After taking care of Guo Yang and leaving his unconscious body at Zhao Lan’s residence, we still had one more person to visit.
His na was Wang Tao, and all we knew about him was that he was the one who brought his slaves for sale early to the theater.
Surprisingly, his mansion was a bit smaller than the other two we visited previously, although it was still much bigger than the other normal hos.
Only one guard was at the gate, so we took him without knocking him out to an alley nearby and started asking him questions.
He told us that Wang Tao was the only family mber who was staying at the residence that night, and when I asked how many slaves were inside, the man remained silent for a mont and said there were none.
"None? You expect to believe that?" I asked.
The guard elaborated, saying that Wang Tao didn’t like to call his servants "slaves" and would get angry if soone did it in front of him.
Wang Tao wasn’t the type of person to beat or punish his slaves for pleasure. Instead, the people he chose would beco his servants or workers.
Still, they were working for free and against their will, so even if they weren’t being mistreated, they were still enslaved.
I was getting a bit more curious about the guy, so we decided to cut the interrogation and get inside the place.
Using our "search" spell, we could feel the presence of a group of people in one room, but their MP levels were quite low, and I deduced that it was probably the servants’s room.
On the upper floor, there was only one big chamber with a single presence inside, so we made our way there and slamd the door open to wake the noble from his slumber.
He looked at us with fear and confusion, yelling for the guards to rush to his room. However, I had already muted the sound from leaving the area.
Wang Tao’s ho wasn’t nearly as protected as the other two, so it was easy for us to reach him without encountering one of the two guards patrolling around.
"You must be Wang Tao, correct?" I asked, making sure that we found the right person.
"Who wants to know?" he answered with another question.
", I want to know..." I replied, shooting a serious glance at him that didn’t allow for any negotiations.
The man gulped and nodded slightly, trying to keep an indifferent expression, but his nervousness was evident from the sweat drops that appeared on his forehead.
Out of curiosity, I asked him why he brought the enslaved villagers to the venue earlier than the others, and his answer shocked a little.
Judging by how he treated his slaves, I thought that maybe he was like i Ling and was just acting so that his family wouldn’t get in trouble. However, that wasn’t the case.
Wang Tao was a superficial asshole who would choose his slaves based on their looks, not because he was a pervert, but because he prioritized elegance above all else.
"Walking around with chained people wearing dirty rags... Disgusting!" he said.
It wasn’t that he treated his slaves fairly. He just didn’t want them to make him look bad, so he gave them clothing and dical treatnt to look healthy in front of others.
Losing all of our interest in him, we teleported him to the Zhao family’s residence, where we were keeping the other two enslavers kidnapped under Yoru’s watch.
We still had a few more hours of nightti, so before we could go back to i Ling’s room, we ca up with a new idea.
There were still thousands of enslaved villagers in Xiulan, so saving only the ones who were being auctioned didn’t seem too fair.
Not every commoner was enslaved, but at least 95% of them were. The ones who were mostly left alone were the commoners who had businesses that were considered important or unique.
For example, i Ling told us that there was a commoner in Xiulan who had a fabric shop where they made silk to sell to the tailors and dressmakers.
That commoner had a permit on her that didn’t allow other nobles to enslave her personally. However, she was still being taken advantage of, as the deals she would get were always detrintal to her while favoring the nobles.
In other words, she was like a general slave, which was a better option than being a personal one, but it still sucked.
lina and I decided to get as many commoners out of the city as we could before morning, and to do it even faster, we split up and covered different areas of the city.
Getting into their hos was pretty easy, as not all nobles had security with them.
It had to do with the fact that nobody would be crazy enough to attack a noble in a country where people could get executed for simply speaking about sothing that others didn’t agree with.
We didn’t get any sleep that night. All we did was fly all over the city, looking for enslaved citizens and taking them to Yuandu.
The best part was that our settlent wasn’t getting overcrowded since we left so magic quartz there.
There weren’t that many enslaved elves, but the ones we found and took to Yuandu were able to use the magic quartz to return ho to Eldariel that sa night.
Others were using it to go to Kyotora and start their new lives there. We even sent so to the Droman Empire and Sephyr.
Of course, we couldn’t send ho the people from the Northern Empire, but it’s not like they were eager for it either, as their country was going through a similar situation.
Once dawn arrived in Xiulan, lina and I quickly returned to i Ling’s room and found her sleeping with her head leaning on the window fra.
"I guess she was waiting for us to co back..." lina comnted.
"Should we get her out of here, too?" I pondered out loud.
It was about to be an interesting day in Xiulan, and I didn’t know if it would be the safest for i Ling to be there when people found out that most of the slaves in the city were gone.
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