Population Control Chapter 8

This is a translation of a j.a.panese novel. You can read the 

This is a work of fiction, with depictions of violence such as death of many people at a time. It is not suitable for readers under 15.

Hey everyone! Chapter 8 is here!

Got to learn a lot of things while translating this one.

Chapter 8: Great teacher Aida's ma.s.s-murder cla.s.sroom

During the weeks before my transfer, I decided to take a look at Aida's light novel to get some inspiration for my mission.

★ The reincarnated, cowardly demon king has given a royal decree to destroy humanity. But he only has 300 years.★
By Aida Tsukigase.

The main character of the story, the demon king, is someone who was transmigrated from j.a.pan to a world with a cla.s.sic medieval human civilization, in order to get rid of mankind. He gets to use his magic as he wants, but he has to proceed as seamlessly as possible.

Reading this book got me thinking. ‘That guy' sure chose poorly when he picked me for his mission. If he had picked Aida, she would have probably gotten straight into it without caring much about the company.

Anyway. In the first half of the book, the demon king came up with many methods to attack the human world.

Drought, famine due to a cold summer, fatal epidemics, locust plagues, weather warfare…

The demon king gradually erased the humans, while being very careful not to let anyone know he was the one behind it all, so that he wouldn't give rise to a new hero coming for his head.

But I can't use any of these methods. Locust plagues are beyond the capabilities of my Regedit, and the same probably goes for cold summers and droughts.

As for famine and fatal diseases, it might not work all that well in our modern society since the UN and some humanitarian volunteers would probably intervene to help the world recover.

Regarding weather warfare, considering the environmental modification convention, even if I do manage to somehow make a meteorological weapon, it will end up getting dismantled, and the authorities would then come for me. Even I have ‘Heroes' I need to look out for.

The first half of the book is all built upon the boundaries of a fantasy world's logistics, healthcare, and production. Unfortunately, using famine and infectious diseases were ideas that even I was able to come up with on my first try, so it wasn't all that interesting for me as a reader, and I didn't get any good material from it. But as the novel's story progresses, those short-term simplistic methods are let go, in favor of much bigger plans on a different scale. That's when it becomes really interesting.

— Chapter 11:”Mount Fuji and the hanging bell.” —–.

【”The solution was right in front of me. Back in my old world, before I became the demon king here, my country had to deal with a population decline problem that kept getting worse after each generation. How did I forget this! Ahahaha. Perfect. Today, we start operation hanging bell!”】

Operation hanging bell… In short, the demon king's plan was to develop the healthcare of the human society to turn into high birth high death ratio into a high birth low death ratio through a demographic explosion.
I guess the point was to ultimately get a demographic transition, in which the growth rate of humanity would eventually take the form of a bell curve, with a low birth and low death ratio.

This is something I could use without having to think of any humanitarian aid's intervention. Besides, this method has already proven its worth here in j.a.pan, where the population keeps decreasing. If there was a counter-measure to this, the j.a.panese government would have probably already jumped on it with tears in their eyes.

That's good material. Next.

— Chapter 17 “The 8 millimeter demon” ——.

【”Humans make children. They'll always try to have children and that's never going to change. Back in my home-country, we managed to catch some hostile, wicked demons, and we cursed them so they wouldn't be able to have any offspring. Then, we let them out in the open. After a few a generations, their numbers had decreased at an astonis.h.i.+ng rate, and they finally disappeared from our country.”】

This refers to the time when the Okinawa prefecture's pest control center eradicated and prevented the re-entry of the worst and most destructive of all pests, the Melon fly. They raised a large quant.i.ty of these flies, which they exposed to the gamma radiations of cobalt-60, thus taking away their ability to reproduce. Then, they released them onto the fields.
The regular melon flies that copulated with the modified flies could not lay any eggs, and that reduced their general reproduction rate.
This process is called SIT; the Sterile Insect Technique. It has to be repeated again and again, persistently, in order to work.

But doing that on humans? That's nasty.

Aida, how can you be so nasty! You're scaring me!

— Chapter 26 “A well of virtuosity”—

【”Wars and conflicts can happen over the most trivial things. I'm going to show you something much more interesting than any great ruler or army.
That terrifying thing is humanity's jealousy, and their desire to monopolize everything.”】

Reading this chapter gave me a pretty big shock.

Apparently, a j.a.panese tv channel once made a special program about a tribe living in a village sitting in the mountains of a developing country. Some water wells had been dug for this tribe, hydraulic power generators had been brought to them, and schools had been built inside their village, and they were expressing their grat.i.tude for it in the program.

