"Well, well, look who's here. If it isn't Slave Reaper Karami!"
"A pleasure to see you, Mr. Bolt. You're here as expected."
"Of course! Any self-respecting slave trader has to attend. It's the kingdom's biggest Slave Carnival of the year!"
The Slave Carnival.
It was the largest slave auction in the Traul Kingdom. A wide variety of rare slaves, not usually available, were put up for auction.
Not only slave traders, but commoners and nobles alike showed great interest, which is why it was often called a 'festival' by the public.
"I'll let you in on a secret. There's a pink goat beastkin up for auction this time."
"Is that supposed to be some big secret?"
"What kind of slave trader are you to not know this! They say that the tight squeeze of a goat beastkin is incomparable to any other race!"
"Ah… Is that so?"
"Your unenthusiastic response tells me you're still inexperienced. Take this chance to buy one. Once you've had a go, you won't be satisfied with anything but a goat beastkin."
Furry Bolt Gay left that shitty advice before disappearing towards the auction hall. The flush on his face just before leaving was our little secret.
I shook my head disapprovingly.
Geez, what's wrong with people? They should be kind slave traders like me. Tsk.
Thud.
Lost in thought, I bumped into a passerby. A muscular woman. The shackles around her neck marked her as a slave.
Judging by the bag she was carrying, she seemed to be running errands, but our collision caused her groceries to spill everywhere.
Although she was a slave, I didn't discriminate based on status, so I apologized politely like a gentleman.
"I am terribly sorry, my lady. I was distracted."
"Is that all you've got to say? That you're FUCKING SORRY? What am I supposed to do about this? My bastard master is gonna… Black hair, black eyes? N-No no no no no, Slave Reaper Karami?!"
"Haha, I am known by that name, yes."
The woman's face turned deathly pale and she prostrated herself in the middle of the street at lightning speed.
"I'm so sorry for touching you with my filthy body! Please, you can trample my head until your anger is sated, just spare my life!"
"Haha, what kind of gentleman would I be to do such a thing to a lady?"
"Gentleman? Gentleman-gentleman-gentle… GRIM REAPER! Urrkk!"
The woman foamed at the mouth and fainted.
"Hey! Karami broke another slave!"
"What's this? I heard he bought a bunch of slaves recently, but he's not even keeping any?"
"It's obvious, isn't it? He probably just plays with them for a bit and then throws 'em all away."
"Whew. All those slaves? No wonder he's called the Slave Reaper. Damn, what a guy."
People around us were whispering about me, and once again, my reputation took a hit.
In the wrong direction.
It had been a year since I transmigrated into the slave trader Karami. I, who dreamed of being a kind slave trader, had somehow become known as the Slave Reaper.
As if there's a slave trader as benevolent as me out there.
This is so fucking unfair.
***
Tycoon of Slaves.
TOS for short. It was a game where players became slave traders and enjoyed a happy life with their slaves.
A tycoon was a gaming genre, specifically, a business simulation game.
For example, there were games where you made and sold coffee using good ingredients and machines, earning in-game money to grow your coffee shop.
TOS was just like that, except you were selling slaves instead of coffee.
You bought slaves, raised them appropriately, and then sold them for a reward based on their value. You could use that money to buy new slaves and raise them, or use it for other purposes.
You could explore dungeons with the slaves you've raised, open a shop to do business, or if you were age-verified, you could even raise them as sex slaves and go hehehe.
With a world setting that included various non-human races like elves and beastkin, you could purchase and raise the slaves you wanted according to your taste.
It was a fairly popular game, with its high degree of freedom and attractive female characters being its biggest selling points.
Then a bomb dropped that turned TOS to dust. It was nothing less than a self-destruction.
It all started with a patch note one day. Those bastards at the game company were like, 'Tada! We've prepared an update that players will love!'
And the bullshit that came out of that? A forty-year-old elf.
Taking advantage of the long-lived nature of elves, they tried to create a legal loli situation, like, 'She's an adult in human years, but elves mature slowly~', a trope you see all too often in creative works.
Legal loli?
Fine, whatever. There was quite a demand for busty characters too. But they should be reasonably sized. So, how the hell was it an adult when its head didn't even reach your waist? Fuck.
They included a cutscene of pounding the elf with her legs wrapped around you mid-air, and sure enough, the game got caught up in child protection laws and vanished. Rumors spread on forums afterwards that the developers were arrested.
The game I had poured my entire college life into disappeared overnight.
What about my time?
My beloved slaves?
They were all gone—the daughters I had raised with such care, maxing out their affection, resisting their seductive 'I want to give birth to Master's slave. Ngh please…'
That very day, I copy-pasted 5.7 billion characters of rage across community forums, the game company's email, and TOS review sections. And the result was…
You have been transmigrated into the game.
