The first thing I do before healing people is survey the surrounding area.

The area around here is full of tight alleyways and sharp corners. Countless places to hide in. I’ve already moved quite a distance away from the housing and the best way to lose my followers was to die into the darker, less frequented areas.

Though, most places I’ve been to lately have had little light. Now that I think of it, I’ve been able to see pretty clearly in the dark. My eyes must have been adjusting to the dark light, far beyond the norm.

I mean, it’s not like they have streetlights out here. What gets me is how subtle the change was. I think I just subconsciously I thought this world just brighter nights or something.

In actuality, it is several leagues darker.

Since the world is larger and obviously the technology level is lower, there is less light pollution overall.

Not only that, but most light at night from the majority of people who even have light sources, only have very small lights. Just enough to see the small areas in which they live.

It’s not only that, though. As my scan pulses over these areas, I come across a common theme.

There are just so… so many poor and injured people.

For every 1 person living in a building, there are 12 others on the street.

The small snapshots of things I see are things I am surprised to see, but really shouldn’t be.

Many people are in the process of getting robbed, stabbed, murdered, hurt, and, in way too many cases, abused.

And so, I come across a conundrum.

Is it enough to just heal people, letting them fall back into the same dangerous situations?

My answer with Ai and Lin was to work with them directly. With the demi humans, I have a strong suspicion that Gong had already filtered out most people who would have been a problem.

… maybe even hoping of using the chaos as an opportunity to get rid of community menaces.

Even if I was willing to do that… which I’m unsure of, what would the ramifications be of something like that?

I would have to scan each person to give a fair judgement.

Possibly, but I’d die. Which isn’t a hypothetical.

I’d really die from that, if I tried to do that with every other type of scan still active.

The only way I could do something like that would be over time and adjusting the others.

My scan shows each of the people within the nearest 20 km that fits that criterion and is in a desperate state.

More than half will fall into the same state, even if I heal them, because of being in an ongoing situation.

So, what will I do? What can I do?

And then the obvious answer comes to me. One that should have been obvious from the beginning.

My taming ability.

It doesn’t have to appear to be me that does the healing. It doesn’t even have to make sense.

If people see that these animals are defending and attacking them, they will obviously assume there is someone behind them.

But… if the animals seem intelligent, there will be the slightest bit of doubt.

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“Maybe the power is coming from them? Maybe they are similar to spirit beasts?”

Not only that, but using them like also allows me to have them being a centering piece, like what I did with Gong’s spiders during the assault.

I’ll be able to heal the people and scan things around them from the connection. Which will lower the cost enough for me to be able to get a general idea of whether it is right to intervene in a situation. And not die from the process.

It will suck immensely when I need to do scanning on other things at the same time. Most likely, will be a similar intensity to earlier.

There is a major downside to this, though. The animals themselves WILL be attacked. They’ll be dissected and torn apart. Every secret exposed. There’s no way the big groups will ignore this.

Fortunately for me, the contract with them seems to be something that wouldn’t show up even in the most detailed information pulls. I’ll also be able to do this from a much greater distance because of the centering effect.

Nonetheless, I’ll put it in the contract for consent. If they ever want to stop, especially once they receive the human intelligence level, I’ll have them switch away from that role.

… One rule, though. No insects or anything resembling them. I can’t have them be affiliated even slightly with Gong or I.

That would just be asking for trouble.

I also need to be doing something else while I do these things. Otherwise, something like what happened when I healed that Yellow Sashes member will happen. Cultivators with their spiritual sense may discover a pattern, as well. I also can’t just stay in one area or place either. That is what a practitioner who had such an ability would have to do.

… I’ll need to lower my local scanning power to compensate. I should be able to just reduce the effective area of my defensive scan (as I’ll call it) to around 2 meters or so.

Unfortunately, this is not nearly enough distance to protect me adequately. The only good thing about the situation is that my reaction speed and preparedness could allow me to dodge even spiritual sword attacks this time. Even from that distance.

I still be doing periodic pulses around myself, to make sure that there're no threats in my area and if there are, to shift my attention to those instead.

And so, with my area clear, I began my operation.

I started out with taming a ton of rats. 10,000’s of people's worth of rats.

Instead of bringing them all together like I normally do, I spread them further apart. I still leave bunches of them together in a way that would allow for them to work together to ‘fight’ against the situations, as I was thinking.

A piece of me is also reminded of those investigative unit shows and how they would be able to triangulate someone’s position by establishing a general area that they worked within.

Which is something called geographic profiling, which works by determining the most probable area of an offender’s base of activities through an analysis of his or her crime locations. In this case, it would be where the rats ‘awakened’ and will now be working.

So, I used my scan to also determine a pattern and randomized my taming in a way that would be highly resistant to such investigative methods.

Just in case.

I end up having rats active across this portion of outer city, with multiple fake potential zones that I could be active in, but that would ultimately show no true pattern. In some ways, even giving the impression that it is someone operating from outside that area.

Exactly as I wanted.

With this done, I began to search out people to heal.

As to expected, there are an exceptional amount of people around that need both healing and ‘help’ in getting out of a continuous situation.

The only question for me is if I partially automate this process with my scan.

If I don’t automate this somewhat, I will be constantly distracted by the different situations the rats are encountering. If I’m consistently distracted at the same time as something is happening… they will be able to determine it’s me.

I wish that was a hypothetical, but with the cultivation methods out there and spiritual scans, they can catch miniscule changes like that. While they wouldn’t assume it’s me, they’d likely believe I’m involved or getting information. Which means torture by high level people. An unfavorable situation.

So, automation is the only answer left. Whether by my scan or by trusting the rats to make judgement calls.

Eventually, I will be able to generally give instructions to the rats, like the hero group or spiders and trust them because of their intelligence and contract… but I just tamed these creatures. There’s no way they are there yet.

With this in mind, I set my scan to figure out the different levels of ‘issues’ that would be responded to vs ignored. This is, in a sense, setting up my own system of law. Determining who gets to live vs die, as a standard.

I never thought I would determine this at this time, but it’s at least partially necessary that I make personal lines on what is worth death or other measures.

And how to respond to them.

… at least my scan is able to determine the truth.

Though, it will run slowly and across many cases for these things. Which is why my area of personal defensive scanning is so small. It’s being used for big operations.

Of course, allotted within this, is enough lee-way to be able to do local scanning. Albeit, over a period of time. I can partially reduce operations to reallocate to local stuff if needed.

Once this is done, I will be able to actually get into the work of helping people. And then, focusing on my current situation.

Which is, coming up with things to do in the city, to appear busy.

Sigh…

This has gotten so complicated. The life of being more cautious in a really dangerous cultivation world.