One month had passed since the day the rumors were spread.
"Good work today, everyone."
"""Good work, Boss!"""
Another day at the shop ended without a hitch. As the employees filed out of the breakroom to head back to the dormitory, only four of us remained: Koken, Tony, Lobelia, and myself.
"It’s been over a month since I hired you all. How has it been? Do you have any concerns or problems with the way things are run here?"
"It is the greatest workplace I have ever known!" Koken exclaimed.
"I have no complaints about the treatment," Tony added. "The work is truly rewarding."
"Above all," Lobelia said with a deep nod, "the fact that we are actually generating a profit with slimes is nothing short of magnificent."
The other two nodded in vigorous agreement.
"I’m glad to hear that. I was worried that asking you to handle research on top of your training might be pushing you too hard."
"Rather than us, shouldn't you be worried about yourself, Boss?" Tony asked. "The number of customers has been surging lately... and you had another visitor today, didn't you?"
Since I had gone public with my Rimul Bird contracts, the smear campaign against me and Branch Master Taylor had all but vanished. In its place, however, came a flood of people demanding my time.
"He left rather quickly," Koken noted. "What was that man after, anyway?"
"He was a middleman for monster sales. He claimed Rimul Birds are in high demand whether they’re alive or stuffed as specimens and offered to buy mine. He even suggested providing a 'replacement bird service' if I’d hand mine over to him... It was nothing but talk of money. Once I’d heard enough, I showed him the door."
Most visitors were either like him or people begging for a job. However, I had no intention of selling the birds, and as for hiring, I’d reached a point where a formal letter of recommendation was essentially a prerequisite.
"I’ve been turning down unscheduled meetings, so it’s not that much of a burden. But thank you for the concern."
"If something happened to you, we’d be the ones in trouble," Lobelia said. "This place is far more comfortable than the research lab. I feel more fulfilled here than I ever did there."
"Certainly better than being a researcher in name only," Koken muttered.
"Back then, the future held nothing but despair," Tony said with a sigh.
"Despair? Was it really that bad?" I asked.
"You can only say that because you don't know the misery of those labs, Boss," Koken replied. "Life there was only marginally better than living in the slums. In some institutions, the researchers are treated as badly as—or even worse than—slaves."
"Is that so!?"
I was stunned. I knew research could be grueling, but to that extent? Even back on Earth, "black companies" and "corporate slaves" were common enough terms, but it seemed that no matter the world, human nature didn't change much.
"The only people who stay in the Slime Research Rooms are those with nowhere else to go, or people like my former self who were obsessed with the prestige of the lab," Koken explained.
"Those departments are dumping grounds for nuisances and unwanted subordinates," Lobelia added. "Masters are legally obligated to provide a minimum standard of living for their slaves, but for researchers, they just pay a pittance of a salary and offer no guarantees. If you die of hunger or overwork, they don't care."
"The pay is technically enough to survive on, but there’s zero room for luxury," Tony said. "And they look for any trivial reason to dock your pay. If you complain, they just tell you to quit. There’s no such thing as negotiation."
They were essentially corporate slaves in the most literal sense.
"What kind of 'trivial reasons' do they use?"
"The most common is a failure to produce results," Tony answered.
"The official goals of the Slime Research Rooms are to clarify slime ecology and establish a taming method for Big Slimes," Koken said. "But in all these years, no one has found so much as a single clue."
"Because the research is considered a lost cause, it’s only used as a place for demotions," Lobelia noted.
"Why hasn't anything been clarified?" I asked. Even on Earth, there were mysterious organisms, but slimes seemed so common here.
"First, their habitats are too broad and their varieties are too diverse," Koken explained. "They are so adaptable that even if you form a hypothesis, there’s always a slime somewhere that proves you wrong. Second, there’s a total lack of hard data. When we study other monsters, we dissect them. You can look at the teeth and tell if it's a carnivore or a herbivore. But when a slime dies, its body vanishes, leaving only the core. Dissection is impossible. Even the cores turn into brittle stones that tell us nothing about their internal functions."
I remembered my early days in this world. Every slime I defeated had vanished, leaving only a core. At first, I’d just assumed it was a "game mechanic" of this world, but it was strange that only slimes did that. I’d been so focused on evolution that I’d just accepted it as a fact of life.
"There have been instances of slimes evolving into high-tier species," Lobelia said, "but no one understands the conditions. It feels completely random."
Wait. They’ve seen them evolve, but they don't know why?
"What kind of slimes did they evolve into?" I asked.
"All sorts," Lobelia sighed, clutching her head. "They seemed to turn into something different almost every time..."
She looked like she was recalling a nightmare. I decided to dig deeper. "What were you feeding them at the lab?"
"Food?" Tony looked confused. "Whatever was lying around, I suppose."
Koken and Lobelia both nodded.
"There’s almost no budget, so we couldn't afford proper feed," Lobelia explained. "Usually, we just took the scraps and leftovers from the more 'important' monster research rooms. Since the researchers were barely eating themselves, no one was going to spend their own money on slime food. There were even stories of researchers stealing the slimes' meat to feed themselves."
"Slimes will eat anything you give them," Tony added. "That much is proven. So, the standard practice was to just give them whatever was cheapest or easiest to get. They’re known for surviving in any environment by eating what’s available, after all."
I was left speechless.
Sure, slimes will eat anything if you tell them to, but... I saw the problem immediately. They were evolving randomly because they were being fed a random, inconsistent diet. Because the results were inconsistent, the researchers had completely overlooked the importance of food.
I buried my face in my hands, reeling from the realization. When I looked up, the three of them were staring at me with concern.
"Boss? Are you all right?"
"I... yeah. It's just..." I decided to be blunt. "The condition for slime evolution is their diet."
