Probably, a minored price like you say, but more something like a ticket for a dog. Beastkins in this world, are, in my opinion, second class citizens. With masters. IE, slaves.
I think we've been through this before, and you could be right. In fact you're almost certainly at least partly right. But we just don't have a great deal of very, very basic information to tell us for sure. After all, "master" would be how a domestic servant (instead of a slave) would refer to their employer, etc. Among those questions:
- Where do beastkin even come from? Is there a beastkin community, or are they essentially mutations produced by humans? If there is a beastkin community, why can't the children stay with their families of origin?
- Are beastkin with masters paid for their work?
- Are beastkin ever abused or otherwise harmed by their masters?
- Is a beastkin with a master ever allowed to leave? (We haven't seen any who want to leave, of course.)
- What are the rights of first-class citizens in this world? What is the political system like?
I think it's been very interesting to watch the different iterations of the "Master and Mel" material go from a point where Itou Hachi had very little interest in world-building except as a kind of superficial stage set (vaguely early-20th century technology, sporadically late-Victorian social customs, etc.) to substantially more specific (but still quite slight) development of the conceptual underpinnings of the storyworld.
I'm surprised that the series ever got much beyond, "All you need to know is that Itou Hachi wanted to draw lovey-dovey scenes of cute little girls with furry ears and a tail."
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