Chapter 62: Church Of Asteroid (1)
To you who do not wish to inscribe a pseudonym upon this phrase sanctifying the holiness of crime, I know that your tolerance was vast, like the martial world itself.
But I.
I still exist.
–Lautréamont, <The Songs of Maldoror>
The place where the Phantom Fist Timothy Young awoke was not a prison.
Since a prison was not a place for criminals who had not yet undergone a formal trial.
Therefore, the proper procedure was to confine the criminal awaiting judgment in a detention center.
There were many detention centers in London, and most of them were structured with open spaces surrounded by iron bars, allowing the cold wind to blow in directly.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.1
The United Kingdom was enjoying unprecedented glory, but the darkness within London was deeper than the light. The scent of prosperity matured in the shadows attracted numerous criminals.
Regardless of severity, the calculated frequency of crimes increased proportionally with the development of the metropolis.
Hence, unlike the gentle customs of a quiet rural village that locks a person up in a small space built of bricks, London’s detention centers needed to imprison many criminals awaiting trial behind iron bars.
If the Metropolitan Police of London had handled matters normally, Timothy Young would also have been sealed of his internal energy on Mount Chupo, exposed to the night wind alongside other detainees at an outdoor detention center.
However, now, he was sitting sheltered from the draft in a relatively warm and cozy room in the corner of the sixth floor of a building.
He was seemingly being treated much better than an ordinary criminal.
From an objective point of view, there were only four things at most that Timothy Young could consider as misfortune.
This building is called Scotland Yard, there are no windows in the room, multiple policemen are guarding the hallways and the exterior, and he can’t even call a lawyer.
Timothy Young didn’t like that.
The man named Sherlock Holmes, he had thought he was just a detective with a reasonably good head on his shoulders for solving the murder case at the Debutante Ball.
He never imagined he would surpass him in Kung-Fu mastery as well.
“Damn it.”
If the detective hadn’t appeared in Cambridge, he might have been able to kill the Postmaster General.
If successful, rumors about the telephone and five mysterious deaths would have unsettled the citizens as planned.
Protesters against telephone usage would swell, creating fear, causing the telephone company’s stock to fall, and investors to disappear.
The next step is simple.
He would have devoured undervalued telephone companies one by one and installed a new Postmaster General to withdraw the lawsuits.
The telephone, unlike the telegraph, possesses unparalleled convenience and has the potential to pave a new market for telecommunication.
He could not forgive the greedy government for failing to respect its value and attempting to subjugate telephone companies under the Post Office’s flag.
The interests related to the telephone must belong to the Church Of Asteroid.
Reclaiming this from the hands of the wicked and guiding the world onto the path led by the constellations is the mission of the Child of Star.
‘On the day when the will of heaven is fulfilled on earth, you shall reign at my right hand.’
The voice of the Father Of Star who whispered this still lingered in Timothy Young’s ears.
And in preparation for any unforeseen circumstances, the lifesaving measure he was taught vividly came to mind.
‘Even if the plan goes awry, there’s nothing to worry about. There are always ways.’
Timothy Young avoided the gaze of the police officer watching through the small window on the door and pushed his left molar with his tongue.
Then, a specially processed tooth root came out, revealing a hidden bead underneath.
Its identity was a pill hidden with the help of the young acolyte by the cult leader’s side.
-Crack!
Enduring the pain, he broke the thin layer of wax covering the pill with the opposite molar, causing it to quickly dissolve upon contact with the blood in his mouth.
“Ugh…”
The next moment, Timothy Young’s entire body was struck by intense pain.
His body, although it was just a single line, was in a wrecked state due to learning and using the mnemonic of Demonic arts.
On top of that, the pill’s side effects made it feel like death itself.
But Timothy Young gritted his teeth and endured it.
It was because he firmly believed in the cult leader’s words that there would be a way to escape even if he were captured by the police.
-Thump!
His heartbeat intensified as a trace amount of Essence began circulating through his body.
Considering the situation where he couldn’t use internal energy due to the Qi Disperser administered by the police, this was logically impossible.
All of this was the effect of the pill he had just swallowed.
“Cough…!”
He quickly covered his mouth with both hands to hide the thick blood pouring out with a cough.
If the watching police saw this, they might misunderstand it as biting his tongue to commit suicide, complicating matters.
The pill swallowed by the Phantom Fist had a strong toxicity that caused semi-permanent damage to the elixir field and internal organs.
And as compensation, create a small imaginary organ that mimics the elixir field below the middle elixir field, allowing the user to utilize internal energy even in emergencies such as twisted blood pathways or being afflicted by Qi Dispersers.
However, the attempt to defy the providence with human strength is far from smooth.
The internal energy was so weak that it was nowhere near enough to break down the walls of the interrogation room or to knock put the police officers monitoring from outside.
