The Dismal Messiah

The Dismal Messiah

"Is this your friend?" Lao Wang asked, pointing at Lin Li.

"We're acquainted, more or less," Huang Ji said. "He wasn't involved in this to begin with. You dragged him into it."

Lao Wang frowned in shock. "He heard all that, and you're telling me you're only 'acquainted'?"

He had assumed they were close friends. Huang Ji had not avoided Lin Li at all when revealing those matters.

Yet they were merely casual acquaintances?

"We only met this morning," Lin Li said.

"Ha! I knew it. You're dumb as a pig—how could you possibly have anything to do with him?" Lao Wang mercilessly called Lin Li dumb as a pig.

Lin Li's face flushed red, but he had no idea how to refute him.

After all, the man insulting him had strung him along for an entire month, making him willingly kneel and accept him as master, then serve him devotedly for a month!

Had another group of victims not exposed the scam, he might have continued being fooled.

"He's trustworthy. I'm never wrong about people," Huang Ji said calmly.

Lin Li abruptly raised his head upon hearing that.

Little did he know that Huang Ji had already seen through him completely. Huang Ji had roughly examined his inner thoughts, and when he told him his name, he had also performed an information-based future projection.

As long as he spent enough time in contact with someone, he could assess their trustworthiness. Lin Li would not leak his information.

Unless the future changed, and only through irresistible means such as Truth Serum.

"He's just an ordinary college student. How tight do you think his lips are?" Lao Wang said. "Kid, I've already been exposed. Someone even set an ambush in my home!"

"We'll definitely have to flee from here afterward. Since you're only casual acquaintances, he absolutely cannot know where we're going."

"I'll never tell anyone!" Lin Li said excitedly.

After learning about the aliens, the Illuminati, and Messiah, Lin Li was not afraid. Instead, he was thrilled, trembling with excitement.

He was utterly fascinated by all manner of mysteries and had long found this ordinary, normal world boring. But despite that desire, he had no choice but to conform to reality and devote his time to his studies.

Today, he had witnessed Huang Ji, a martial artist who had effortlessly dealt with criminals. And Lao Wang, whom he had believed to be an old con man, turned out to be a member of an organization secretly fighting evil forces.

Countless revelations had suddenly burst into his life, filling him with an unprecedented longing.

"Let me join you!" he immediately said.

Lao Wang's expression was cold. "Kid, people die doing this."

"I'm not afraid!" Lin Li said.

Lao Wang looked at Huang Ji. "I know exactly what he's capable of. With a brain like that, letting him join us would be sending him to his death!"

"Whether he joins is up to him. The people who work for me don't need to be smart," Huang Ji said.

"Besides, have you considered that you already endangered him by performing the Golden Core Dance in front of him?"

"..." Lao Wang froze.

"To hide your tracks, you had no choice but to make a living by scamming people on the streets. But you need quite a bit of money. You can't hide here forever and barely scrape by."

"If you truly had a Golden Core Dance trick, making money would not be difficult. Even if you wanted to scam people, you could easily target richer people. Why did you only dare scam Thugs and students?"

"Do you still insist that was only a magic trick?"

Lao Wang sighed. "Fine. There was something in there that we stole from the research institute."

"Whether I used it to scam people or not, getting exposed was only a matter of time. After I hooked a few fat sheep with it, I only needed to talk them into it, so I hid the thing away."

Huang Ji knew that Lao Wang desperately needed money, so he had taken the risk and used the Golden Core Dance routine to lure in ten targets within a single day.

Afterward, he stopped performing it on the excuse that the Golden Core should not appear in the world, relying entirely on his gift of gab while having already hidden the Golden Core somewhere.

If he could gather enough money and flee quickly, all the better. But if he was caught, then at worst he would die. His enemies would not be able to find the "Golden Core."

"But precisely because of that, if the enemy can't find the Golden Core, they'll look for everyone who has seen it."

"Even now, I could send Lin Li home and leave with you, but the enemy would definitely come looking for him," Huang Ji said.

After a moment of silence, Lao Wang said, "But he might not die. In Hua Country, the Illuminati generally don't kill people so easily."

"What if he was going to die anyway?" Huang Ji asked.

The two were stunned, unable to understand what he meant.

"Lin Li, I'm proficient in medicine, both Chinese and Western. The first time I met you, I noticed you had a hidden ailment and told you to get a checkup," Huang Ji said.

Lin Li recalled their first meeting and hurriedly nodded.

"After Lao Wang knocked you down in the alley, I massaged your neck and discovered something wrong with your pulse. After a careful diagnosis, I suspect you have cancer."

"What?" Lin Li was horrified.

Huang Ji extended a finger and poked Lin Li in the side of his abdomen. "Does it hurt inside?"

"It hurts, it hurts, it hurts..." Lin Li gasped sharply.

Huang Ji nodded. "Confirmed. There's a tumor growing here."

Such a simple and direct diagnostic method left Lao Wang clicking his tongue in amazement, secretly thinking that Huang Ji had far too many abilities.

In truth, the spot and angle Huang Ji had poked had nothing to do with the tumor.

Anyone... would have felt pain if poked there...

With that, Lao Wang no longer objected to Lin Li joining them. If Lin Li went home, the Illuminati would sooner or later find him and interrogate him. Once they got no results, there was already a fifty-percent chance they would silence him. If they then learned he had stomach cancer, they would certainly take advantage of it and ensure that he died quickly from stomach cancer to keep his mouth shut.

Lin Li stared blankly while rubbing his stomach. Huang Ji said, "Your tumor is still very small. If you receive the correct and effective treatment quickly, you'll be fine."

