Chapter 34:
To Ratome Village
RATOSU VILLAGE’S ADVENTURER PLAZA was quiet, so I slept soundly. That was good news for me but probably bad news for the village. The gloomy mood permeated the whole place, bringing me down, too. I wanted to get out of here as soon as possible. I’d planned on catching field mice and making some money, but maybe that could wait until the next village.
If I was reading the map correctly, it would take me seven days to reach Ratome Village. I’d found my map out of sheer luck, but it was surprisingly accurate.
I visited a butcher, but none of their meat looked very good, so I left without buying. Food poisoning during travel was the worst. Red potions could cure it, but my lesser potions would take a while to get it done. Best to avoid it entirely.
Five days after leaving depressing Ratosu Village, my fear of tree monsters settled down and I could sleep in the woods again. Thank goodness for that.
As I walked along the village road, I felt a few auras up ahead, so I hid Sora in a bag. Not long after, I saw a group of adventurers approaching. The group was a little too big to be one team.
I moved to the edge of the path and waited for them to pass. As I watched them go by, I noticed the group had slaves among them. This was my first time seeing slaves. Small villages almost never had any, so I’d only heard about them.
I’d heard that towns and big villages had slave traders, but it’d never really been my business so I hadn’t given it much thought. I was surprised to hear from an adventurer that bandits would kidnap people and sell them as slaves.
I’d overheard that adventurer warning their child about the bandits: “Don’t trust people when you’re traveling. If you’re in the forest, stay away from people just like you would monsters. And even if you see someone hurt and begging for help, stay away.” Apparently, some bandits pretended to be injured to lure people in.
The fortune-teller had warned me about bandits, too, but I didn’t know they kidnapped people.
There were two other types of slaves: criminal slaves and debt slaves. Criminal slaves were people who had broken the law. They were treated as slaves by the state until their sentence was up. They were often put to really hard labor for private businesses.
Debt slaves were people who couldn’t pay off their debts. Were these adventurers escorting debt slaves? I’d also heard in a plaza that adventurers could end up in debt, too, if they failed to complete requests. I’d better be careful to not end up like them.
I would soon be passing through big villages and towns, where bandits were more likely to pop up. I was alone, so they would see me as easy prey. I would have to stay sharp!
I searched for auras near the village road. Once the coast was clear, I took Sora back out of its bag.
The slime was a little bigger than before. After healing me, its shape had become much more consistent, too. Sora used to be flat as a pancake, but now it was a proper teardrop shape. It did still look a liiittle bit stretched…but at this rate, it would look just like a normal slime before long. Then I’d be able to keep it out next to me at all times.
Sora’s translucent body did bother me, though. I’d seen tamed slimes before, and most of them looked murky. Some were a more uniform hue, but none of them were translucent. Sora, on the other hand, was a translucent blue. You could even see the bubbles inside when it ate.
I know! I’ll go to a bookstore in the next village. They might not have anything about Sora, but maybe they have books that go in-depth about slimes. Or at least mention something about the colors.
If Sora was the only translucent slime out there, then it might have to stay in my bag forever. My blobby friend hopped down onto the village road, bouncing along with me as I walked. This was another new trick it had learned to do after healing my wound.
Reflecting on how Sora had been when we first met, I could see it was a lot stronger now. I remembered worrying that it would die overnight back then.
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