Slavery. Sage was not originally from this world and so he of course had a hate for it. Many who lived in the world also abhorred the practice, but like most things the strong made the rules. Powerful cultivators had little need for slaves, people would serve them willingly for the chance to have a strong backer. Even weaker cultivators could easily earn money and they would be treated like rich men by normal mortals. The problem was actually with rich mortals.

Merchants, business owners and other mortals would find ways to gain wealth. Since they dealt only with gold and not Spirit Stones, most cultivators ignored them. On the other hand, there were weak cultivators that had reached the end of their roads and just like the ones joining the Hatchet Gang wanted more power, some just wanted to live in leisure. They found that serving these rich mortals could be quite a nice life as long as they didn’t mess with any other cultivators they could bully the normal mortals.

It was this confluence of rich mortals and weak cultivators that were the most involved in the slave trade. They felt stifled by those above them so they vented their emotions on the ones beneath them. It was frowned upon in the Dou Kingdom, but far from being illegal. Most of the first rate powers cared little for what happened to ordinary mortals. They usually only cared for their own direct family members or clans. So, after putting their own relatives into protected settlements, they usually ignored the rest. Most were just too concerned with their own power to waste time on activism.

Of course this was only the general situation. In many places slavery was completely outlawed by one righteous group or another, and in other places it was absolutely rampant. If the sect in charge of the area had a use for sacrificing lives, then the mortals there would be little more than livestock, bred and raised to be culled. It was a gruesome practice, and it was only a matter of time until one of those livestock was related to or became a powerful cultivator. Groups with such bloody foundations were always destined to fall at one time or another.

They weren’t all that common in the Dou or Shihu Kingdom, and the ones he had seen were kept in a similar manner to indentured servants. It was only after Wu Chang reminded him that he tasked the information network with collecting information about them. What he found was that slaves were uncommon in the Dou Kingdom, but slavers were not. There was more than one group operating in the Kingdom that would, though one method or another, purchase people. Then they’d ship them out of the Kingdom, bringing them to some other country before selling them. His network didn’t extend outside of Dou Kingdom, so they couldn’t track exactly where they were being taken to.

He immediately tasked the information network with digging up information about the various slaver groups. Next, he sent another message to Black Saber to inform him of their new hunting target. It wasn’t an all out war, but all slavers were to be added to a sort of ‘targets of opportunity’ list. If they ever saw any, they were to be made note of and watched. After that, if there was ever a time they were moving somewhere secluded the Jade Horde should strike them down.

On top of that standing order, Sage was looking for an opportunity to test out his new combat prowess so he sought out the closest groups to Lionheart Town. He started with missing person reports. The city guard kept records of when people were reported missing, but it was more of a formality than anything else. Most that went missing were never seen again. The city guard mostly patrolled the streets and protected from outside threats. They weren’t trained detectives or investigators, they only solved cases by accidentally stumbling upon them. That said, with thousands of them walking the streets everyday, they could stumble upon quite a lot. So, their one effective practice was to rapidly spread information to all the guard posts so the city guards would know what to look for.

At least they leaned into it. They probably also have some pretty effective methods of communication. Maybe Wu Chang will share them with the Jade Horde?

The little birds were far more effective at narrowing down the search than the dumb luck of the city guard. In only a few days, they’d already marked a dozen locations and two dozen possible people related to slavery. They were places that people had last been seen at before going missing and the suspicious people were loan sharks, landlords, and vicious cultivators.

The loan sharks and landlords would allow people to build up their debts and then, once the debt was too high they’d ‘allow’ the debtor to sell themselves, or others, as repayment. Some even turned it into a profession, kidnapping and selling others to fund their vices. The vicious cultivators were just like that latter group, except using their strength they could capture whole families or even small settlements. They tried to keep a low profile and such vile people were constantly being caught and killed.

The even worse villains, and the ones Sage was searching for, were the people that bought the slaves. The slavers were the ones that were paying for the captured people and shipping them out of the Kingdom. If they didn’t exist, the others wouldn’t have much of a market. He couldn’t capture every vile person in the world, but if he cut out a link in the chain it would drastically reduce the amount of people getting sold into slavery.

Sage was peering through a crack in the shutters of a window. He was watching the building across the street for signs of motion. At the same time, there was a small owl sitting in the eaves of the building and Sage was monitoring what it heard. Three of his Falcons were doing the same thing at the other three sides of the building. They’d so far narrowed their search down to this warehouse. One of the Falcons had even snuck inside during the day using Mud Mask to alter their facial features and Bird Bath to hide their cultivation. They found many suspicious traces. There were many crates large enough to store people, large amounts of straw, a kitchen, a well, and many sets of manacles.

Researching the warehouse, there were no large livestock suppliers listed in their records, so it made little sense for a random warehouse to have all those things. Either they were storing and moving slaves there, or it was a secret staging base for some other power. Which meant that gathering more information on the place was not a bad thing. Since it was their most promising find so far, Sage had joined in on the stakeout. He’d been spending his time training, but there was only so much he could improve without putting his skills to the test. If he had a master to guide him, or at least the notes of a master with a well traveled path to follow it might be different, but his cultivation was now based upon a legendary Heavenly Material and so he had only the most basic information to follow. He’d have to forge his own destiny.

Just at that moment when he was thinking of his cultivation, there was motion. A small team of four wearing dark clothing, and with their faces hooded, walked up to the door of the warehouse and used a key to unlock it. They slipped inside after checking their tail and the door swung shut behind them very quietly. Sage, and the Falcons, ordered their owls closer. Pushing their heads into the rafters and towards the drafty spots they’d identified earlier. Places where the sound would carry better.

The techniques of ‘How to be a Little Birdy’ were skewed towards passive use and very effective for going unnoticed among a crowd. They were far less effective at covert operations during the night and for forceful infiltrations. A small bird flying around a garden would be completely ignored. It could listen to rumors and gossip from servants or even catch important information from a private meeting on a terrace. On the other hand, even a tiny insect would be seen as a security breach if it were to fly into a sealed high security building. The same went for using a disguise and mingling among a crowd versus a disguise used to enter a guarded building at night.

So, Sage didn’t intend for them to force the gathering of intel here. Instead, they were waiting for the four inside to step outside once more. When they did, the owls would follow them from afar and with time and patience they would learn more about their new persons of interest. After a few minutes, two of the hooded figures came out and two of the owls followed them, their Falcons staying far behind. After a few hours, the other two still hadn’t left the warehouse.

A secret entrance, perhaps?