By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 4 - Chapter 6

Chapter 3 Episode 6: Communicating After Work

A month had passed since we first spread the rumors. The workday ended without a hitch. People left the break room to return to their housing, leaving only me, Caulkin, Tony, and Lobelia.

“You’ve been working here for over a month now. How do you like it? Any problems?”

“It’s the best job ever!”

“You’ve been perfectly hospitable, and I’ve found the work pretty fulfilling.”

“Best of all, the way you use slimes for profit is wonderful!” Caulkin declared, and the other two nodded.

“That’s good. I thought that between all the job training and research, you might be overworked.”

“Don’t worry about us. What about you? We’ve been getting more and more customers, not to mention all those people who want to talk to you. We just got another one today.”

Ever since we publicized that I formed contracts with limour birds, the negative rumors about me and Taylor died down. But in exchange, plenty of people started coming to see me.

“He left surprisingly quickly, though. Who was he, anyway?”

“A middleman for a monster-selling business, I believe. He went on about how limour birds were in high demand and worth a lot whether alive or dead and stuffed, and how he could trade them for something else if you just needed them to send letters. He was just interested in money, and after listening to him for a bit, I asked him to leave.”

Most of these visitors were either here for something like that, or to ask if they could work for me. But I had no intention of selling my limour birds, and I wasn’t going to hire anyone without a letter of recommendation under these circumstances.

“Well, I’m turning down anyone who comes without an appointment. It hasn’t been that big a burden on me, but thanks for asking.”

“It would be a burden on all of us if something happened to you. This is much more comfortable than my research days, and very fulfilling.”

“Much better than when I was a so-called researcher too, yes.”

“I used to have nothing but despair for the future.”

“Despair? Really?”

“You can only question that because you don’t know the tragedy of the slime laboratory. Life was only a bit better than it was in the slums, and we were treated like slaves, if not worse.”

“Seriously?!”

A laboratory didn’t sound like the type of place where such awful treatment would happen. But even with the labor laws in Japan, there were plenty of abusive companies that treated employees like cattle. This world was different, but no matter the place, humans were always the same.

“When you’re assigned to the slime laboratory, the only reason you’d stay with the company is if you have nowhere else to go, or if you have some attachment to the lab like I used to.”

“It became a department for getting rid of employees the bosses didn’t like, so of course the conditions were terrible. Most slaves are guaranteed at least a meager life, but the researchers at the slime lab were guaranteed nothing except their paychecks.”

“It was technically enough to live on, but not enough to buy more than necessities. They would also reduce your pay over the smallest things, to make life even worse. If you ever complained, they just told you to quit, so there was no room for negotiations.”

“Any more details?” I asked. It sounded just like the abusive companies in Japan.

“The most common reason for cutting pay was failing to get results from your research.”

“Learning about slime ecology and methods of taming big slimes were the main goal of the research, but nobody could find anything.”

“Which is why this is where they put people who get demoted.”

“Why couldn’t you discover anything?” I asked. But even with all our scientific advancements on earth, there were animals that weren’t fully understood.

“Firstly, slimes live in many environments and come in too many varieties. If you ever come up with a hypothesis, there will be some type of slime that proves it wrong.”

“There’s also just a lack of information. Other monsters can be dissected for research purposes. Then you can determine from the teeth, for one example, whether the monster is an herbivore or a carnivore. But when slimes die, their body disappears aside from the core, so they can’t be dissected. But there would be no point in dissecting the transparent ones either way, and the cores turn into brittle stone that has no apparent use as any sort of organ.”

Slimes did disappear when they died, but more advanced types did leave a bit of fluid behind. Back when I first came to this world and killed a slime, I thought that the core it left behind was something like an item drop, assuming that was a real-world concept in this universe. But other monsters didn’t disappear and I learned that I would have to cut them apart to harvest their meat and other materials. I sometimes wondered why it was only slimes that vanished, but as I got used to them, I began to focus more on how they evolved. It did seem like this would make them hard to research, however.

“We did see some slimes evolve many times, but we never understood how to make it happen.”

“What did they evolve into?”

“A lot of different things, that’s all I can tell you. It was different just about every time,” Lobelia said with a sigh, trying to remember something. I wondered if something bad happened related to this, but put that aside.

“What did you feed the slime?”

“I don’t know, whatever was lying around,” Tony said, and the other two nodded.

“We barely received any funding, so it was hard to scrape up any money for slime food. We took leftover monster food from other departments, for the most part. We were only paid enough to keep ourselves alive, so we had to be as cheap as possible. Sometimes researchers even stole meat that was meant for the slimes, so I don’t think anyone was going out of their way to buy slime food.”

“Slimes will eat anything they’re given. That’s one thing we did know, so we typically fed them whatever was on hand. They can live in any environment and eat whatever is available, after all.”

After hearing what Lobelia and Tony told me, my mouth was agape. Slimes would eat anything if ordered to, though. It sounded like they happened to feed the slimes what they needed to evolve sometimes. But as a result, they failed to notice the importance of food to a slime’s evolution. I couldn’t help but hold my head in my arms, and when I looked back up again, the three of them were staring at me.

“Boss, what’s wrong?” they asked. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I decided to get straight to the point.

“The key to making a slime evolve is food.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that depending on what a slime eats, they may evolve in different ways,” I said, then told them everything I learned about slime evolution in the forest, and that I discovered the conditions to evolve all the slimes I owned. They were shocked to hear this.

“But how could that be?”

“Was the theory wrong?”

“I don’t know what your theory was, but did it say that food and evolution were unrelated?”

“Right. It was an old thesis, but the biggest authorities on monster research agree that food has nothing to do with evolution.”

“I haven’t actually heard of any more recent theses about slimes. In general, our modern perception of slimes is based on old data.”