After hearing that, Lin Li asked, "I have a question. Since the Illuminati you speak of can't control everything with one hand, why not tell the government about the aliens? Wouldn't it be better to use the power of the state against the Illuminati?"

"No," Huang Ji immediately said.

"That's suicide," Lao Wang added.

"Why?" Lin Li asked.

"First of all, we have no hard evidence. Almost everything we know about aliens is based on what we know about the Illuminati. We've never actually seen an alien," Lao Wang said.

"Second, while the Illuminati have little influence in some countries, their economic influence is global."

"Because of that, we cannot possibly unite every class within a nation. Without hard evidence or enough data, anything we say is merely a conspiracy theory... Do you think a country can be governed by conspiracy theories? Even if we managed to convince some people, even more would certainly oppose us. Then... the people would die, and the policy would end."

"The people would die, and the policy would end?" Lin Li blinked.

"Messiah has gone through three collapses and reorganizations in its history," Huang Ji added. "It was first established in 1948. Its main members were two air force personnel involved in the Roswell Incident, some intelligence officers from naval intelligence, and several dozen 'enthusiasts.'"

"Later, Messiah developed its most famous member in history: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then a congressman from the District of Columbia and the member with the highest political standing in the organization."

"Because the Illuminati did not yet know there was a group opposing them, after ten years of effort, Messiah successfully helped John Kennedy reach the position of President of America."

Lao Wang nodded from the side, while Lin Li's mouth fell open.

"Regardless of how debauched he was as a person, after taking office in 1960, he did many major things in succession," Huang Ji said. "First, just three months after taking office, he vigorously promoted the development of space technology, publicly declaring that enormous funds would be invested in the space sector. This prompted the Soviet Union to enter a moon-landing race with America. The following year, he had a moon-landing plan drafted and repeatedly demanded that Congress increase spending on space research. At the time, America could barely send a single astronaut into space, and could not even reach the intended orbit."

"If that were all, the Illuminati would not have cared, because a moon landing alone was irrelevant. But Kennedy firmly removed CIA Director Dulles, and had his own brother become Attorney General to restrict the power of FBI Director Hoover. Both Hoover and Dulles were Illuminati members, and the two sides fought fiercely for a time."

"With the support of the CIA, which he had already brought under his command, Kennedy struck out everywhere, suppressing Illuminati forces and exposing technological advances that some Illuminati research institutes had concealed. This greatly enhanced national technology. That was Messiah's most prosperous era, and it developed many members."

"At that point, the Illuminati finally realized that a hidden hostile force existed, and they quickly uncovered the existence of Messiah. In the end, their foundation ran much deeper. They soon exploited Kennedy's mistake in Cuba, along with the hostility of the Soviet Union, to provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly triggering World War III. From this, it seemed that Illuminati members had some kind of escape route and were not afraid of nuclear war at all."

"Fortunately, Kennedy and the Soviet side spoke every twenty minutes throughout the crisis, maintaining communication and restraint. No chain of mutual suspicion formed, and the crisis was ultimately defused."

"But without question, after that, Messiah and the Illuminati became irreconcilable enemies. The year after the missile crisis, Kennedy had been in office for only three years when the Illuminati chose the simplest and most direct method: assassination."

"After he was assassinated, many of his close aides were either killed or demoted, and many Messiah members were secretly purged."

At this point, Lao Wang gave a bitter laugh.

"It wasn't just the assassination," Lao Wang said. "In the subsequent presidential election, the Illuminati displayed their true influence. They deliberately arranged the largest margin of victory in history, having Lyndon Johnson urgently sworn in as President of America on an airplane, to show us their terrifying power."

"Johnson had clearly been just an ordinary candidate. Otherwise, he would not have lost to Kennedy back then. Yet in that election, there was an unprecedented gap in votes—a crushing 44 to 6 victory!"

"The Illuminati's candidate won forty-four states! America only has fifty states in total. It was an overwhelming victory whose record remains unbroken to this day."

"The losing candidate was utterly dumbfounded to discover that so-called voting blocs were complete nonsense. The idea that the two sides each held half the country and traded blows in elections was merely an illusion."

"The Illuminati had simply been deliberately balancing the two sides in the past. If they did not need to maintain appearances, they could even make a single candidate win every state in the country."

"From then on, we in Messiah understood that our strength was not even on the same level."

"They only did something like that once," Huang Ji said. "They merely wanted to tell you that it wasn't that they couldn't—it was that they didn't want to."

"In short, Messiah's peak lasted only three years. Once the Illuminati knew the organization existed, they would never allow it to emerge into the open again. Most of the Kennedy family urgently defected to the Illuminati and provided the whereabouts of Messiah members, only managing to save their own lives that way. Kennedy's brother Robert, a 'surrendered general,' still wanted to run for president, but he was shot dead in Los Angeles during the election."

"Too many people betrayed us," Lao Wang said. "The most fatal betrayal came from Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline. She directly married a Greek Illuminati member, the world's richest man, Aristotle Onassis, and provided a complete list of Messiah members. That led to Messiah being almost entirely wiped out."

"After more than a decade of reorganization, we could only hide in the shadows and make small moves."

"The gap between us and the Illuminati is like an impassable chasm. We're completely at their mercy, hated by everyone. They've never even shown their true strength. Even so, do you still want to join us?"

"I'm saying this to you as well. You refused my son because you knew the Illuminati could not be defeated, didn't you?"

With his final words, Lao Wang stared at Huang Ji.

It seemed Huang Ji intended to join, but Lao Wang could not be certain. He still had to make things clear.

Huang Ji smiled. "I don't believe there is an unbeatable opponent. I refused to join back then because I knew you people would never amount to anything."

"..." Lao Wang fell silent.

P.S. Sorry.