Karami the Slave Trader.
That was the character I possessed. He was a penniless, low-class character who would starve to death. I was dropped in the middle of nowhere and asked how to live.
The good thing is that I played the game with a lot of love, so I memorized the strategy to a certain extent.
The unfortunate thing is that even though I know the strategy, I don't have the minimum capital to implement it.
I also had to solve the rituals because it's not a game, it's real life. I'm Nabal, a slave trainer, and I got a job at an inn.
Luckily for Bing, the timing of the game was a year before the main event, the Slave Carnival, so he had time to prepare.
"It's pretty tight.
If you don't buy a slave, he's sold to someone else. If something goes wrong and the slave dies, it's GAME OVER as soon as you start.
I don't think you'll die for failing to buy a slave at this point, but if you don't fulfill [Return Condition: Completely free your main slaves], you won't go home.
You have one year to raise enough capital to buy and fully train a story slave.
I've accumulated a small amount of money by doing odd jobs at the inn, but it's barely enough to feed myself. I need to snowball this small amount of money somehow.
What should I do then?
Buy a slave.
*** *** *** *** ******.
There are usually two ways to make money in a tycoon, let's take the restaurant tycoon as an example.
Restaurant tycoon.
In this game, you start by selling food from a stall, then upgrade and eventually become the owner of a three-star Michelin restaurant, selling steaks.
You can earn a lot of money by selling expensive dishes. Selling steak at a restaurant is more profitable than selling tteokbokki at a bistro. It's a truism.
However, to sell steaks, you need the best ingredients, a chef to prepare the food, and a place to serve it.
If you can make it and sell it, you can rake in a lot of money, but you need to have some kind of foundation.
This naturally leads to the next level of cooking, but selling meals by the piece is not very efficient. Considering the investment and time, you might as well just get a part-time job.
You can't sell steaks, and you can't sell bunsiks. There is a perfect dish for this situation.
It's soup.
It's a modest investment with a decent return.
In Taosl, there is a product that serves as such a soup: the Suin. Suyin are often mistreated in the human kingdom of Trawl because they are considered to be lowly beasts.
One by one, their bodies and minds are broken, making them less valuable, and they are sold to the market at a low price.
In a game system where the more wounded a slave is, the more rewarding it is to free them, the more soup they are.
To some, they were a nuisance to deal with, but to me, they were a part of the family.
I used the money I earned from my part-time job to buy them, feed them, and heal their wounds. When they were of some value, I took them to the kingdom of Vestia.
The slave price paid in Vestia, plus the system's reward for freeing them. Do this again and again, and the money piles up!
I nurtured and freed watermen like a factory, and as a result, I succeeded in earning 5,000 gold coins in just one year. That's more than enough money to buy a story slave.
The problem is, his reputation has taken a turn for the worse.
He was infamously known as Karami the Slave Buyer.
"Why...?
The reason was simple.
I've bought an infinite number of slaves, and I don't have any of them left. I'm just a piece of human garbage to be disposed of when people think they've seen enough.
It's so sad because I was so good to him. But what can I do? The Sioux greeted me on my way home, and that's enough.
Alas, a perfect world where no one gets hurt.
Anyway, I've collected enough money, and I've also gotten some items from Count Briam that will help me raise my slaves, and I've returned Narsha to her family, so it's a win-win.
You're all set.
It's time to enter the main episode.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this year's Slave Carnival is already coming to a close. But the excitement is many times hotter than it started!"
The emcee of the slave auction shouts into his gavel.
All the slaves from the previous auction have been sold.
By the way, Mr. Bolt purchased the pink goat, Suin, that he said he would, and it's a fucking male. From this day forward, your name is Perry Bolt Shit Crab.
"Before we meet today's main dish, let me introduce you to the appetizer."
A spotlight flickers on the podium, revealing a girl shrouded in darkness.
She's petite, about five-foot-five.
Wavy hair and indigo eyes that seem to reflect the night sky.
She wore rags that could hardly be called clothes, and her thin limbs looked like they hadn't been well fed.
Slave. As she came into view, the information popped up. She was a girl I already knew.
[Mirabelle, the Forsaken Witch]
The first main slave.