Questioning established science could be surprisingly difficult. I started my research from virtually no knowledge, so maybe that lack of preconceptions helped. Now Lobelia and Tony were holding their heads in their arms. From their perspective, I was defying common sense. It was probably hard to accept right away. Caulkin, however, remained strangely quiet.

“Caulkin?!” I shouted. He was hanging his head and weeping.

“Boss.”

“Yes?”

He began to speak quietly and monotonously. “What you say makes a lot of sense. When I was at the lab, actually, I was searching for the method of evolving a slime into a big slime. I found that big slimes lived in environments with other powerful monsters, and theorized that feeding the meat of those monsters to a slime would evolve it into a big slime. I saw that nobody else was getting results, so I thought I should come at it from an entirely different perspective.” They assumed that big slimes evolved from slimes, apparently. And from the sound of it, Caulkin got close to achieving his goal. “Like Lobelia said, slime researchers had enough trouble securing food for themselves and could never buy the meat of strong monsters just to feed it to slimes. But I was a noble and had at least some money. I desperately wanted to get some results so they would transfer me to another department, so I hired adventurers to hunt strong monsters that I could feed to slimes. Of course, I also paid the shipping fees for this meat out of my own pocket every day. This went on for around a year before the slime finally evolved. But rather than become a big slime, it evolved into something called a meat slime. Not only did the slime eat meat, but its whole body was made of it.”

“Its whole body?”

“That’s the only way I can describe it. It looked like a writhing blob of raw flesh. I’m sure you can imagine how sickening it was. I was fired from the laboratory shortly after that, and had to sell my house and almost all of my belongings to make up for the money I spent. I couldn’t continue my research after that, but if what you say is correct, it would explain why my slime became a meat slime. I only wish that I had known sooner. Maybe I would have found out myself if I could have continued my research. Curses!” Caulkin said and began to shed tears again.

I could see why he would be frustrated. If his research had gone on, maybe he could have uncovered at least something about slimes. When I first met Caulkin, Jeff told me that he spent all of his wealth on research, so this must have been what he meant. I decided that someone else would have to manage the money when I put him in charge of a store.

“Don’t worry about it, Caulkin! We got hired by this store now!”

“That’s right! Now we can do all the slime research we want!”

“Yes, that’s true! There’s no time for regrets! I should take this as even greater encouragement!”

Lobelia and Tony seemed to cheer Caulkin up, as he soon got ahold of himself, more motivated than ever before. I was glad to see he wasn’t too cynical. I happened to know how to tame a big slime too, but bringing that up might have depressed him again. I didn’t have the courage to tell him, or the conversational skills to do it without hurting his feelings.

“So what were we talking about?”

“We were telling the boss about the poor conditions at the slime laboratory.”

“Oh right, and we got sidetracked talking about the conditions for evolution. Boss, do you have any other questions?”

“What did the slimes at the laboratory tend to evolve into?”

“Well, as far as the types I saw at the lab, there were sticky slimes like the ones you own, but that’s all I remember. We theorized they might evolve into big slimes after enough combat training. Most of our work involved capturing slimes and having them fight other monsters until they died. They wouldn’t have had time to evolve.”

“A long time ago, one of the slimes I used for research evolved into a tree slime.”

“I’ve never heard of those before. What was it like?”

“It was like any old slime at first, but a tree eventually sprouted from its core.”

“Like the core was a seed? What happened then?”

“That’s it.”

“What?”

“The tree kept growing, roots burrowed into the ground, and it became a plain old tree. There still seemed to be a core inside, but it was as immobile as an actual tree.”

“Did you find any special use for this slime?”

“Not really, unless you were to cut it down for wood.”

“Boss, it’s not that easy to find slimes that are useful. The sticky slimes had fluid that worked as an adhesive, but that was about it.”

“And we could just use glue for that, so it wasn’t that valuable.”

“When slimes evolved to higher ranks that weren’t big slimes, we considered them failures and tossed them aside.”

It didn’t sound like the researchers had much passion for slimes. Maybe the poor conditions and the lack of future prospects killed their motivation, but I felt like they were too cruel to the slimes. One of my goals in this world was to raise the value of slimes. I didn’t understand why they weren’t more widely used in the first place. They were weak, but even the most basic slimes had countless uses.

“Even weak slimes are great at detecting danger. They’ll know when monsters or thieves are nearby before anyone else. They’re also good for finding water because they search for dew to consume as food. These are both vital to surviving in the wild.”

“Ever since we first met, I’ve felt that you’re pretty compatible with slimes, Boss.”

“Apparently so. I can handle a huge number of them.”

“There’s that too, but I was referring to your capacity to understand them. You can have high compatibility with a familiar, but not in the same way that everyone does. For example, if you got together some tamers who were all compatible with a specific type of monster, not all of them would be equally good at mutually understanding their familiars,” Lobelia said. Some tamers could empathize with their familiars, while some understood them by watching their behavior. “You do need a degree of mutual understanding to be considered compatible, but once in a blue moon, there comes a tamer who can understand monsters as if they were humans. You probably fall into that category. As for me, I can tell when a slime doesn’t like something, but that’s about it.”

“Same here. I can form contracts with them, but I wouldn’t know when they’re afraid or thirsty. They also sometimes stretched out their bodies to carry things for me. Maybe that was an example of some understanding between us.”

“If everyone could understand slimes like you, Boss, then maybe slimes would be a must-have for all tamers.”

Apparently most tamers didn’t understand their familiars like I did. That was likely only in regards to slimes, but that could have been the reason why little research on them was successful. I asked more about the slime laboratory, we talked about other types of slimes we had discovered, and before I knew it, it was the middle of the night.