Slave Trader Karami.
That was the character I transmigrated into. A low-tier character with no money, let alone slaves, about to starve to death. How was I supposed to survive after being suddenly dropped into the medieval era?
My saving grace in all of this was that I was so into this game that I had memorized a good chunk of strategies.
However, the bad news was that while I knew the strategies, I lacked the minimum funds to put them into action.
Moreover, since this was my reality now and not a game, I had to take care of food, clothing, and shelter. Forget raising slaves, I had to get a job at an inn first.
Fortunately, I had transmigrated into the game one year before the main event, the Slave Carnival, so I had time to prepare.
There's not much time left, but…
If I can't buy the slave, that slave will be sold to someone else. If something goes wrong and the slave dies, it's game over right from the start.
Now that I had transmigrated, I probably wouldn't die instantly if I couldn't buy the slave, but if I failed to achieve [Return Condition: Grant absolute freedom to all main slaves], I can't go home.
I needed to secure enough funds within a year to buy and perfectly raise the story slaves.
While I had scraped together some savings from odd jobs at the inn, it was a meager amount, barely enough for one person to survive on. Somehow, I had to flip this small sum into a fortune, rolling it like a snowball to accumulate wealth.
So what's my next move?
Buy slaves and raise them, of course.
***
In tycoon games, there were usually two routes to make money. Let's use a restaurant tycoon as an example.
Restaurant Tycoon.
You started by selling street food from a food cart, gradually upgrading until you finally became the owner of a 3-star Michelin restaurant selling steaks.
Selling expensive dishes could earn you a lot of money, and selling steak at a restaurant was more profitable than selling tteokbokki at a snack bar. That was the golden rule.
However, to sell steak, you needed top-quality ingredients, chefs to cook the food, and a suitable venue.
If you could make and sell it, you'd rake in a lot of money, but you needed a certain foundation to make such sales possible.
Naturally, your attention turned to lower-tier dishes, but selling street food wasn't very efficient. Considering the investment cost and time, you might as well just work part-time.
You couldn't sell steak, and selling street food was iffy. That's when the perfect middle-ground dish came in.
It was rice soup.
You got decent profits with moderate investment.
In TOS, there was a product that played the role of rice soup—the beastkin. In the human kingdom of Traul, beastkin were considered lowly animals and were often abused.
Beastkin slaves whose bodies or minds were damaged in some way had a reduced market value and appeared for sale at cheap prices.
In a game system where the rewards were higher the more damaged the slave was, freeing those beastkin slaves was the very definition of rice soup.
To some they might be troublesome burdens, but to me, they were a lifeline.
With the money I earned from part-time jobs, I bought beastkins, fed them, and treated their wounds adequately. Once their value had increased sufficiently, I guided them to the Beastkin Kingdom of Vestia.
Using the slave payment from Vestia and the system reward for freeing slaves, I repeated this process over and over. Gradually, the money began to pile up!
I raised and liberated beastkin like running a factory, and as a result, I managed to amass a huge sum of 5,000 gold coins in just one year. It was enough to buy the story slaves and have some left over.
The only problem was that when I came to my senses, my reputation had hit rock bottom.
I even gained the infamous title of Karami the Slave Reaper.
Why…?
The reason was simple.
Despite buying an endless number of slaves, there wasn't a single slave left by my side. In people's eyes, I was human trash who used slaves for fun and then disposed of them.
I was really sad about this. I treated them so well. But what could I do? The beastkin returning to their homeland thanked me, and that was all I needed.
Ahh, the completion of a world where no one gets hurt.
Anyway, I had gathered enough money, and I had also obtained items from Count Bryan's family that would help with raising future slaves. I even sent Narsha back to her family, so it was a win-win for everyone.
The preparations were complete.
It was time to enter the main episode.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this year's Slave Carnival is already nearing its end. But the excitement has only intensified since we began!"
The auctioneer shouted that into a magic tool.
All the slaves that appeared in the previous auctions have been sold.
By the way, Bolt bought the pink goat beastkin he mentioned earlier, and it was fucking male. Starting today, your name is Furry Bolt Gayshit.
"Before we meet today's main dish, let me introduce the appetizer."
A spotlight suddenly illuminated the stage, revealing a girl who had been hidden in the darkness.
She was petite, barely 150cm tall, with wavy hair as dark as the night sky and eyes of indigo. Her clothes were little more than rags, hanging loosely on her body, and her thin limbs made it clear she'd been underfed for some time.
As the slave girl entered my view, her information was displayed. I already knew who this young girl was.
[Mirabelle, the Abandoned Witch]
The first main slave.