The Programmer's Dungeon

Chapter 4 : Money is the Key to Solve ProblemsUntitled Part 4

At that moment, I could feel my stomach began churning. I was already pretty hungry five hours ago, now my stomach was so empty that it hurt.

Guh... dammit... I wanna eat something... But to get food, I needed money. To earn money, I needed energy. And to get energy, I needed food. These were an endless loop, and I didn't even know where to begin.

"Hey lad over there with strange clothes, you seem hungry. Wanna take a bite of this juicy rabbit meat?" shouted one of the vendors selling rabbit skewers.

The smell of burning meat in the air made my mouth watered. Despite the meat looking a bit plain, I knew the texture would be so chewy in the mouth. Was I too focused on this strange world that I ignored this before?

"Hm? What meat is this?"

"It's Scaled Rabbit meat! Only three luxes each. I can even give you a discount if you buy more."

Ah... It's not that I don't want it, alas... I'm broke beyond compare. How unfortunate, modern money didn't work in this place.

Just then, I noticed multiple wagons were passing through the street. On them were iron cages, big enough to fit cattle inside. What piqued my interest was that they didn't carry livestock, and instead, it brought people. Yes, humans.

"A kidnapping?" I scratched my head and denied it soon after, "There's no way a kidnapping happened in broad daylight. Also, they wore a collar on their neck. So, a slave?"

According to the books in the library, the selling of human beings was common. Of course, there were regulations for the different categories of slaves, and depending on the category, it would show how slaves were treated, but that was quite lax in this place. Besides, the practice of using slaves itself existed and spread from way back even three hundred years ago when the time of great strife was still rampant.

When the last passing wagon passed by me, I saw a different-looking human girl. No, rather than a human, it had hairy ears resembling that of a wolf or a fox. Moreover, I noticed she had a yellow, fluffy tail, definitely not a trait a normal human would have. Is she perhaps a fox-beastkin?

"She must be a beastkin." The rabbit meat vendor gave an indifferent look to the barely ten-year-old beastman or more correctly beastkin.

For all I knew, there were countless minor races and five major races: humans, elves, beastmen, dwarves, and demons, and they were all "people." Unlike monsters that appeared after the Great Cataclysm, this world was already filled by tons of races.

One of the reasons the five races were called "major races" was that they had made a nation — or a big community equivalent — sometime in the past. No matter whether it only lasted for a moment before being destroyed or lasted for a long time, it was one of the prerequisites to be called a major race.

As for the difference between beastmen and beastkin, beastkin were a subrace of beastmen. It seemed that there were more racial differences between beastmen compared to humans, but I wasn't sure of the detail since it was my first time seeing one.

"Mister, don't you feel any pity for that girl?" I asked, curious why all the people in the plaza were giving the same indifferent look, too.

"Pity? I sure pity that girl, but she's a demi-human. Why should I care about her well-being? What?! You wanna save her? I'm tellin' you to forget it. Even if you help one, you couldn't possibly help every half-ling that have turned into a slave, no?"

It seemed that the word "half-ling" was used as an insult for beastkin. Although the term itself was supposedly used for when a person was a mix of two different races or more. And since humans and beastkin looked alike, they were more prone to receive discrimination compared to their racial relatives.