The first part of the morning was hectic and chaotic. The three women were overjoyed, skeptical, and unsure about their newfound freedom. It took a while for them to come to grips with the situation. It took even more time for them to realize that they weren't free in the truest sense, but in all the ways that mattered, it was just about the same.
He explained that while he couldn't free them outright, he could order them to act and behave as if they were not, in fact, slaves. To just act normal. Or more to the point, to act like they would if they had never been made slaves. This included listening to his orders or the orders of anyone who might end up their master. He added that last bit because it was a big and obviously dangerous world. He didn't want them to suffer in case he took the long dirt nap. Coupled with the fact that there were no more Parchments, if he were to be killed, they would be safe even if they had a new master. It was even more protection, because if the one who killed him knew they were his slaves, they could just pretend to follow orders until they could escape. Or get the upper hand and kill the so-called master.
Plus, there was the fact that they could no longer be forced into another slave contract. It was in some ways better. Still, there would be some minor hiccups somehow, but he was sure for the most part he had solved the issue. They were free to go and live their lives as far as he was concerned. He didn't want or need slaves, and he informed them of this.
The young man was now in proper clothes… if a robe-like garment with simple pants counted as proper here. He had found several changes of clothes inside the storage ring after a more thorough search, though they were geared toward a man, he was informed. They would do in a pinch. So now the three women had something else to wear along with the crocheted dress-like things he had made. Though a little short on him, they were much better than his makeshift outfit from before. He kept the headwear; long hours of remembered deployment and homelessness reminded him of the need for protection.
The larger of the women didn't fit the robes at all, but she managed to make one into a makeshift wrap/skirt thing that didn't look half bad. After things had settled down and they got used to their new situation, he talked with them. She, it turned out, was an Ogre, or Ogre-blooded, as she told it. Her people lived on the steppe plains he had seen from the hilltop. Though no true ogres lived anymore, there were still plenty of Ogre-blooded who could draw upon the old might of ogres, more human than Ogre now after the many generations since the Ogre Empire's downfall and eradication.
After they had eaten and the first shock of freedom wore off, the four of them sat close to the fire. The women stayed quiet at first, unsure what to say. He didn't push, just waited, letting the calm stretch out. Sooner or later, people talked when someone gave them room.
That was when they started telling him who they were.
She was proud of the fact that she could trace her lineage back several generations further than most of her tribe. She claimed to be almost three-fourths pure Ogre.
The young man had no reason to doubt that claim, nor did he care about her genetic makeup. He was just glad he could help.
The other two women were also from parts of the steppe, or the Forgotten Plains as they called them. The next woman was the one with mottled green and grey skin, though not unpleasant, just different, and small tusks poking from beneath her lower lip. She said she was Orc-Blooded, another denizen of the Steppe Lands. They had also been part of the Ogre Empire and also part of its downfall. In fact, she stated that most of the denizens of the Badlands, the Steppe Lands, and other such areas were remnants of older empires or civilizations that got too big for themselves, got conquered, or eradicated. Currently, it was the humans' era.
The last one, the small white woman with black scales, called herself a Serpent Kin. One of the ancestors of her people was what she called a Sacred Beast. Through the conversation, he guessed it was kind of like a beast that could also cultivate. He wasn't exactly sure what she meant, but it was a new world.
They had all been taken together as part of a caravan that was attacked by rogue cultivators, then sold into slavery. They didn't really go much into their treatment. One, it was personal to all of them, and two, it was something they wanted to put behind them.
Once they shared their stories, he asked about the land itself. If he was going to survive here, he needed to know more than names and bloodlines. The three of them traded looks, then began explaining the world beyond the clearing.
He found out they were on the edge of what they called the Great Green. It was a vast and unmapped forest. Separated by three zones or areas. There was the area they were in now, the Periphery, which bordered the Great Green as a transition zone and boundary. It was composed of woodlands, meadows, fens, swamps, and such slowly growing denser and larger as you went in. Then there was the Great Green itself, larger, deeper, stronger, and some say aware. Some people had been known to go in as much as five or ten miles. Nobody usually returned if they went further than that.
It stretched hundreds of thousands of miles and was the heart of the continent they were on. Nobody knew what was in the center, though there were rumors and speculations that there were clearings within the Great Green where people could live. People, in the general sense of sentient beings. Some the size of small towns, some the size of kingdoms.
Nobody knew for sure. There were even myths of entire civilizations hidden within the Great Green, protected—some said trapped—by the Great Green itself. They talked about it as if it was almost a living organism. When he questioned that, they just laughed and said it was. He didn't quite get it. How could a forest be a single organism?
Scattered around the outskirts of the continent and a few miles into the Greens Preliterary itself, for those brave enough to clear space, were pockets of civilization. The Great Green did not encroach all the way from edge to edge. There were anywhere between ten and a couple thousand miles between the shoreline of this continent and the Green.
So there was ample space for sentient beings to travel. It was just that nobody traveled straight through. All routes were long and circumstantial.
They also confirmed that the stretch of red-brown he saw was, in fact, a maintained road.
As the night went on and they finished talking and eating, he asked them what they wanted to do. While they did feel gratitude, they all just wanted to go home. It had been decades since they had been able to see family and friends. They were low-level cultivators, so their lifespans had been expanded, but not infinitely.
He nodded and thought on that. He told them he'd be more than happy to split whatever resources he had in the bag with them. But before they left, if they didn't mind, he wanted to ask them a few questions about cultivation.