“I never thought a party led by an A-Rank Adventurer would be this weak,” I commented as I watched the battle between Leia and the Earth Slime.

“Master, I think your standard is too high. The ones who entered your previous Dungeon are Champions and Heroes, whose strength was comparable to SSS-Rank Adventurers.” Slimerin said with a sigh. As for how she got that information… I wondered about it too. It seemed she knew much more about this world than me, even though she was born just a month ago. Or was it two months ago?

Well, whatever.

More importantly…

“SSS-Rank Adventurers? I think S-Rank is already the highest rank?” I asked curiously.

“Well, that was five thousand years ago. After that, because a lot of people stronger than the rest S-Rank Adventurers appeared one after another, the Guild created SS-Rank for those people. And after that, they also created SSS-Rank for the same reason. It was two thousand years ago.” Slimerin explained to me.

How did she get that kind of information?

Must be because of her high INT stats, right?

The fight between the Earth Slime and Leia came to an end. The Earth Slime was unable to blow the conclusive hit at Leia, however, Leia couldn’t defeat it either. I could guess the strength of the Earth Slime was around S-Rank Adventurers, huh?

Well, for the tenth floor Boss, it should be enough, right? I didn’t have to summon my Slime King, no, Slime Queen, the strongest Slime of them all, right?

By the way, Leia was defeated because she consumed all of her Mana and she fainted because of that. As for the others, the Scout, the Healer, and the other Warrior were suffocated to the point of fainting and the Mage was hit by a pebble on her head. Well, her wound was not too bad, so she should alright. However, she was the only one who was injured in this fight, huh?

I set the Dungeon to send the fainting Adventurers back to the safe room on the first floor automatically, so they should be alright. Naturally, I didn’t forget to take their weapons and their items, such as gold and the potions. They would be used to fill my treasure chest after all.

After having fun with the Dungeon, I returned to my dorm and decided to have a quick nap.

…

Night.

The dorm had a cafeteria, but sometimes, or most of the time, the students preferred to eat outside the school. It was not that the food provided in the cafeteria was not delicious, but rather, there were only a few menus there. So, after a week of eating the same things over and over again, the students became bored and chose to eat outside most of the time.

As for me, I was going to the inn as usual. Well, I only came here thrice a week though. Also, since I came in Faye appearances, Rita and the others didn’t think that I was Fey. It seemed they were safe and the nobles didn’t do anything to them. As for my promise to teach Rayleigh, I kept it by using letters. Sometimes, I saw his progress and wrote letters so he could learn further though.

By the way, Rita was like usual. She sat nearby and started gossiping. Oh, also, I had to ask her whether there was a letter for Fey or not, or she would forget about it. Just like when I had to give a speech in the opening ceremony.

“Oh, I have a letter for Fey, will you give it to her?” Rita said as she picked a letter from her pocket. When I looked at the sender’s name, I wanted to burn the letter without reading it.

The sender was the silly Goddess, Briana. She had gone to do a quest in another town since… two weeks ago, perhaps?

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It had been two weeks and she hadn’t returned, so I believed the quest, or rather, the situation in that town was quite dangerous. Or even if it was not dangerous, it must be tedious. And if she sent me a letter, it must be because she thought that I would help her after reading the letter, which was why I wanted to burn the letter without reading it first.

After having dinner and chatting with Rita for a while and looking at Rayleigh's progress, I left that inn. I had one place that I wanted to go to now, but I didn’t want to come there with my Faye appearances. So, I donned a cloak and asked Slimerin to cancel my disguise. I also asked her to prepare a retreat, a temporary teleportation gate to the Dungeon, just in case. After that, I went to the Slum and went to the Slave Market.

Yep, I went to the Slave Market to buy some Slaves. I didn’t know the price of the Slaves, but I thought a few hundred of gold coins would be enough to buy several Slaves.

Actually, buying Slaves was not what I wanted, but I couldn’t steal the Slaves easily. No, I could steal the Slaves from the market, but the Slave Crest that was put on the Slaves was troublesome. With that Slave Crest, the Master could easily order the Slaves to kill themselves, even from a thousand miles away. So, if I stole the Slaves without doing anything to the Slave Crest, it was no different than killing those Slaves. So, I had no choice but to buy a few of them legally and tried to experiment with their Slave Crest later.

…I didn’t have any confidence in undoing the Slave Crest though, not with my limited knowledge.

When I reached the Slave Market, I saw the scenery that caused me to go crazy. Almost. Yep, the treatment the Beast-kins had was really the worst. I had to silently grit my teeth and kept walking, looking for the shop attendances.

By the way, I asked Slimerin to make me a bit matured, since they wouldn’t believe a young girl like me having much money. But if it were the mature version of myself, I should be able to buy the Slaves without problems.

