By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 6 - Chapter 8

Chapter 4 Episode 8: The Slums’ Point of View

The next day, it was my first time visiting this large house in the slums since I came to hire Caulkin’s team. I knocked on the door and sensed the presence of magical energy as it opened.

“Come in!”

“Excuse me.”

I followed the voice inside. It was the same man as last time.

“It’s nice to see you again, Lible.”

I was curious about the rumors I heard yesterday, so I had Dolce make an appointment with someone who’d know the details, and he introduced me to Lible. He was the advisor to the slums and the one who represented them when negotiating with the public office, so according to Dolce, nobody was a better pick than him.

“Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me.”

“Not a problem, Ryoma. You can use that chair there.”

I borrowed a chair that was off in a corner of the room and sat across from him.

“So I heard from Dolce that you wanted to hire someone again?”

“Only part-time, but we’re currently getting ready for a new hire.”

“That’s plenty. As you know, a lot of us have been worried lately. You wanted to ask about that too, yeah? What’d you want to ask specifically?”

“Everything, if you’re willing to talk about it.”

“I hear you looked into it yourself, though. You probably already know some things.”

He had heard that Carme researched the rumors. Then he happened to hear about it when he met with the head of the public office yesterday as well. But I hardly knew anything about the state of the slums. I only knew what Carme and Arnold told me, and what I could guess from that. But I didn’t know if my guesses were correct. Maybe there were some misunderstandings between the public office and the citizens of the slums. Either way, they probably wanted to tell their side of the story, and I wanted to know about it. I wanted to help however I could, but I also didn’t want to get in the way in the process.

“If you say so. First, what you know about the cause of the rumors is all true, and so is the fact that we can’t trust the public office. They’ve been surveying the place for a while now, but when people started to come out and say they were asked to leave, it’s caused a lot of anxiety.”

“Is the reason that you can’t trust them what I think it is?”

“Everyone knows there’s a different guy in charge now. Doesn’t mean they’ll do things any different. It’s too soon for us to forget what they’ve done before.”

“Right, it hasn’t even been a year.”

“Yeah, though personally, I think their new boss is trustworthy.”

Maybe this was a rude thought, but I found that a little surprising.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he came here, just like you did. Then he told me what was happening on their end, the state of the environment here, and the reason for his request, and then he left. All that stuff about blocking the roads and the danger of damaged homes, I think he’s right. Before he took over, they never really came to survey the slums at all, so we were taking advantage of their laziness in a way. Can’t argue with his complaints. But the thing is, a fair number of folks have lost their homes because the public office got stingy about paying for the pit toilets to be cleaned.”

I didn’t know what to say. I decided to just listen quietly, and it sounded like some of the people who made a living cleaning pit toilets couldn’t pay rent when their salaries were cut, so they were driven from their homes. As a result, they either had to live on the street or in abandoned buildings. In other words, the public office’s past deeds increased the homeless population. To these victims, the same people who took away their homes were now telling them to get off the street and find a house to live in.

“That’s the gist of it. You can see why there’s a lot of opposition. The homeless stay with people they know when possible, but that started for everyone when they lost their homes. The public office isn’t going to reduce the homeless population just by telling them what to do. We’re calling for volunteers with construction skills to help repair buildings, but not much has come of it.”

“I see...”

It sounded like the citizens were already doing all they could.

“We’re currently looking for something else we could do. Seems like that Arnold guy’s preparing work for us, but a lot of folks are suspicious of him. They say the people up top are all the same.”

Considering everything he told me, I felt like it was only natural that these victims would feel this way. Their trust had to be restored somehow.

“Excuse me, I have a question.”

“What?”

“Are people surviving alright?”

The day after I cleaned the pit toilets, when I received the reward for the job, Worgan told me that there were a fair number of other jobs to go around and that there was no need to obsess over cleaning the pit toilets. That was why he rejected their cleaning of the pit toilets, from what I remembered.

“Well, some people don’t make things easy, but we’ll get by as long as everyone’s helping each other out with food and the like. If the public office hadn’t come and said anything, I doubt there’d even be an uproar right now.”

“Putting people’s trust in the public office aside, what do you think would happen if the housing problem was solved?”

“There’d be no reason to complain to the public office, so there’d probably be no more rumors. Why do you ask?”

“Maybe I’ve neglected to consider something that I should have.”