Timothy Young was also well aware of that fact.
Choosing the ignorant option of escaping by using Kung-Fu was never considered from the beginning.
The Essence processed by forcibly squeezing the Innate Energy through the imaginary organ had a peculiar wavelength.
Specially trained gentlemen could detect it even from a distance.
‘Hurry… Hurry and come to take me away…!’
The Phantom Fist clenched his teeth, enduring with difficulty, waiting.
For the hands of salvation that would soon come to find him.
There were not many within the Church Of Asteroid who knew where or when the group first appeared.
Even the apostles, who had achieved mastery under the guidance of the Great Master, couldn’t grasp the cult leader’s age or background.
Sebastian Moran, the cult leader’s favorite disciple, was no exception.
Only after being recognized as the right-hand man of the cult leader did he hear that his birthplace was Schwarzwald2 in Germany.
To Moran, Cult Leader Moriarty, the Great Master of the Church Of Asteroid, was an extraordinarily unique individual.
Whether it was right to call a being on the brink of ascension by the same term used for lower creatures like himself was always questionable.
The Cult Leader always referred to himself as the Son of Man, and it was his constant refrain that an enlightened human surpassed even the gods. Thus, Sebastian Moran had no choice but to make an effort to treat him as merely human.
This was an extremely difficult task.
No matter how much Master Moriarty proclaimed himself to be merely human, it did nothing to change the fact that he remained a transcendent figure, revered by all his disciples and followers.
Although Moran, born as the eldest son of the Moran family, grew up seeing numerous masters in the martial world, there was no one he had encountered in his life who could compare to the Cult Leader.
The Great Master of the Church Of Asteroid, a religious order shrouded in secrecy and something beyond, was a genius adept in both martial arts and sorcery, as well as the Tao that governs the world.
That was not all.
The Cult Leader was deeply knowledgeable in Numerology and Astro-Qi-sics and possessed the miraculous and unpredictable ability to foresee the near future by reading the movements of the stars.
Truly, an unfathomable being like the title Father Of Star.
However, Moran, who had been carrying out missions under him for a long time, could infer, based on several grounds, that he was somewhat excited at the moment.
“…I see you have dispersed the protesters.”
The two were sitting face to face in a spacious underground library, having passed through the stairs hidden in the confession booth in the corner of the church.
“There was an unexpected disturbance, you see.”
The Cult Leader nodded with a smile on his face.
Moran could not hide his surprise at this.
During his one-year hiatus, he stayed in London and spent leisurely days, but that didn’t mean he lived with his eyes and ears closed.
Strolling around London and enjoying fishing was Moran’s hobby.
He was watching the religious group protesting at Westminster Bridge while fishing over the past few months.
It wasn’t hard to find out that the protesters were all followers of the Church Of Asteroid, following the orders of their Cult Leader.
There were only a few religious leaders, Moriarty among them, who authored their own scriptures and replaced the word ‘devil’ with Heavenly Demon, and so, each night, the protesters would return to Southwark, where the Church Of Asteroid resided.
“……”
The fact that the uninformed followers of the Church Of Asteroid started protesting against the use of telephones a few months ago was likely the result of their leader’s orders.
The Church Of Asteroid is a group that exists for the personal benefit of their leader, James Moriarty, and unlike typical religions, it served as a camouflage to keep his criminal empire from surfacing.
In other words, the protest against the usage of the telephone, which has nothing to do with religion, involved the leader’s vested interests.
As expected, it wasn’t long before Moran heard the news about a series of murders related to telephones.
The Cult Leader’s intention was probably to spread fear about telephones, destroy the value of the telephone company, and then take it over.
However, instead of the case going unresolved, it was neatly resolved and the followers stopped protesting.
This indicates that the Cult Leader’s plan to target future interests went awry.
Then why is the Leader smiling so cheerfully?
“…It seems things have gotten tangled up.”
Sebastian Moran remembered the glass bottle he fished out on the bridge before coming here.
Although he had become accustomed to such strange occurrences and wasn’t surprised, he still couldn’t guess what kind of trick the Cult Leader had played.
No one had dived into the Thames to hang the glass bottle on the hook. If that had been the case, his widely spread senses would have surely detected it.
The glass bottle floating on the water drifted along the river and snagged on the fishing hook that he had cast. That was all.
Precisely because of that, it felt even more inexplicable. Unless the Cult Leader residing in the church could interfere with the flow of the Thames, there was no reason for the ring attached to the glass bottle to hook precisely on the fishing hook.
The problem was the content written on the note inside.
The Cult Leader, who read the stars to predict the near future, would write a short prophecy in addition to the summoning order when calling the commander.
The prophecy recorded by the Cult Leader this time was as follows.
- TL/N: Is the author quoting Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two cities now? ️
- TL/N: Black Forest ️