Chapter 37

Beliak took Black Glasses back to Yuri’s room, where there was a stench permeating the air and a corpse lying on the ground.

Beliak went to the refrigerator, opened it, and started looking for a bottle of wine. He eventually found one in the depths of the refrigerator and then handed it to Black Glasses.

When Black Glasses glanced at him, he said, “Don’t worry, it’s not poisoned.”

“But it stinks,” Black Glasses said.

“Not this bottle,” Beliak said. He sat across from Black Glasses, lit another cigarette, and rubbed his stomach, “What kind of sincerity are you looking for?”

“I want to know everything that happened.”

“It’s a long story. You guys must have already closely analyzed things so there’s no need to repeat it here,” Beliak said.

“Based on what you say, I’ll judge for myself whether I can really get back what I lost by trading with you.” Black Glasses unscrewed the cork from the bottle and sniffed the contents but didn’t drink any.

Beliak glanced at Black Glasses and finally confirmed the other man’s intentions. He realized that the other party really did have something he wanted to retrieve; otherwise, Beliak would’ve either been killed or sent to the police.

“Ok, I’ll tell you.” He looked at the pages of text on the wall, “Yuri claimed to be a researcher ever since he was very young. Unlike ordinary children, he had a deep understanding of religion. Children usually hate churches when they are young but he didn’t. In fact, he was very eager to learn about them.”

“Did you meet at Saint Isaac’s Cathedral?”

“Yes, I’m much older than him but I don’t look it because I have albinism.” He took a puff of his cigarette, and then his eyes went distant as he recalled the past, “I was copying documents for the church at that time. He would come and ask me questions if he had any. At that time, our relationship was that of teacher and student. I later found out that his family was rich, so I got a lot of material help during the time we spent together. In order to maintain this relationship, I began to study occult and religion so that I could continue to guide him. Of course, he made such rapid progress that we soon became not just teacher and student, but two colleagues working together.”

Beliak’s eyes became even more distant, “The winter there is too long and there is never anything to do so we studied the Orthodox Church, Catholicism, then Buddhism, and then Chinese Taoism. In fact, all of these religions are ultimately attributed to one source—a primitive religion. There was one year when the winter was particularly long so we decided to start researching this primitive religion in order to try and sort out its relationship with modern religion.”

Black Glasses glanced at Beliak with a very subtle smile on his face but Beliak didn’t notice. He had become very focused while talking about the past and wasn’t paying attention to the other man anymore.

Most primitive religions essentially originated from the Stone Age. To be more precise, they were tribal religions from the Neolithic Age.⁽¹⁾ At that time, the worship of nature was bloody and barbaric; all aspects of human sacrifice in modern religions basically came from primitive religions. With the exception of Voodoo, the primitive religion that was relatively systematic was Bonism in Tibet.⁽²⁾

When they arrived in Tibet and began to visit Bon temples, they encountered many difficulties. For Yuri, the current Bon religion that was modified by absorbing Buddhist traditions from India wasn’t the most attractive to him. He wanted to know more about Bonism practiced among the locals and think about how all the Bon religious stories became myths.

But the local Bon religions were very messy because there were different systems in each region and a lot of stories that were passed down were just made up by later generations to scare children. They had to go deep into some remote villages on the other side of Nepal in order to see the real primitive Bon religion.

“Blood,” Yuri confessed to Beliak. “I want to see blood sacrifices, not some improved rituals.”

All those villages were in the ice-covered stone valleys of the Himalayas. Not only could they only be reached by mules and horses since the roads were blocked, but the villages wouldn’t expose their sacrificial religious customs to outsiders.

It took them a lot of energy to find a young man in a village willing to talk to them, and then it took him two months before he was willing to bring them to meet the priestess in the village.

The ancient Bon god worshipped in this village was the Dark Goddess. If such a name were heard in the city today, it would sound very stupid, but in the Bon religious systems of Tibet and Nepal, the Dark Goddess and the Goddess of Prosperity were a pair of twin sisters who were inseparable.⁽³⁾ The Goddess of Prosperity brought health and wealth while the Dark Goddess took them away.

These names came into being later under Buddhism’s influence. On thangkas⁽⁴⁾, the Dark Goddess and Goddess of Prosperity would both appear at the same time in order to illustrate the ancient wisdom that when you gained something, you would lose something at the same time.

It wasn’t known what method Yuri used to persuade the priestess, but they eventually succeeded in getting her to take them to the place where the Dark Goddess appeared for thousands of years. It was deep in the Himalayas in a valley.

The priestess told Beliak that the Dark Goddess was still present, so as long as the ritual was performed there, she would appear. The priestess could take them there as long as they could provide human flesh for an offering.

At that time, Beliak and Yuri were both a little abnormal but the abnormality first started with Yuri. Instead of feeling afraid, he began to think about where to get human flesh.

Beliak’s relationship with Yuri had always been more like a demon enticing a child into doing evil deeds. But at that moment, when Beliak looked at Yuri, he felt that the brainwashing and control he had been carrying out seemed to have gone a little wrong. The result was completely different from what he had imagined.

Yuri had never been controlled or brainwashed by him, he had just found what he had been looking for in Beliak.

This strange atmosphere made Beliak feel anxious, but at the same time, it was a little intoxicating.

<Chapter 36><Table of Contents><Chapter 38>

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TN Notes:

(1) Reminder, the Stone Age lasted roughly for 2.5 million years. The Neolithic Age is also known as the New Stone Age (aka it’s the final period of the Stone Age) and is the period from the beginning of agriculture to the widespread use of bronze in about 2300 B.C.E.

(2) Did some digging for funsies. Some anthropologists estimate that voodoo’s roots in Benin—formerly Dahomey—West Africa may go back 6,000 years. Hinduism is said to be more than 4,000 years old, Buddhism 2,500 years, and Christianity about 2,000. So Bonism is basically like the OG religion according to Beliak.

(3) The characters for the Goddess of Prosperity’s name are “功德天女”. I decided to go with “Prosperity” over “Merit” but “功德” is literally translated as “achievements and virtue” so I feel like either one could work without being wrong. I can’t find more substantive info for you guys because all I keep finding are various Hindu or Buddhist gods/goddesses with like a million different names that I can’t (and won’t) try to sort through but I think the Goddess of Prosperity is Lakshmi while the Dark Goddess is Alakshmi. Their descriptions kind of seem to match this random article I found.

(4) Tibetan Buddhist scroll painting on cotton, silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala. Info here.

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Sorry guys, I was really shooting for 3 chapters tonight but the research on this one bogged me down 😦