Assimilate All Talents

Sol didn’t really care about Canes' personal life so he skimmed through the book until he got to what really interested him. The first entry that stood out to him was a little over five years ago.

—

4/16/513:

Found a good location. An abandoned slave prison from when it was legal to enslave elves. Funny how it will serve its purpose once again.

4/25/513:

That noble brat kept requesting for loyal fighters. How the fuck was I supposed to do that? I dealt in illegal slaves, but how was I supposed to make them loyal?

4/26/513:

Managed to appease the brat by convincing him he could train them to be loyal. Made some bullshit up on disciplining them, and he ate that up.

5/2/513:

Ha! One of his slaves escaped and informed the authorities. Can’t believe he let them out of his sight. Good thing I had them blindfolded the whole time or this place would have been compromised.

5/15/513:

One of my subordinates unlocked a second talent, and it's quite rare too. For some reason, I thought back on that noble brat's first request. Loyal fighters, huh? Maybe that's possible now.

—

Although it was Cane’s journal, he seemed to be wary of mentioning any names, places, or information that could be compromising. Sol found it hard to glean any useful information from these passages, but he kept reading nonetheless.

—

6/3/513:

Although his skill level was low, we found it pretty easy to mess with the mind of a random slum dweller. Whether it would work on stronger people still needed to be tested.

6/4/513:

A merchant who got banned from the adventurers' guild came to me for a servant. I gave him the slum dweller and managed to sell it for triple the original price. People were willing to pay good money for a loyal slave, but it could be more.

6/8/513:

There is an up and coming adventurer who is surprisingly fast and can cast lightning magic. I sent my men to capture him so we can test out how much effort is needed to recondition him.

6/14/513:

When we captured the rookie, we immediately tried the skill on him, but it failed. The most we could do was make them temporarily believe something, but it wore off after an hour. It was not until I beat him near death that the skill worked. We made him believe the injuries were from an accident from his lightning magic and we saved him.

6/15/513:

After the first conditioning, all mental changes after were much easier. Not only did they stop resisting, but it seemed once the skill's mana tainted their body it also made other changes much easier. We found a buyer and quickly sold him.

—

Reading how this man treated people so easily like products to simply be sold disgusted Sol. Later months described his testing process as Cane learned how best to mentally exhaust his victims then condition them. Sol found it really difficult to read the inner thoughts of this twisted man. As a coping mechanism, Sol stopped seeing him as another human but as an enemy who he would soon stop.

—

11/20/513:

A noble decided to invest in our business. They liked our products and decided to give us the Rank Report. Apparently nobles used that list to find promising recruits from the adventurers; now we can do the same. In return, he wanted early access to the products, and I had no problem with that.

2/4/514:

One of the products was returned to me today. I asked them if there was an issue or he broke through the conditioning, but apparently they just found him weird. Apparently, his attitude was too informal for being a personal manservant, and he played too many pranks on other servants. If that was the only issue then it would have been fine, but he pulled a prank that embarrassed the noble's daughter.

Either way, I was left to dispose of him, but after seeing his skills it would be a damn shame to let it go to waste. I'm thinking it would be better to recondition him to work for me. He was good at controlling threads and as strong as a C-Ranker so he would be useful in capturing other rookies. I might as well also rename him to better fit his new role; I’m thinking Weaver.

—

It was so unbelievable that Sol couldn’t help but exclaim, “What?! Weaver was one of the kidnapped adventurers?”

Sol wouldn’t have guessed by how willingly the man kidnapped others as if it was a game to him. It made Sol wonder, does Weaver know what they did to him?

—

2/13/514:

Worked so much better than I thought. Instead of sending multiple men who are weaker to secure one person, it's much easier to just send Weaver who could bind the target and immediately silence them. No more mess and it’s much harder to track since he doesn’t leave any trace.

I am considering keeping a few other products for myself as they made my life much easier.

—

A whole year passed of Cane repeating the same daily routine. His business slowly grew as he gained more subordinates and “conditioned” products as he liked to call them. He wrote how he gained a reputation in the black market and was offered to sell products on their behalf with his connections to other influential people and families.

Eventually, he stopped doing direct selling and switched to an auction for two reasons. The first was to make the price more competitive and gain more money and the second was because there was a lack of high-quality adventurers to capture and condition. With a lower supply, Cane decided to use an auction to make his buyers fight for it, which gained him much more money.

Sol continued to read until he found another entry of note.

—

8/2/515:

The latest target was a tough one to grab. She could turn her body to sand, which completely nullified Weaver's strings. Weaver said she almost managed to escape, but her skill's duration ran out and he knocked her out before it could be used again.

She was now in her cell, after a few days of starving and training, her mind should be ready for her conditioning.

8/6/515:

Weaver informed me she was ready, so together with my right hand, we went to begin the conditioning. The procedure was perfect, and in the end, I decided to keep her for myself. Her talents fit perfectly for capturing other targets and could be useful where Weaver isn’t. To make sure she didn’t turn out eccentric like Weaver, I made sure to condition her to believe she was nothing but a tool that obeys me. Similarly to Weaver, I also renamed her, giving her the name Red Sands.

—

‘Even her…’

The red cloaked assassin who lost to Sol was also just another victim. The damage this man had done to her even surpassed Weaver not only enslaving her but even taking her free will.

‘No wonder she barely talked or even reacted to pain.’

Sol’s fist clenched. To him, this was worse than death, at least then it would be over and have some agency in the way they go out. This took any choice, any agency they had over their lives and shaped it as their own. Even their thoughts were not their own. Something about this truly made Sol furious like never before.

Even in his anger, Sol kept reading. The rest was the same for the next few years, with Cane continuing this awful business. It was not until he got to diary entries from a year ago that he finally found something that could connect Cane to nobles involved.

—

2/17/518:

Fucking Valentino wanted to stop providing the Rank Reports. I had to threaten that fat lump of meat that if he did I would never sell him anything again, that I’d even cut him off from all other black market dealers. That put him in his place for now, but I better start finding other sources of the Rank Report just in case.

4/14/518:

Managed to finally close the deal with the Gulmar House; that made it four noble houses that are invested in my business. I'm lucky their daughter got sick and I knew just the right drug in the black market that could cure her.

—

7/27/518:

The latest targets have arrived. A boy who could wield the sword and water magic and a girl who could enchant objects and people. At first, I thought the girl would go for more, but Weaver spoke highly of the boy based on his initial impressions. He didn’t just have abnormally high stats but had skills that made him really strong against physical attacks. I should consider whether or not to keep him; I already know what I would call him, Tranquil Blade.

—

‘Me too?’

Cane was thinking of also keeping Sol and using him to kidnap even more people. Sol was surprised but it didn’t change his plans as he planned to start the raid before they used whatever skill “conditioned” people on both him and Rebecca.

It was not until Sol read the latest entry that everything changed. The entry wasn’t complete as Cane stopped midway to deal with the Street Wyverns messing around in his territory.

—

7/29/518:

I'm starting to think my right hand no longer wants to work under me. Lately, he had been taking the initiative to start his own business and while he said it’s to grow mine I doubt it. Just because he got lucky and gained the [Mind Shaper] talent-

—

Sol dropped the book in shock.