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.
"That's how I, as someone who knew what they were saying is the truth, was able
to arrange talks and request their assistance," I said. "With that done, in order to
demonstrate their abilities, I created a system that would let other races see bacteria
and microorganisms."
In other words, an optical microscope. This world already had lenses. (They had
glasses, after all.) For the rest, I'd drawn out a diagram of how I vaguely
remembered a microscope working, and the academics and craftsmen had created
one for me. That optical microscope had proved that the three-eyed were telling the
truth.
"But, man, the three-eyed really are incredible," I said. "I'd never have imagined
they'd already developed antibiotics."
"Auntie-buy-ought-ex?"
"Substances that prevent bacteria from multiplying like I was telling you about."
The famous example would be penicillin, I suppose. I mean, even a humanities
student like me had heard of it. (Though it was knowledge I'd picked up from
manga.) It was extracted from a blue-green colored mold, I think?
In the case of the three-eyed, they were extracting theirs from a special sort of
slime creature that could live in unsanitary conditions. They were a subspecies of
gelin, and they had the same sort of shape as Liquid Metal *limes. They had no name,
but I'd taken this chance to christen them "gelmedics." From what I had heard of its
effects, there was no questioning it was an antibiotic, but while it was similar to
penicillin, it might also be very different.
Incidentally, the three-eyed just called this drug "the drug."
That felt like it was just going to get confusing in the future, so I'd used my
authority as king to give it the name "three-eyedine." It was the three-eyed race's
medicine, so I'd shortened that to three-eyedine. I mean, it would have been fine
calling it "the drug," or "the pill"... but, as a former Japanese person, I'd always have
been thinking of completely different drugs.
"This... three-eyedine, was it?" Liscia asked. "It prevents the bacteria from
multiplying, but what good does that do?"
"It's a cure for infectious diseases," I said. "Basically, you can think of it as a
wonder drug that treats epidemic diseases and will prevent wounds from festering, I
guess."
"Treat epidemic diseases?! It can do that?!"
I couldn't blame Liscia for being surprised. While this country's medical
treatments (in particular, regenerative treatments) could be, in some limited ways,
ahead of modern science, on the whole, they were at the same level as Japan in the
Edo Period. When it came to infectious diseases, they would drink medicinal teas,
trying to ease the symptoms. However, with antibiotics, it was possible to treat the
underlying cause of illnesses to some degree.
Liscia looked taken aback. "That's terrible... We've been overlooking an incredible
drug like that all this time..."
"Well, the other races didn't recognize the existence of bacteria and
microorganisms, so even if the three-eyed had told you that antibiotics could fight
them, you probably weren't going to believe them. If you turn it around, the threeeyed were only able to find this way of fighting bacteria because they could see
them."
"So, can we mass produce this three-eyedine?!" Liscia asked, looking desperate to
hear more.
Yeah, I could understand how she felt. I'd had a similar response myself during
talks with the three-eyed elder. However, Carla and Owen, who were watching us,
were wide-eyed with surprise at the way Liscia was acting.
I nodded to Liscia. "We don't have the capacity for it yet, but we're slowly
increasing production. I had already distributed it to the military when the war with
Amidonia broke out, actually. Didn't you notice?"
"Fortunately, I never needed to take any... Ah! Now that you mention it, I did
think the number of fatalities was low given the number of wounded in that battle.
Was that thanks to three-eyedine?"
"Could be," I said. "Bacteria getting into a wound and making it worse is one of
the things it can help to prevent, after all."
"Incredible..." she whispered.
"Anyway, the three-eyed are giving their full cooperation, and the country has no
intention of being stingy when it comes to medical care. The biggest bottleneck will
be the number of gelmedics that they can extract three-eyedine from, but thanks to
Tomoe, we easily solved that problem."
Slime creatures like gelins were actually categorized as plants, and she couldn't
communicate with them as well as animals; but from their thoughts, she had still
been able to learn their preferred environment and the conditions needed for them
to multiply. Now we had the gelmedics actively multiplying in their breeding
grounds.
"Our little sister is way too convenient, isn't she?" I added.
"She sure is," said Liscia.
The public had started calling Tomoe the Wise Wolf Princess. Given the
rhinosauruses, the orangutan army of Van, and now the gelmedics... there was no
doubt she was living up to that name.
"And, well, on that note, our country is in the middle of a medical and hygienic
revolution, and one part of that was fixing up these slums," I said. "We tore down the
old houses to improve the sunlight and air flow. While we were at it, we stamped out
the criminals and illegal drugs, which was cleaning up the area in a different way.
We had all the residents move to new, prefabricated huts. The huts are small and
cramped, but they're free. On top of that, by having them work at cleaning up the
city, we're able to both support them financially and manage the city's hygiene."
"You're doing all sorts of stuff, huh. ...You're not pushing yourself too hard, are
you?" Liscia asked, looking concerned.