“Watashi wa Tamago.”
That was his alias.
Apparently it’s a famous name.
I still can’t believe it myself.
“Y- Yes, it’s Aoi…”
We introduced ourselves with our aliases.
I still couldn’t believe the guy’s face. There weren’t even any facial features. It’s just a smooth brown egg.
He was wearing shades, though.
By the way, it’s a rule in Metro Manila Online that your avatar couldn’t be too different from your IRL appearance, so it’s a wonder that Tamago was an egg! Rather, maybe it was actually a mask? It might be a mask.
As for me, I just changed my cheeks and eye shape. Absolutely no one recognizes me.
Oh, and your name could be whatever on sign up.
“Watashi wa Tamago—”
“Yes I got that.”
“Kimi wa?”
“Me? I think I’m disappointed…”
“Ah, come now, Aoi-san. You haven’t even seen the amazing thing I just found…”
No matter how weird the guy was, he’s a famous name for a reason.
He slipped me a brown envelope, and in it were a bunch of PDFs and grayscale JPEGs.
Colored images aren’t evil, you know? Grayscale JPEGs don’t have that much smaller filesizes than colored ones, you know?!
But… huh?
“… This is actually a really good find. I’ll tip you extra for this.”
“My, I never thought you could be this generous.”
The documents contained a summary of the Church of Christian Revivalism, an officially-registered cult with their main base in Metro Manila Online.
As it turned out, cults were legal entities now, which I guess was for the better, since that meant that they could be regulated.
Basically, any organization had to register as a cult if they were mainly religious in nature, less than 100 years old, and if its higher ups got privileges at the expense of the members, whether voluntary or not. For all of that, the government did a yearly audit of registered cults.
… mainly to see if they could be taxed, which was fair, I guess.
But, the Church of Christian Revivalism, huh…
They didn’t have a lot of members, which made sense. Christianity was dead in this era. Cults popped up from time to time, but none of them survived past 100 years. On the other hand, the Revivalist Church has been around for 17 years, apparently.
Say, it’s a fun coincidence that I’m also 17 years old, huh?
Anyway, the reason why I’m looking into cults…
… I can’t find a surviving church that I can visit anywhere.
I really, really need to talk to Jesus. Very literally.
“Oh just visit a church if you need tips!”
What lies.
Half the churches get bombed each time there was a war, and there’s been three wars—three!—since my last life. Half of a half of a half—only 1/8 of the churches are still around, and all of them have been turned into tourist attractions.
Even if I really, really needed to talk to Jesus, I didn’t want to become part of the attraction just to do so.
Besides, praying in churches was illegal nowadays.
… There’s a really complicated, or rather, surreal reason for that which didn’t involve religious persecution.
Anyway, I couldn’t find a church where I wouldn’t become part of the attraction. My best bet now was to find a surviving branch of Christianity, which was very likely to operate an underground church somewhere. By now, they’d probably be classified as a cult and not a religion, since as a religion, Christianity’s all gone.
By the way, the largest non-cult “religion” in the Philippines now was Sciencism.
It’s what it says it is on the label. Their pantheon was… weird.
Anyway, all the cults I looked into before this were all pagan or spaghetti-themed, but now here’s a promising one that’s hopefully what it says it is on the label.
The Church of Christian Revivalism… this was a really good hit.
Good thing the Church’s HQ was just along Katipunan. I’ll go there immediately.
Just as I got up, the space flickered, and for a moment, I saw raw bytes of data—a tell-tale sign of someone hacking their way into this space.
“There he is!”
“Get him!”
No sooner, 6 hackers spawned in through the entrance. It looked like they were pointing at Tamago.
If these guys were from the Church—I think I’ll have to revise my plans.
