Chapter One — The Dying Young Man Being Sold at the Slave Market (Part 1)
My twin younger brother, Lindeil, once told me that whenever you take a road you don’t normally walk, or wander into a shop you would usually pass by, it’s because fate is there, quietly guiding you toward something.
There was something unbearably dramatic about the way he said it, but I never disliked it.
So on that day, at that exact moment, when I found myself walking down a street I had no reason to take and peering into a slave market that just happened to be open, I suppose it must have been what he called fate’s guidance.
And when I discovered him in a cage tucked away in the corner of the market, beneath a sign marked Special Sale—
That, too, must have been fate.
Inside the cage, he lay collapsed and barely breathing.
He was absurdly cheap.
Five silver coins.
That was all he cost.
Five silver coins was about enough to cover two weeks’ worth of meals.
At that price, I doubted anyone was paying for the value of a living person anymore. It was probably no more than the worth of his body by weight in meat. In fact, when they dragged him out of the cage, he was only barely clinging to life.
The slave trader looked openly stunned when a young woman like me said I wanted to buy him.
“Miss, are you serious? That thing’s practically dead already. You planning to use him as feed or something?”
“……”
Without answering, I took five silver coins from the pouch at my waist and dropped them onto the table in front of him.
There was already a slave crest carved into the man’s body, so I paid another three silver coins to have my name inscribed over it.
Even during that, he kept breathing in shallow, ragged wheezes. It felt like if I looked away for even a moment, he might die right there.
I strengthened my arms with enhancement magic and hoisted his body over my shoulder.
The slave trader stared in surprise as someone as slender as me effortlessly carried a grown man, even one half-dead. But after taking in my appearance—the light metal armor, the longsword hanging at my waist, the trousers and boots—he seemed to understand.
“An adventurer, huh.”
Without so much as a glance back, I walked away with the dying man over my shoulder.
That dying man…
was supposed to be the prince who had once been engaged to me—
and then cast me aside.
