A few hours ter, I sighed as I dropped all of my belongings(*) down on the floor.

  The infirmary incident resolved in a retively straightforward way after the King got involved. Ming Lina and Lu Liwang went and healed the Prince of Xandu, and the chaos quickly died down when the foreign VIP's clinical condition stabilized. Realizing that they were preventing the medical staff from doing any work, the Archbishop astutely ordered everyone out of the room. Then, he insisted on making a schedule so that the King could have a private audience with each Otherworlder one-by-one. This way, everyone could get their requests heard in an orderly fashion. Since there were a total of twelve Otherworlders, it wasn't possible to fit all of the meetings into one night, so some of my cssmates were scheduled for the next day.

  Lu Liwang stayed behind to heal some of the sickest patients, mostly because he didn't have any reason not to.

  The only person who was particurly unhappy in the end was Hong Baiye.

  She did not say exactly why she was upset (she was far too cunning to state it openly), but I could guess that she was silently furious at Ming Lina and Lu Liwang. The two girls did not say a single word to each other after we left the infirmary, which was unusual given that they were ordinarily peas in a pod. In high school, Ming Ming was practically Hong Baiye's loyal backscratcher and devoted underlying — a Crabbe Goyle to the infamous Draco Malfoy.

  As for myself, I endured an agonizing hour of Kang Jiesu's useless doting that progressively made me more and more concerned that he was definitely going to get me killed one day.

  For that matter, I hadn't ruled out the possibility that Hong Baiye would send me out of the window outright because she didn't like what she saw. She was upset when she found out that Kang Jiesu had somehow acquired a sve, but her mood (thankfully) improved when she heard that he actually didn't want one. She even suggested that the ownership could be transferred to her, but my childhood friend simply refused, stating that he took this responsibility very seriously and wouldn't leave it up to anyone else. The two of them had a really strange and ambiguous retionship, and I didn't know how to expin it. They had previously both insisted multiple times that they weren't dating.

  Ming Lina's reaction, incidentally, was pure silence.

  She was uncharacteristically quiet.

  I didn't know if I should be concerned or not. The position that I was in was undeniably hazardous, and I knew from past experience that this was hardly my cssmate’s first rodeo.

  This wasn't the first time that Kang Jiesu had picked up a random unfortunate girl out of the city gutters, and more than half of the time, the outcome was a total trainwreck.

  + + +

  Logistically, one of the problems that I immediately encountered after my legal status change was the fact that I was technically no longer ‘employed’ by the Royal Pace. This had wide-sweeping ramifications, in the sense that I was promptly informed that wouldn't be allowed to use the communal cafeteria or sleep in the maid dormitory anymore, and they would need me to remove my master's belongings(*) from my old room.

  It was my 'master's' belongings because apparently all of my possessions automatically became Kang Jiesu's overnight. Due to various legal technicalities, I couldn't own any property or money, and it wouldn't even be possible to access my bank account which had been transferred over entirely to my 'master'.

  The financial strangution was a particurly hard pill to swallow.

  On Earth, I was fully aware that some people romanticize Master-sve BDSM rolepy, but there really wasn't anything erotic about having your life savings locked out of your control. I worked very hard in order to make a decent sary, and by Galuterican standards, you could even say that my income was high enough to qualify as 'middle css'. However, my journey to this station in life had definitely not been easy, and prior to coming to the Royal Capital, I even sold my body in order to cw my way out of poverty. I very much felt as though my savings were quite literally composed of my blood, sweat, and tears.

  It really hurt to have all of that invalidated and taken away.

  + + +

  Kang Jiesu was currently having his private audience with the King, so I had some time to collect my belongings(*) and move them to a different room that had been assigned to the Otherworlders.

  Incidentally, the new quarters that I had been given was essentially an empty room.

  It was supposed to be the owner's responsibility to figure out how they would feed, cloth, or house their sves, and the Royal Pace wouldn't involve themselves with managing those personal affairs.

  There were already three rolls of cloth id out on the floor on one side of the room — completely untouched — presumably they were supposed to be improvised beds. It was frankly no better than a straw mat, and it was probably very uncomfortable to sleep on the floor.

  I had learned a little bit earlier that I was not the only servant that had been granted to the Otherworlders. Two nights ago, Sha Guadi had apparently indulged quite heavily during the night, and he ultimately ended up taking three sex sves. Apparently, no one had even seen them ever since Sha Guadi cimed them, and they never left the Golden Room after they were first delivered. It was impossible to know exactly what had happened to them, although I could really only assume that he had locked them inside and I could only hope that they were still okay(?) after more than 24 hours in confinement.

  In the Kingdom of Galuterica, it was considered incredibly impolite and inappropriate to intervene if another master mistreated their own sves. People generally had a right to do whatever they wished with their own property.

  In either case, those three had evidently not even gotten a chance to set up their beds in the shared sves' quarters.

  As far as I could tell, it seemed like I was the first person to cim occupancy in this space, so I had the opportunity to choose the corner of the room that I liked best.

  Thinking about it rather objectively, it was extraordinarily rare for a free person to be ensved randomly out of the blue, so I had many more belongings(*) than the average sve who might have been suffering in these oppressive conditions for years. For instance, I had my own clothes, linens, toiletries, and other miscelneous personal effects. It was not an excessive amount — the maids in the Royal Pace were not given a lot of personal storage space — but I had in fact been living here for four years, so I had certainly accumuted a fair amount of items.

  I took some time to organize a few trinkets as I reflected on the depressing outlook of my overall future.

  At first, I was retively calm.

  However, the complete absence of Sha Guadi's three sves gradually began to unnerve me.

  I didn't really want to think about exactly what had happened to them.

  Was I really in the same position as — that?

  + + +

  The door opened and someone else was pushed abruptly into the sves’ quarters. They stumbled forward a few steps and then immediately fell to their knees before the door was shut behind them.

  I stared bnkly for a few long seconds.

  There were a pair of fluffy round ears.

  As well as a metal colr.

  I couldn’t tell if they were male or female, but I could immediately see that they were some kind of skinny kuma (bearkin) sve. Their clothes looked brand new — as if they had just been washed and exchanged — and they looked rather disoriented.

  The kuma looked around the room in confusion.

  “…This is…?” They muttered.

  “Hi.” I said.

  I tried to be polite.

  “T-they just brought me here all of a sudden.” The bearkin stammered. “Said that I would have a new master. I don’t know anything else.”

  I examined the kuma with some amount of curiosity.

  Their voice was almost perfectly androgynous, almost a little feminine, but they were completely ft-chested and cked any kind of hips. It was rather obvious that one of my cssmates had requested a sve, since there was no other reason why they would be here, but I really couldn’t tell which one of my cssmates would specifically ask for an ambiguous body like this.

  It was very suspicious.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Yuko.”

  Another gender-neutral name.

  “My name is Hana.” I told them. “I think you’ve been sold to one of the Otherworlders, but I don’t know which one.”

  “Otherworlders?”

  It seemed like they had no clue what I was talking about.

  “People who were summoned from another world,” I expined.

  “…Oh.”

  Yuko the bearkin appeared to be at a complete loss about what to do with that kind of information. If anything, neither of us had been given explicit instructions about what we could and couldn’t do, and this room was practically empty apart from the small heap of belongings that I had piled up in my corner.

  Without anything else to talk about, I asked the question that was pguing my brain.

  “Do you mind if I ask if you’re a boy or a girl?”

  “…” Yuko hesitated for a while with a frown.

  Was it really that hard of a question?

  “Male.” He finally said after some difficulty. “I would prefer it as male.”

  (Huh?)

  ?