****(POV)

I always dreamt of dying a hero.

That was back when I was but a little kid.

You know go out in style.

Save the life of a dear friend.

Protect the city from a monster invasion.

Join a powerful guild or sect and protect the continent.

Perhaps even protect this world from otherworldly creatures too.

I'm not sure how to feel about this ending.

I'd say it is bittersweet.

I gave my life to protect a friend.

Yet this friend did not accept my sacrifice.

I am touched.

Yet I know how idiotic this all is.

There is no point in both of us perishing.

Yet, that was my friend's choice.

People would probably ridicule me for calling a slime a friend.

This does not matter to me.

There are emotions that transcend species.

Love is one of them.

Simple camaraderie too.

If anything this slime is my family.

The only one I have remaining.

I wanted to save it.

I failed.

Life can be unpredictable.

Humans can be unpredictable.

Who could have known how deep a bond would form between us after a single day.

This is not logical.

Who would have known how messed up the situation with the training room would become.

This is highly unlikely.

Yet it all happened.

They say you see your life scroll before your eyes at the moment of death.

In my case, it seems to be afterward.

I am dead.

I know it because I don't have a physical body.

I am but a mass of thoughts drifting in a dark space.

Floating around are the remnants of my consciousness.

The experiences I lived.

The emotions I felt.

I just saw my recent past.

I keep going forward.

I see a lot of moments where I am struggling.

Trying to learn more about taming.

Growing plants to sell for money.

Even the bad stuff like stealing food.

All until I finally reach scenes I knew would come.

Memories I have burrowed deep inside my psyche.

Yet I still know exactly what it contains.

I brace myself, then enter.

****

The young me. Still a child.

I never knew my parents.

They died not long after I was born from a monster invasion.

But I had an uncle that raised me.

He was a taciturn man that would barely talk.

He would barely ever show any emotion for that matter.

He didn't care about me much either.

He simply raised me out of duty.

I was the heir to a sizeable fortune.

My dad had been a successful merchant before his demise.

Raising me made it so my uncle could live a lavish life.

He saw it as a deal of some sort.

I never hated him for it.

He never mistreated me either.

He had his circumstances.

For instance, I know he loved my mother.

Looking at me would remind him of how he wasn't the brother that was chosen.

Thus I was left to my own devices most of the time.

I would explore the surroundings on a daily basis.

Meeting all kinds of people.

Hearing stories from travelers from afar.

I would daydream about one day heading to the vast world.

I wasn't too worried about the future.

I was truly fearless back then.

Fearless enough that I strayed too far from safety.

Explored a bit too far.

In usual circumstances, it wouldn't have mattered.

A bunch of coincidences changed my fate completely.

One, I came across slave traders.

Two, they had come to know about the wandering unwanted kid that I was.

Three, they knew about a beast tide that was about to happen.

Conclusion: they got themselves easy merchandise that no one would truly look for while getting a great scapegoat.

They bagged me and thus I lost all rights as a human being.

I was but a product.

There was the low food input that was necessary to somehow keep me alive.

There was the space I occupied in the cage. One mounted on a carriage.

There was the price I would possibly fetch.

That was all my puny existence amounted to.

Two outcomes were possible.

Getting sold and living a life worst than death.

Getting sold and dying quickly.

No matter what, they would sell me.

Or at the very least my corpse.

Days turned into weeks.

There was a beast tide coming after all.

People in the area had better things to do than to buy livestock.

That's how they called us.

Thus we traveled for so long.

Barely getting fed.

Some died of sickness.

Most of us made it.

Dying would have been better.

We got sold to some rich nobleman.

His trade simple, entertainment.

For these bored people, seeing slaves killing each other in the ring was a delight.

When I first arrived, I understood something very quickly.

No one there was a friend.

Everyone knowing that others would eventually become opponents.

All standing in the caged areas in silence.

All hope gone.

Either awaiting their end or struggling to live.

The ones faring the best being the ones that started to enjoy killing.

But even them would at some point die.

Betting was a thing in such a sport.

The banker would subtly decide the outcome of the fight for it to turn in his favor.

When a gladiator became so strong that everyone started betting for his survival….is when he would die.

I slowly realized that there was indeed a pattern to it.

The only way to live was to struggle in every single fight.

Never to show great power.

Learning about the system gave me better chances of surviving it.

I decided that I would survive this no matter what.

I decided that I would wait for the time of revenge to come.

I would win all my fights while almost getting defeated every time.

One day I would hopefully get an opportunity.

Or maybe never.

But I would at least try for a while.

I was the only one there that didn't have dead eyes.

That's how he came to approach me.

The man that would play a significant role in my life.

The man I would come to call brother.