When I first heard that people from the slums were looking for jobs, I just thought about how they wanted money without considering why they wanted it.

“They want money so they can get a house and have their needs met?”

“Well, rent’s only going to be worse for them if they get houses, and if you’ve been kicked out of a house once, it’s hard to rent one again. That information gets passed around to all the landlords in the city, so they’ll be onto you. And even if they manage to rent a place somehow, they’ll just end up back on the streets if they can’t pay the rent.”

There were a lot of issues tangled into this, but as long as the housing problem was solved, maybe the tension would die down for a while. But even now that my focus was narrowed down, there was a lot to think about.

“The ones actively trying to find a job are better off than some. At least they still have the desire to escape homelessness on their own. The ones who don’t care anymore could be given jobs, money, and house, and there’s still no telling if that’ll help. Maybe it would at first, but they could just as well end up back on the streets at some point. Everyone’s got their own circumstances.”

“This is awfully complicated.”

I thought about what I would do in their position. If I had land, I could either build or repair a house myself. If I didn’t, then I could leave town. But thinking about the issue in terms of what I was capable of was entirely unhelpful.

I kept asking questions for a while longer, then came to the conclusion that all we could do was watch the situation unfold and contribute whatever possible along the way.

“I’m glad you care about us, but don’t worry about it too much. This is between us and the public office. If you provide some safe jobs, then you’re doing more than enough,” Lible said before I left.

I bowed to him, then exited his house.

■ ■ ■

A prolonged fight with the public office wouldn’t help anything. It seemed like most of them knew this, though. I thought about it all the way up until I got home. I opened my Dimension Home and released my familiars.

“Pirororororo!”

The first to come out were the limour birds. After the six of them flew high into the sky, they approached and receded from the entrances to the many abandoned mines as if to inspect them. It seemed possible that something was living there again. I considered blocking all the entrances in the future. But the creatures that moved in could serve as food for my limour birds or slimes, so I was unsure.

Then I heard a quiet bursting sound. It sounded like the limour birds found some prey. I was going to go check on them, but then I noticed something move. It was next to the house that I built as camouflage. Something at the entrance to the charcoal furnace felt off.

I approached to take a look, and it seemed that something had crawled through the ashes. I cautiously peered into the furnace and discovered a slime that was desperately trying to dig into the ashes. I promptly formed a contract with it to take it for myself. Maybe the slime had simply gotten lost somewhere, but it was unclear. I didn’t even know when it got there. But this slime was evidently eating ash. There was less ash left in the furnace than I remembered. I gave the slime some ash as a test, and it happily ate it. It seemed that it might evolve into a new slime.

I had also just added the fluff slime to my ranks, so I decided this would be a good time to put some information about my slimes on paper. I went to a room in the abandoned mine and jotted down each type of slime that I owned.

Slimes I owned:

・Poison Slime

・Acid Slime

・Sticky Slime

・Cleaner Slime

・Deodorant Slime

・Scavenger Slime

・Metal Slime

・Iron Slime

・Bloody Slime

・Medicine Slime

・Healing Slime

・Earth Slime

・Wind Slime

・Dark Slime

・Light Slime

And there were also the fluff slime and drunk slime I acquired on my last journey. That was seventeen in all. I wanted to wait and see what this slime that ate ash would evolve into, and I actually had other slimes with the potential to evolve into new slimes too. I had acid, cleaner, and sticky slimes that found a unique favorite food as well. I decided to take this chance to write those down.

The acid slime liked the caustic soda I used to make soap, as well as the alkali solution. These could be dangerous if thrown out, so I used my acid slimes to neutralize them. Then I found one that started to drink the fluid that was leftover afterward. After that, I always gave it the fluid that was leftover after making soap and neutralizing the waste. Lately, though, it started to absorb caustic soda by itself. I was still waiting for it to evolve.

I also found a unique cleaner slime while making soap. This one expressed no interest in caustic soda, but it would eat the finished soap. I was also waiting for this one to evolve. Lastly, the sticky slime liked to eat the stalks of the dante flowers I was growing for seeds and dandelion coffee. I found this one during the preparations for the Founding Festival. It could have eaten the seeds or roots instead, so I didn’t know why it chose the stalks.

I could imagine a few possibilities for what the previous two specimens would evolve into, but I had no idea with this one. I needed to keep an eye on it. I couldn’t wait for these three, and the ash-eating slime, to evolve.