As I entered one of the shops, the shop attendance approached me with an annoying smile on his face. He rubbed his hands excitedly as he looked at me from the top of the head to the bottom. It seemed he tried to appraise whether I was wealthy or not, so I ignored him.

“Dear customer, is there anything I can help you with?” He asked. His voice was grating to the ear, or perhaps it was only my biased ears, huh?

“Show me the Beast-kins slaves,” I said while gritting my teeth. Actually, I already saw several Beast-kins slaves in this shop, and they were thin and their eyes were lifeless. It seemed the slavers treated them so badly that they lost the will to live. But they couldn’t kill themselves because of the Slave Crest either.

The shop attendance seemed to misunderstand my expression. Perhaps he was thinking that my hate for the Beast-kins was so powerful and I wanted some Beast-kins slaves so I could torture them. Well, it didn’t matter what he thought. More importantly, he brought me to the Beast-kins slaves right away.

“Here, you can see our best goods for Beast-kins. Do you prefer the young ones or the older ones? Do you want males or females? What kind of Beast-kins do you want to see? We have Dog-kins, Cat-kins, Lizard-kins, Squirrel-kins, and some major Beast-kins as well.” He asked while walking in front of me. While walking, I saw some cages and within them, the slaves were chained. There were some human slaves as well, but the numbers were not many. There were more Beast-kins there. Perhaps because the wars between humans and Beast-kins happened more often than the wars between humans and humans, huh?

Rather, those humans looked like criminals, right? For criminals to be enslaved, it should be alright. So, I only looked at them with a quick glance before followed the shop attendance to the deeper part of the shop.

We stopped at a place with cages all around us. The cages were stacked and reached the ceilings. And all cages were filled with two or three Beast-kins, it seemed. The numbers should reach… a hundred or even more, huh?

Once again, I gritted my teeth, and the shop attendance once again misunderstood my expression. No, he was not wrong. I was clearly showing my hatred, but the target of my hatred was not the Beast-kins but rather, him and all the humans worked in this place.

“How much?” I asked him while trying my best to hold back my rage. It was not the right time. I should be patient.

“Well, it depends. You see the Cat-kins over there? They are twenty silver each. Similar to the Dog-kins, they are also twenty silver. As for that…” The shop attendance pointed to each slave and gave their price to me.

Most of them were less than one gold coin. Well, considering their condition and their appearances, it was expensive. Most of them were sick after all, and they couldn’t be used as laborers. Also, it seemed the female ones had higher prices than the males. Seriously, whether on Earth or here, females always worth more than the males, right?

I laughed bitterly at my own sarcasm. After considering everything, I decided to buy thirty slaves for this batch. Most of them were children, whose eyes were filled with fears. I didn’t plan to buy the lifeless ones who had given up on their lives. I also didn’t plan to buy the ones filled with hatred, as that would be troublesome for me. What if I set those with hatred free and in the end, they started killing the humans left and right? So, I ignored those with clear hatred in their eyes.

So, after considering everything, I only bought thirty slaves and they were clearly scared of me. Well, I didn’t care about that though. By the way, most of them were sick to the point that they almost couldn’t walk anymore without any supports. I should bring a carriage to this place, huh?

Well, next time, I would definitely bring a carriage. As for now, I hoped those children could follow me to a hidden corner. Slimerin had prepared a teleportation gate there. So, we only needed to walk there and send them to the Dungeon.

“However, we have to kill the nuisances first, right, Master?” Slimerin smiled evilly… was not what I wanted to say. How could a Slime smiled when she didn’t even have a face? But in my mind, she was smiling evilly when she said those words.

Yes, there were some nuisances, meaning, the slave traders sent a few people to track us. Perhaps they only wanted to know our information, but it would be troublesome if they knew about us. So, we had no other choice but to kill them silently.

Yep, and killing silently was what we were best at. I meant, Slimerin best at. As for me, I would be a decoy, naturally. Slimerin returned after three minutes passed and inside her body was the corpses of the few people that followed us. Three people, exactly.

“Now, then, you can start walking through that pillar between the third and the fourth pillar while muttering ‘platform 9 ¾’ in your mind.” I pointed at a pillar and ordered the children to walk to that pillar. When the first child magically disappeared from the pillar, the other children became even more scared. But they couldn’t disobey my order, so one by one, they entered the pillar and disappeared. After the last child entered the pillar, I looked at Slimerin and nodded.

“Now, it’s our turn.” I said as I walked to the pillar while muttering ‘platform 9 ¾’ in my mind. The teleportation gate disappeared after both me and Slimerin entered it, and it became quiet again.