Even in the royal capital Parnam, there was a dark side. Because of the large population, there were those who succeeded in business, those who earned a middling profit, and those who failed outright. The slums were a place where those who had failed, but who hadn’t fallen far enough to become slaves, would drift to and work for their daily wages.
Many of the homes were shanties. It was unsanitary, and prone to outbreaks of disease. The people who gathered here were of questionable origin, and the crime rate was high.
That was the sort of place it had been, anyway.
“That’s all in the past now,” I said.
“It’s changed?” Liscia asked.
“It’d be faster to just show you. I mean, when I was considering what to do about the future of the slum town…” I made a gesture like I had something like a hose in my hands as I spoke. “…I met someone who was strangely enthusiastic, going around saying, ‘Filth will be sterilized!’”
As we arrived in the former slum town…
“Huh?” Liscia tilted her head to the side in confusion.
“Hm?” Owen did the same.
When she saw their reaction, Carla did, too. “Is there something strange here, Liscia?”
Even after she had fallen to become a slave, Liscia had forced Carla to keep talking to her the way she had before. They were still good friends. It would be an issue if it happened in public, but I wasn’t about to tell Liscia how to behave herself in private.
Still with a blank look on her face, Liscia responded to Carla, “Huh?…Oh, yeah. I’ve never been to the slums before, but I’m surprised at how different it is from everything I’d heard.”
“What had you heard?” asked Carla.
“That it’s a dark, dank, moldy place with poor public order. I’ve heard the same,” Owen explained.
He was right. The slums had been like that before.
“It’s true that they look sparse, but the place looks pretty clean to me, you know?” said Carla.
What we saw before us now was a scene of houses that just looked like white blocks of tofu lined up. To put it in terms that a modern audience will understand, imagine the sort of temporary houses that are set up in the affected area after an earthquake. While they were spartan, they got a lot of sun and were bright. They also were well ventilated, so they weren’t dank. Admittedly, they could get a bit too dry in winter. Even so, when we saw children drawing on the ground and playing, it was hard to imagine that public order was bad here.
“Is this really the slums?” Liscia asked.
“Yeah. It’s gotten a lot better, hasn’t it?” I responded, puffing up my chest proudly. “When I was addressing the sanitation problem in the city, I worked hard to get everything in shape here.”
“The sanitation problem?” asked Liscia. “If I recall, you mentioned that when you were banning carriages from going down all but the largest roads, and when you set up the water and sewer system, right? Was reworking these slums a part of that, too?”
“I’m glad to see you remember,” I said. “Yeah. It’s easy for pathogenic bacteria to grow in dark, dank, places that are poorly ventilated. On top of that, this being a slum town, the residents don’t get proper nutrition, so it’s easier for them to get sick. If an epidemic had gotten started, this would have been fertile ground for it to spread rapidly.”
“Pathogenic bacteria… I feel like I may have heard that word before,” said Liscia.
She and the others were looking at me with faces that seemed to say “What are those? Are they tasty?”
“Huh? Didn’t I explain last time?” I asked.
Ah, come to think of it, I used the word when talking about the sedimentation ponds, but I didn’t explain it in detail, I thought. In that case… I guess I have to start by explaining how people get sick.
“Well… In this world, there are little creatures too small for the eye to see, and they exist in numbers far too great to count in the air, the ground, in our bodies— everywhere you can imagine. These tiny creatures make things rot and cause illnesses. On the other hand, they also cause foods to ferment, and there are some with positive effects, too.”
Using my meager knowledge of science (I was a humanities student, remember), I explained to Liscia and the others about bacteria and microorganisms. I didn’t feel like they were getting it all that well, but for Liscia, who knew that my knowledge could be far ahead of this country’s academia in some places, she seemed satisfied that “If Souma says they exist, they probably do.”
The study of medicine and hygiene wasn’t particularly well developed in this world. One large factor in that was probably the existence of light magic. Light magic heightened the body’s ability to heal, even allowing it to recover from serious wounds. It could even reattach severed limbs if administered quickly.
It seemed that, because of that, the study of medicine and hygiene hadn’t developed. That was why, in this world, there were very few who knew of the existence of bacteria and microorganisms.
Light magic only activated the natural ability of the body to heal, so it had the shortcoming of not being able to heal infectious diseases or the wounds of elderly people whose natural ability to heal had declined. Because of that, until just recently, the use of shady drugs and dodgy folk remedies had been rampant when it had come to the treatment of infectious diseases. When I’d addressed the issue of hygiene, I’d thought something needed to be done about this situation posthaste.
But before I could do that, I had first needed people to become aware of the existence of bacteria and microorganisms they couldn’t see.
“But how can people be aware of something they can’t see?” Liscia asked.
“In this world, there are people who know about bacteria and microorganisms… or rather, a race that does,” I said. “When that race focuses with their ‘third eye,’ they can see microorganisms that you wouldn’t normally be able to see. I enlisted their help.”
“A third eye… Do you mean the three-eyed race?” Liscia asked, and I nodded.
The three-eyed race. They were a race that, as you would expect from their name, had three eyes.
They lived in the warm lands in the north of the kingdom. Their defining trait was that, in addition to the standard left and right eyes, they also had a third eye in a slightly higher position in the middle of their forehead. It would be fine to imagine them looking like Tien Shin*** or ***suke Sharaku, but it wasn’t really an eyeball like that. That eye was small and red. At a glance, it looked like a jewel was embedded there.
Liscia let out a sigh. “I’m amazed they agreed to help. I’ve heard their race hates having contact with outsiders.”
“The reason for their xenophobia actually stems from that third eye, it seems.”
The three-eyed could see things other races couldn’t. It seemed that had been the reason they’d grown to reject outsiders. The three-eyed could tell if someone had good hygiene or not at a glance. That made them natural neat freaks, and they had started to avoid contact with other races as much as possible.
On top of that, with that third eye, the three-eyed had learned of the existence of bacteria. They knew them to be the cause of illnesses that couldn’t be treated with light magic. However, no matter how much the three-eyed insisted on this, the other races who couldn’t see the bacteria wouldn’t believe them. In a world filled with superstitions, even if they spoke the truth, it might seem like they were trying to throw the world into chaos with some dubious new theory.
Because of that, the three-eyed had come to hate contact with other races, and they’d developed their own independent system of medical knowledge and practice only for their own race. When it came to the study of infectious diseases in particular, their medical science was centuries ahead of this world. In this world where humans and beastmen were thought to have lived long lives if they made it to sixty, the three-eyed who originally had the same life expectancy now lived to eighty on average.