... and no one's responded to this one, yet? Hrm, perhaps that's not a good sign.
Alright... well, I suppose I could sum this up easily. I could have liked this chapter a lot... but I didn't.
But I doubt you'd let me make such an accusation without evidence. Darn.
The thing that bothered me the most is that a lot of time passed (months), and a lot of stuff happened (apparently they had to pay to leave?), but I have no clue what that stuff was, or why. That really irks me, because it's like you just threw out a huge chunk of the story in order to get Jin to a place where you can torture him. I already hate time lapses, especially large ones, but if there are crucial things that happen in that time lapse? Ugh, bad mojo.
Outside of that, there's another issue that I had: too much happened to Jin in a
very short amount of time. He arrived in town, sold the skins, got sold himself, got taken to the pits (which took a long time, according to the writing), worked for "a full rotation of the suns" (however long that is... I need to know your time frame, but that seems long), sleeps (for an undetermined amount of time), then trains (for quite some time, I assume). And he's eight years old.
I call BS. You take an 8-year-old who has lived a sedentary life, and make them do that much work, and they'll either be dead, or immovable the next day. I don't care how much energy a little kid has. He's malnourished and lazy. He is not going to be running back and forth for "a full rotation of the suns", unless that's an hour. You take any person who isn't in shape and put them through a grueling exercise regiment, and they're useless the next day, and if you continue to make muscles work past their limits, you end up pulling tendons, pinching nerves, and so on (personal experience: I started exercising awhile back and ended up pinching a nerve in my shoulder; my left arm was practically useless for a week, and the numbness took forever to go away). This isn't DBZ where you train every day for 16 hours in 10G environments and magically get better.
Now, contrary to Hollywood's belief, slaves were not usually treated very harshly. An abused slave is not a productive slave. Whipping a little child is going to make him very unproductive, when he starts suffering from blood loss on top of his normal malnourishment. Yes, there are the (mostly true) stories of horrible slave drivers who constantly abused them, but they usually didn't have slaves very long, because they died. Even a small whip gash can fester, and I want to see how much money Jalean can get from a kid with gangrene.
So what I end up with is a chapter I just can't believe. I have no problem with Talven being a deadbeat dad, nor with the concept of Jin working in the pits or his inherent loss of pretty much everything in his life. Them's the breaks, as they say. But making a little kid perform outside of the human limits just triggers my WTF alarm. Unless he's really some sort of super human... but then, I would have expected you to inform me of that before this.