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Volume 7 Chapter 3 Part 13

There are definitely many more houses whose owners keep slaves in them than I initially thought, but aside from that, there is also one more thing that heavily limits the society of this world when it comes to science: the fact that there is no such thing as forensic science in this world at all.

DNA testing, the system of taking people’s fingerprints, those useful things have not been invented just yet, and they probably won’t be for a long time if this world is going to be stuck in the middle-ages forever. With how things are here technologically, there is even no way for people to know their own blood types.

But if this world does not possess such things, then how are the criminal cases handled here, and how can people who have been charged wit committing a crime attempt to prove their own innocence in case if they happened to be convicted for a crime they didn’t really commit.

So what happens in such a case? The 「investigations」that the Knights from the Knight Orders can carry out cannot really be called genuine investigations, not with the limited tools and methods that they have available for them. If they start doubting someone just because they won’t find the answers to their questions that the suspect would be giving them to their liking, then that means that such a suspect is pretty much done for, because he’d be proclaimed a criminal based on that alone without the Knights even trying to get down to the heart of the matter.

But why am I even talking about such things as trying to prove your innocence to the Knights if in this world devoid of forensic science there is not even such a thing as evidence to begin with. Since there is also no such things as luminol and luminol reaction in this world, it will not be possible to determine if the weapon that’s been used for murder really belongs to the suspect or perhaps to someone who was trying to frame them.

The only thing that could be possibly used as evidence would be the confessions and testimonies from the eyewitnesses, and as we all know these cannot always be relied on, because witnesses can always be either bribed or silenced to stop them from spilling information.

Not to mention that if there was ever a person who is a completely new arrival in town or the city where no one knows him, that would automatically make him the target of the accusations for everything strange or out of the ordinary happening in the area recently.

Also, the way that society is structured in the world of this game seems to be based on the assumption that when it comes to the neighborhoods like the one where we currently live in, all of the neighbors seem to be pretty close with one another and everyone knows everyone, or at the very least most of the people next to whom they are living.

That is exactly why I feel that establishing a society in which people from different backgrounds, races, culture and customs can live harmoniously with each other without getting in each other’s way is impossible in this world, where apparently privacy means very little. I myself lived in a society where it was fine if you didn’t interact much with the people around you or knew your neighbors faces, so suddenly switching to a way of life that’s going to be like a total one hundred eighty degrees turn is going to be rather difficult for me.

But even if an environment like that could somehow be established in this world, then I have a lingering feeling that it would not be able to last very long and would collapse upon itself when trouble with its structure started appearing one after the other.

Quratar is a city where a lot of Explorers have gathered in order to explore the Labyrinth in the city’s center, so I guess it must have originally been a city where a lot of strangers used to live since many of them were probably coming and going however they saw fit, so in that sense, I guess you could say that the companionship between the neighbors isn’t as much as I was giving it credit for after all, a notion reinforced by the fact that I literally don’t know the faces and identities of the people who live in the houses next to ours.

However, Roxanne seems to have a fairly good understanding of that. And once again, how is that possible? When did she have the time to get acquainted with the people who live around us when she spends practically the entirety of the day at my side?

Well, I guess that matter is not all that important right now. What’s important is the fact that now that we have neighbors around us, we need to attend the bare minimum of the required regional activities together with them if we don’t want them to start thinking that we are a suspicious bunch.

Thinking about it now, this is probably going to be super weird and awkward for the new people in town or the weird ones that try to stay away from the contact with others as much as possible, especially if something unpleasant ever happened in the area.

What would have happened if a robbery or murder occurred in here?

If there was someone who did not attend any of the regional activities in order to better integrate himself with other people in his area, then he would naturally be branded a culprit for any crime that would occur in that area. And after that, the only thing that would await him would be unspeakable tortures until he would be broken beyond repair, just to have him confess to committing a crime that he actually didn’t commit.
If you look at that matter from such a perspective, then attending the regional activities whenever you are being asked to do so is the necessary thing to do if you don’t want to end up with false charges on your head, or at least that is what I understood from the brief explanation that Sherry has given me.

As such, that is enough of a reason for me not to skip out on these activities after all. If this is what is going to be required of me so that I could go and enjoy my life in this world in relative peace, then I say that we’re going to be doing it so that everyone could see that we are in the clear and we have nothing to hide.

Cleaning the sewage might be a dirty job, but if Miria’s attendance in it is going to directly translate into us scoring some points with the others for being good neighbors, then having her work in sewage water for a bit is a small price to pay, and she herself doesn’t look like she particularly minds it.

Of course, one can try to refute in case of being accused of being a criminal, but I highly doubt if just their, or mine, words were enough to shake the accusation off. If anyone accuses any of us of being a criminal, it is more than likely that a trial is going to be held against us, and if I were to guess, then the possibilities would be either trial by ordeal or trial by combat.

Now for those of you who might be unaware, when I say trial by ordeal, I mean the kind of trial where the outcome is 「determined by God’s will」. It might sound all pompous, but usually it all boils down to subjecting the accused to some kind of painful or unpleasant experience in order to have them prove to the judge and the jury that they are innocent.

When it comes to the actual ordeals that the accused can be subjected to, they can vary from throwing a small pebble into a barrel of boiling-hot water and forcing the accused to get the pebble out, having them walk on burning rocks and the like. To follow the pebble in boiling water analogy for a bit, it would usually go something like this:

If the accused gets the pebble out of the water then he’s going to be declared innocent, and if he fails, he is proclaimed guilty. There was also the kind of trial by ordeal where the accused had to pick up burning-hot metal rods or other kind of metal objects and they would only be deemed innocent if there was no burn marks left on their bodies, or one of the trials by ordeal used during the Salem Witch Hunts, where the women accused of being witches were being thrown into the water with their limbs tied, and they would only be cleared of all the charges if they floated above the water’s surface despite being bound, because that would be a sign of their innocence send from the God on high himself.