But according to a story that came out later, it turned out that the tribe got involved in a fight with neighboring tribes over those water wells and power generators, and that many local tribes ended up killing each other because of it, to the point where they could not subsist anymore.

…Where does Aida find these ideas? This could be useful to me in tons of ways.

— Chapter 27 “The pond of life” —

【”No matter how wise they are, those who let themselves be fully dependent on trial and error are doomed to failure. Even so, humans just can't help themselves from doing it. Showing these people the foolishness of their ways will be quite entertaining.”】

This is… Sort of the same as the previous idea, but not quite.

In this part of the novel, the main character was inspired by another story. It's the story of a certain village that used to be located in the mountainous region of a developing country. It took the girls of this village two hours every day to go fetch water and two hours to come back. To help them so they could have time to attend school, some non-profit organizations and the Overseas Cooperation Volunteers built a pond near the village. But this gave rise to an explosive increase in the number of mosquitoes in the area, which led to the annihilation of the village by malaria.

Apparently, the people of the village where the pond was first built had been taught how to build a pond and were able to manage it without any trouble. The problem was that people from other villages started being jealous and tried to imitate the first village's pond by just copying what they saw without understanding it, and that's what ultimately brought their mutual destruction.

Not good. This is polluting my poor brain.

I might have a strong mind, but I feel like even I shouldn't let myself read this novel in one setting. Before I know it, I'll find myself thinking stuff like “How would I go about killing all these people?” while walking around town. This would be dangerous.

Wait, no, the only actual dangers here are Aida and that guy!

In the weeks before the date of my departure, I had a lot to do. I got a farewell party, took care of my pa.s.sport, acquired a work visa, got my vaccines, trained to adapt to the local customs and habits, cancelled my apartment lease, and made arrangements regarding the place I was going to move in upon arrival.
And as I was keeping myself busy with these sorts of matters, the time for the wind of autumn to make its grand entry finally came. Time pa.s.ses amazingly fast when you have a lot on your plate.

By this point, the rumors about the Imaginary ‘horse racing prediction system' that I'd supposedly made had all but faded.

To pull this off, I had to come up with a scenario.
After I got the results from the Tokyo lottery tickets, I partook in in the Summer jumbo lottery, and let everyone know about it. Then, I used my Regedit to make it so I'd be the winner of one of the first prizes. I heard winning the lottery comes with its lot of mental burdens and risks, but most of those risks will probably be irrelevant once I'm outside the country. There is no way anyone would follow me to my new job overseas to take my prize money.

Once my plan was settled, I checked my winning lottery in the middle of the office, and then deliberately made a big show of it, saying “Oh! I won!”.

This lottery was a way for me to evaluate Regedit's performance, but other people had no way of knowing that. To my colleagues, the only possible answer to this win was that I was just a lucky guy, who was using up the luck of a lifetime and embracing it. And that is exactly what I wanted them to think.

I figured that once the idea that I'm a frighteningly lucky man installed itself in their minds, they'd label my trifecta win as just one fluke among many in my lucky streak.
This turned out to be the right call. Manipulating everyone's impression of me worked even better than I thought. Those unsettling shadows plotting behind my back were all disappearing.

Then, come September, by the time the grade 1 Sprinter Stakes race started, I made a big show of losing a horse racing bet, and that was the last blow to everyone's delusion of a “Miraculously accurate horse racing prediction AI system”.

After that, the number of colleagues who decided it was better to just take money directly from me increased, but the only methods they used were basic crimes like trying to somehow break into my house or into my PC. At least my life was not under threat anymore.

Still, many kinds of people came after my money, with each their own excuses. Some wanted to use it for a date, others wanted me to lend it to them to save their family's factory before it would go bankrupt, some went with the story that their debt collector was after them and was about to make them sell their organs, or that they'd been taken to a bas.e.m.e.nt by a group of guys in black suits or whatever.
Every single time, I gave them the same reply.

“Can we talk about this another time, please? I'm too busy right now. I've decided to go work overseas and I have a lot of preparations to make before I leave.”

With this one line in my a.r.s.enal, I managed to keep escaping from them, thinking that they probably wouldn't be able to follow me anymore once I'd be overseas.

The day of my departure soon came, and I successfully left the office.

To be honest, with my lottery money, I don't need to work for the company anymore. But leaving the company is too risky, I don't want to get kidnapped or to be pestered to h.e.l.l and back.
This overseas job is the simplest solution.