Chapter 140: Chapter 138 – Escalation

With a general plan set, I think deeply about what moral lines I have that would require me to interject with the rats, without question.

One would definitely be rape. I cannot imagine any situation where that would be acceptable, regardless of the crime. And personally, on that note, I don't care what the ethics of this world is regarding that.

However, with a bit of thought, I stop myself and really consider whether that's an indisputable crime.

There are drugs that cause people to lose control of their body in this world. To commit things they would never do otherwise.

As an example, the drug that young master tried to give Mei Lin. Give a more aggressive version to someone, and they would commit rape against their will.

Both parties would be victims.

Unfortunately, such thing would be an excellent framing technique, that is frequently used.

With this thought in mind, I decide that for every violent situation, I should use my scan on it to determine the truth. An action made possible by the use of the rats as a centering zone.

However, I will still stop a situation in progress. If someone's getting assaulted or about to be killed, I should do something about that situation to prevent it from being continued. After they are separated and the truth is revealed, then I can handle it.

If one of them is in the wrong, purposefully, for something like rape or serial murders?

Death by regenerating rats.

Luckily, there is a precedent for beasts with regeneration abilities. It will probably be attributed to ‘whoever’ is controlling them.

For other offenses? That will be a lot tougher to handle.

It may be better to just focus on the clear-cut situations first. Once I'm in a position to allocate more of the scan to this, I might handle these with a more delicate touch.

This doesn't even include the normal healing I have to do for people.

I have to keep in mind that there're many things to consider with each of these situations.

I'm not even sure if I want to get into the idea that there may be someone I heal being a legitimately bad person. For now, that will have to be an emergent solution. Something I keep an eye out for.

A feeler in my scan, that innocent healings or deaths are related to a central source. If I am consistently seeing something, I’ll have to handle it.

 

Thus, the first wave of rats goes out and gets close to people on the ground. The sick and unmoving people. People who can neither take care of themselves nor who people wouldn’t care about.

 

That way, there will probably be less of an effect from my actions. People won’t care if a rat climbs on or around them.

I’ll also be protecting myself by only healing them to where they can eventually get up, but not immediately.

 

Alright. I think I’m good.

Let’s begin.

 

 

To my immense surprise, it goes smoothly.

 

Out of the many rats, they rush around and find a person, which the scan and healing attaches to.

Then, they are mostly healed within the next 5 minutes. Despite any conditions they may have had.

What is frightening in many regards, is that there were more than a few people with the vestiges of diseases that could become full on pandemics. There was even an engineered one that I squashed. A scan revealed that I had healed everyone that was infected.

 

… Whoever planted that isn’t going to happy.

Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the bandwidth to pursue the knowledge of who did it and have to move on.

It’s strange… I get the feeling that now that I started, I can’t exactly stop. To be specific, I can… but only in certain situations.

A time and a place. An echo of an answer from the information gained.

One of those situations is getting into the sect. During this downtime, though? Every effort has to be poured into this.

Sigh… so demanding.

 

In the midst of doing this, one of the situations I feared, happened to one of these dilapidated people.

An older woman suddenly begins stabbing an older man that I was healing. After shanking him a few times, she begins searching his body for things.

A generic scan reveals that these two people try to rob each other on a regular basis. Not out of malice, per se, just as an extra potential resource. She just managed to catch him off guard this time.

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As he wakes up from his shanking, with a healthy, but now stabbed body, he quickly grabs a nearby piece of stone and begins hitting her with it.

And they begin brawling to the death.

I send in the rats separating the two. Swarms of rats flood from the cracks in the area, within seconds.

This has multiple effects, they begin screaming in fear, while running away.

Well. At least, before the rats’ stuff the people’s mouths with their bodies. They try to bite down, but the rats continuously heal.

My scan continues during this downtime.

Ultimately, their answer still comes out to the two of them being equally in the wrong. It’s been going on for decades.

The easiest way to handle it, I find is to heal them both and send them in opposite directions. With rats camping in the middle.

I follow through with this plan to the T. Nothing happens and they look completely confused. They seem to come to an understanding and walk away from each other.

With this situation somewhat resolved, I move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next.

Even as I don’t specifically target actively bad situations, they happen to the people I’m healing, anyway.

Each one is in its own little situation. One that requires my attention, it is clearly difficult to automate. Or to be specific, I could automate it, but it wouldn't feel right to do so for some of the solutions that come up.

Like, for example, where a man who just lost his daughter to an accident, and is attacking the person who caused it.

Technically, the scan would be right in allowing the man to attack them, but at the same time, would that be the right solution?

It’s hard to say.

Another situation is a kid being physically abused by their parents.

They're still being fed, and have a place to sleep, but they are also used as a way to have anger taken out on them.

 For situations like this, unfortunately, the rat becomes a warden. After they stop the abuse once, twice, three times, the parent is definitely afraid of the rats and is lithe to take care of the child anymore.

If they refuse to do that, the rats attacks them until they do so. The parent soon realizes they are being forced to take care of the child properly. Seems right to me, but is wrong for the common sense of this world.

The issue is that this is basically a common occurrence. Even just for one situation, it takes quite a few rats to pin someone down. If other people come to help, they are apprehended if they try to stop it.

Even within the first 5 minutes of doing this, I’ve come across at least 50 cases that appear to just be casual abuse. And there are countless more cases. Which means that even more rats have to be tamed to handle this.

The only good thing is that because of my earlier ‘death’ and the massive amount of people/conditions I'm healing, I become able to handle more tames much quicker than I had assumed I would.

 I'm also estimating that it will only take one rat to keep an eye on the situation, to send a message to an abuser to stop.

 

Despite all this, eventually there are enough scenarios being played out across so many numbers of different areas that I'm able to get a feel for how I should direct the scan to automate such things. It kind of feels like machine learning in some ways.

However, instead of the scan being the one that's trained, per se, it's actually me learning what my tendencies and decisions would be for a scenario. Then, I have the scan work off that baseline.

It's after about a few hours of this, of dedicated work, I finally achieve a state where I can reliably assume the scan will react the way I would to a situation. For good or bad.

 

The only situations I'm consistently having issues with, regardless of the scan, are ones involving people with connections to higher status people.

In almost every one of those situations, the attacker or abuser coerces the victim into begging the rats to back off. The attacker is making threats to tell their superiors and kill everyone off.

Of course, I make sure the rats don't listen to them. They handled the situation by either separating the individuals and protecting the victim. Or they just kill the attacker.

The reason it escalates to usually killing the attacker is because they have a tendency to lash out at the victim murderously, or are clearly planning to do so in another way.

This, in itself, isn't too different from the normal scenarios. What is different is when that person was useful to someone in a more powerful position.

 

That is why, despite my need to not focus completely on the situations, I'm being forced to.

The situation is escalating. They realized people aren’t rebelling, but there is an outside influence doing this.

 

And it's only been four hours since I’ve started.

 

… What the hell have I gotten myself into?

 

 

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