Alexandr Korol

have never understood me — why I stop, why I don’t touch it. It’s the same as when I returned to St. Petersburg, as I often did. I didn’t just study the map of St. Petersburg, but also the nearby towns: Pushkin, Pavlovsk, Lomonosov, Peterhof, Gatchina, and so on, and so on. Kronstadt — basically all those places around Petersburg. But I never pried into anything. I mean, maybe that’s just how I was raised. And anyway, what’s the point of digging into things? It’s not about the physical. Am I supposed to find some kind of treasure chest filled with gold or something? I have no such need, and that’s not my goal. And when I found the place where Mary Magdalene is buried — or rather, when I traveled to the place I had seen, after Big Alexander asked me where she was buried — I simply saw the location in my mind, without even knowing what city it was. Then I opened a map, found the city, went there, and there stood a very unusual Catholic church. The atmosphere felt like I was in some English village, like it was a little English chapel. It was elongated — really unusual. And the energy there was overwhelming — when we drove up in the car, everyone’s thoughts just shut off, like a fog came over us, can you imagine? And right on the grounds, there was this powerful radiation. And I understood that something was hidden there, something sacred, buried on that land — not in the church itself, but underground, within the territory. But of course, I would never go there with shovels or behave in that way. Even if I did want to retrieve something, of course I would need to coordinate it with the local administration, with the city authorities — or even with the church that the land is attached to. I’d need to explain the situation, say that I have a genuine interest, that I’m willing to fund the expedition myself, that it would be official, and that nothing would be disturbed. It would have to be done officially — if I ever wanted to do something like that. But as you see, that was never even my goal. My goal was simple: I realized that knowledge was being given to me, information was being passed to me. My one task was to write about it, to document it in the book — and that’s it, nothing more. But people, as you can see, have a slightly different reaction — a wilder one. If I were in a reader’s place, I suppose — if I were reading “Alternative History,” and then, say, I happened to be walking through Petersburg and suddenly saw the Church of Peter and Paul — sure, I might walk up to it. But I wouldn’t act like a madman and go there on September 12th, in the middle of the night, just to stand there, and then run into others just like me — other readers doing the same. But that’s just a hypothetical. I haven’t seen