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Uncle and the Slave Merchant (part 2)
“Little Jinwen has gone missing?”
Elan looked at me with big eyes as she asked me.
I nodded my head.
“He shouldn’t have been missing for long. We might be able to find him if we immediately go search the vicinity. Master, do you have any leads?”
Carolina looked down at the town from the balcony after speaking.
“It should be in order to prevent Jinwen from running away again, the merchant will sell him at the nearby slave market. If it was me, that’s what I would choose to do.”
I fixed my gaze on Little Jinwen’s bed while speaking.
“That’s good then, master. If we go now, maybe we can——”
“Maybe we can catch up to them?”
I cut off Carolina’s words.
“Yes, it might be too late if we wait.”
I snorted.
“Carolina, Little Elan, pack up our things and get ready to go.”
“To go and save Little Jinwen?”
“No. Prepare to go to another town.”
“But Little Jinwen……”
I let out a long sigh, staring into Carolina’s eyes.
“Carolina, I only save those who are in front of me. Little Jinwen was not stolen by anyone, and he wasn’t snatched away by anyone either. He was just following his own desires and used those two legs of his to walk away. For him, returning to his owner is more important than coming along on our journey. If I wanted to save him, how could I do it?”
“But he obviously ran away; he didn’t want to be a slave!”
Little Elan cried while looking at me.
Sorry, Little Elan.
I didn’t say that to make you sad and scared, but I’m not going to give in everytime you cry. “People do not not know the harms of their son, but they also don’t know the strength of their rice seedlings.”[1] For me, I needed to watch Carolina’s progress, while also watching over Little Elan’s deficiency. I was not bringing her with me to raise her into a useless person.
Thus, I raised my face and said:
“So? I don’t care about a single, momentary decision, but the long term, much stronger will. I think that instead of wallowing in the past until death, I would rather choose the future. Jinwen chose to surrender to his status as a slave. Even if I rescued him, nothing will change. I will not give in.”
I crossed my arms and looked down at those two.
At this time, Mademoiselle Phantom’s face appeared at a distance very close to mine.
“But Zhai He, didn’t you obviously save me?”
“I don’t remember that happening.”
“Here we go again, here we go again~”
Mademoiselle Specter passed back and forth through my body as if doing the backstroke.
“Zhai He, when you saved me, I was a specter without any self-awareness. Naturally, I couldn’t look to the future, isn’t that so?”
“You’re just quibbling. I had never thought of saving you from the start. I just wanted to free Little Elan from your control. That’s it.”
“But in the end, wasn’t I saved by you?”
“So?”
“So Zhai He,”
Mademoiselle Phantom gave an elegant and bewitching smile.
“You unconsciously saved others. I wasn’t saved by you because I had been pursuing the future. It was because I was saved by you that I started to look to the future.”
Like this, my reasoning was reduced to mere sophistry by Mademoiselle Specter’s attack.
I unceasingly tried to think of words in retaliation, but in the end, I could not speak a word.
Ah ah, so noisy, so noisy.
I carelessly rubbed my hair.
“I know. I will go do it.”
Mademoiselle Phantom pushed back her glasses and circled above me happily.
Saving Little JInwen wasn’t a simple thing. I needed a plan.
Before I do anything, I need to first confirm my funds.
I had eleven gold coins worth of things on me. I didn’t know if that would be enough.
Little Jinwen’s weakness was that he accepted his position as a slave. Accepting a set of values that I see as unreasonable.
I couldn’t blame him for this. Even Carolina believed that the trafficking of slaves and using slaves was an ordinary occurrence. This is the system of values of this world. Using the words from my original world, this was the limitations of history. These limits were very easy for me to stay detached from, but from their point of view, it was insurmountable. This was because I came from a much more technologically advanced society. If in the future, people would start to specially raise babies for eating, then I would see this as inhumane, but maybe the people of the future wouldn’t care.
This was the most annoying aspect. Wanting to shake the world’s slave system of course was not practical. This was a thing that could only be left to time to do. There definitely would be a day when slaves would not be able to take the oppression and start an insurrection, securing their human rights. But that had nothing to do with me.
There was only one thing I could do, and that was to make Little Jinwen understand.
He was not a slave.
Rather, he was my, Zhai He’s, friend, an indispensable travelling companion on this journey.
Thus, I needed to go find his owner.
[1] Blind to the things right in front of you.
Thank you!!
Who’s Carolina???
Carolina = Ka Luona.
While I don’t really know any Chinese beyond the dim sum menu, I would extrapolate from Japanese that it’s a difference in the romanization of a name from a Chinese phonetic spelling… for example, in Japanese there is no such letter as L, and it is based upon whole syllables, no the consonants and vowels like English… so to write the word “love” in Japanese katakana, you would approximate to “rabu” らぶ. I’m guessing that this is a similar kind of thing.
The view taken by the MC regarding slavery is BS and unfortunately alot of these have slavery in them and have MC who are relatively OK with the slavery or at least don’t fight it any.
Let’s take US slavery, it was not simply ended because slaves rose up and overthrew their status. And that’s impossible when there is only a few slaves anyway, especially of another race to be prejudice against.
US and Britian slavery ended in part because people who were not slaves, spoke out against and fought against the slavery. Not all did it for entirely morale reasons, but that does not matter.
MC should be fighting against the slavery, be the first in one of these other world reincarnated stories to do so.
MC should attempt to free the slaves within his grasp, and not with money. “steal” them. Kill the slave master so that she can’t pursue and cause trouble.
Truepurple…..are you an idiot, or have you not been paying attention to the story? He does NOT approve of slavery, but the culture their does. He does NOT consider himself a hero and does not wish to try changing the values of society because of the trouble it would bring to him. AND oh by the way slavery existed for thousands of years before Britain or the USA used it. Rome used it for a long time for people who couldn’t pay their debts or prisoners of war. Not necessarily because people were born different, but because they ended up being inferior to those who the competed against whether in martial or economic endeavors AND regardless if the competition was rigged BECAUSE life isn’t fair…so eventually slaves were looked down on as inferior and in the world of fantasy where people have cheat like abilities THERE WILL ALWAYS BE THOSE WHO EXPLOIT OTHERS
Why does every MC have to be politically motivated…just enjoy the story or don’t and stop reading it