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[Alexandr Korol]

or parent-child relationships. Or you start thinking — do you even talk to your parents? That’s the kind of highlighting I mean. It can highlight a color, it can highlight an object. I can be walking and suddenly start noticing people in red everywhere and not understand why. Then I start reading about what the color red means. That’s how the Spirit, the system, highlights things for me. So imagine, all the information in “Alternative History,” all the volumes I’ve written and am writing — it’s all been highlighted to me by the Spirit. I can turn on a film about soldiers, and there’s a scene where a student gives a lesson presentation on Achilles’ shield, and I don’t take it as a sign right away — Achilles’ shield is just a shield, sure, it catches my attention a bit, but something else happens. I open a review of my new camera, an American article, and there’s an example using the term “Achilles’ heel.” I think, “Achilles again?” Then I start preparing illustrations for the book, where I needed to depict the Sun God on four horses, and I try to find an image that matches, and I find a golden shield — and it turns out to be Achilles’ shield. And I think, “What is going on?” I start researching who Achilles was, what the Achilles’ heel means, what the shield is, and what sacred meaning it holds. I look at what’s grabbing my attention, I see that the work is about the Trojan War. I begin to unravel all that’s being highlighted like that, piece by piece, and all of it ends up in the book. And then, even more unusually — it turns out that it all directly connects to the book’s theme. That’s what was being highlighted for me. Imagine — how is that even possible? So I start working on the fifth volume, and suddenly, for a week or two, hourglasses are stealing my attention everywhere. And it’s such a paradox that I even buy one, and the image shows up here and there, and even in the products I make — posters and stickers with those hourglasses. And only at the end of the fifth volume do I suddenly realize that this is the symbol of the Spirit of the fifth volume — it’s the hourglass. And that’s how the system highlighted it to me. When you’re scrolling, choosing what series or film to watch — imagine this coincidence: I find a series, and the system arranges it in such a way — there are so many episodes, so many seasons — and if, for example, today I’m working on something like the topic of aggression, writing a chapter about that, and I turn on season five, episode six of “Smallville” about Superman, and in that exact episode, he gets scratched by a meteorite that makes him aggressive and unable to control it. And then I get a whole bunch of other clues about that topic.