Alexandr Korol

Or it’s like they forgot about you, and you forgot about them too — but then, when you entered the Gotham world, they remembered you, and you remembered them, and suddenly you had time for them. See, it’s like everything shifts at once. So I assumed the card contributed to that. Why? Because it felt like it switched on my heart — I literally felt it the moment I held it in my hand. And yes, then... I don’t even know where that card is now. At the time, it was significant. Now, it’s not. I even think I took it apart to see what was inside. Well, it is significant — it’s something I’ve kept — but it’s as if it was meant exactly for what ended up in the first volume of “Alternative History.” That’s what this is about — places of power, right? Saint Petersburg, places of power. So it turns out that places of power and stones — it’s all about energy. And the voice, yes. And that’s basically the first volume. So yes, in the first volume, this adventure begins precisely with my arrival in America — I start looking for stones, searching for these rings, gathering artifacts. And I became so fascinated by it that to this day I’m still doing it, and now on such a scale you wouldn’t believe — it could be a museum. I went through all the antique shops, all the museums, scanning every object with my eyes, and if I felt something, I immediately took a photo to store those radiating images, to connect even deeper to something. And I also felt that each gave off a different kind of energy. I kept collecting more and more of it all — stones, minerals, metals, artifacts. Then I noticed that artifacts from different religions emitted energy differently. For example, Muslim artifacts gave off one kind, Tibetan another, Egyptian a third. I bought up those little cards with the Pope and a small blessed metal pendant in Catholic church shops in Italy. I collected them into bowls so I would have a bowl full of blessed items. I gathered anything blessed — people even sent me stones from Jerusalem and other holy places. I collected the oldest shells — belemnites from Australia and New Zealand, and our local ones too, called “devil’s fingers,” all kinds. That’s a whole separate world: corals, shells, pearls — I collected it all. It was all truly important to me. Why? Because I found a way that might help me resist the influence of society and the world, and this mind, these sins — I understood that if I surrounded myself with all these consecrated things, then I could hear God or hear my heart, meaning my mind would be clear, and I wouldn’t experience confusion, and I would never commit the bad deeds that people commit.