"What?" Tony blinked.
"Wait... what?" Lobelia froze.
"Exactly what it sounds like. A slime’s evolved form is determined entirely by what it eats."
I proceeded to explain the evolution conditions I had discovered back in the forest and revealed that every slime I owned was the result of controlled feeding. The three researchers looked like they had been struck by lightning.
"No... it can't be..." Tony whispered.
"We... we spent our lives believing a lie?" Lobelia's voice trembled.
While those two were spiraling, Koken was strangely quiet. I looked over and saw him staring at the floor, tears streaming down his face in silence.
"Koken!?"
"Boss..." He finally spoke, his voice thick with emotion. "What you said... it makes too much sense. Back at the lab, I was obsessed with finding a way to create a Big Slime. I noticed that Big Slimes often lived near powerful monsters, so I hypothesized that eating the meat of strong prey would trigger the evolution. I wanted to prove everyone wrong with a completely different approach."
He was actually on the right track.
"As Lobelia said, most researchers can't afford meat. But I was a noble once; I had some savings. Desperate to get a transfer out of that department, I spent my own fortune hiring adventurers to hunt high-rank monsters. I paid for the meat and the transportation out of my own pocket, every single day for nearly a year. And finally... the slime evolved."
"What did it become?" I asked.
"It wasn't a Big Slime. It became a Meat Slime."
"A Meat Slime? You mean... like actual meat?"
"Precisely." Koken bit his lip hard. "It didn't just eat meat. Its entire body became meat."
"What does that even look like?"
"I can only describe it as a wriggling, pulsating mass of raw steak," he said with a shudder. "It was horrifying to look at. Soon after, I was fired. My house and all my belongings were seized to pay off the debts I’d run up for the research. I had to stop my work, but if your theory is correct... then it explains perfectly why my slime turned into that nightmare. I was right, but I was wrong... Oh, if only I had known! If only I could have continued!"
He broke down into fresh sobs of frustration.
I felt for him. If he’d had the resources, he might have actually revolutionized the field. I also made a mental note: Koken is brilliant but terrible with money. I must never let him touch the shop’s finances without supervision.
"It’s okay, Koken!" Lobelia said, trying to cheer him up. "We’re working for this shop now!"
"Exactly!" Tony added. "Working under the Boss, we can finally prove to the world that slimes are useful!"
Koken wiped his eyes and stood tall, his sorrow replaced by a terrifying level of motivation. "You’re right! There’s no time for tears! I will use this frustration to fuel our future work!"
I was glad he wasn't the type to hold a grudge, though I decided not to tell him that I also knew how to tame Big Slimes. If I told him that now, he might actually have a breakdown. I didn't have the social grace to handle that kind of emotional fallout.
"Anyway," Koken said, recovering his composure, "where were we?"
"We were explaining the abysmal treatment in the labs," Lobelia reminded him.
"Right. And then we got onto evolution. Boss, do you have any other questions for us?"
"I'm curious about the other types of slimes," I said. "What else have you seen in the labs?"
"In my department," Tony said, "the only one I saw was the Sticky Slime, similar to yours. They had a theory that combat experience and training would trigger growth into a Big Slime. So, we just spent our days capturing slimes and throwing them against other monsters until they died. It was a cycle of slaughter."
No wonder they never saw an evolution.
"I once saw a Tree Slime," Lobelia offered.
"A Tree Slime? I’ve never heard of that one. What’s it like?"
"At first, it looks like a normal slime, but then a sapling starts growing out of its core."
"Does it grow into a seed?"
"Not exactly. The tree just keeps growing until it takes root in the ground. It becomes a literal tree. It’s still alive and technically has a core inside the wood, but it can't move anymore."
"Is it useful for anything?"
"Not really. You can chop it down for lumber, I suppose."
Lumber... that’s a bit sad for a living creature.
"Boss, finding a useful slime is incredibly rare," Tony said. "At best, we use Sticky Slime fluid for glue, and even then, most people prefer traditional paste or animal glue."
"Once a slime evolves into something 'useless,' it’s usually destroyed as a failed experiment," Koken added.
It was clear that the researchers back then had no love for their subjects. Maybe the lack of results and the poor pay had sucked the soul out of them, but it felt incredibly cruel. I felt a surge of resolve. Maybe that could be my lifelong goal in this world: to prove just how valuable slimes can be.
"I don't understand why people think they’re useless," I said. "Even the weak ones are great at danger perception. They can sense monsters or bandits long before a human can. They can even find water or morning dew in the wild."
"I've suspected this for a while," Lobelia said, "but you have an incredible affinity for slimes, Boss."
"Is it because I can handle so many at once?"
"That’s part of it," Koken said, "but we’re talking about your level of understanding."
"Understanding?"
"Tamer affinity varies wildly between individuals," Lobelia explained. "Even among people compatible with the same monster, not everyone can communicate with them in the same way. Some just feel a vague emotion. Others can interpret gestures."
"But very rarely," Koken continued, "there are those who can communicate with monsters as if they were speaking to another human. You seem to be one of those, Boss. For comparison, the best I can do is tell if a slime is feeling 'unpleasant.'"
"Me too," Lobelia said. "I can form a contract, but I’d never be able to ask one where the water is. And the way your slimes use their bodies to carry objects? That requires a level of intent that most Tamers can't transmit."
"If your level of communication was common," Tony noted, "slimes would probably be a staple for every Tamer in the world."
I see. There was a massive gap in communication ability between me and the average Tamer. That was likely another reason why slime research had stalled for centuries.
After that, we lost track of time, talking deep into the night about the various types and characteristics of slimes that had been recorded throughout history. For the first time, I felt like I was truly among kindred spirits.