“Let me go! I said, let me go!” a woman shouted while her husband tried to restrain her.

“What are you doing, Geneva?”

“I’m going, Andrew, I’m going! I can’t stay in this slaughterhouse anymore! So many people died! I won’t stay in this government experiment any longer! I know my rights, and it’s time for me to go! I’ll get the secret services on this case as soon as I reach L’Aquila!”

Jacob saw a convoy of cars stopping because a man had just pulled his wife out of one of those vehicles.

“Christ, Geneva! You were going to leave your daughter and me behind?!”

The man, Andrew, was clearly shocked by his wife's behavior.

Jacob’s thoughts were grim.

This is not going to end well.

He had seen such scenes in his past life. Families had been split, and deaths occurred in troves whenever someone would start splitting up and going on their own. This world was very primal and unfair, much more than any person could begin to realize.

Sects and Clan managed to bring some semblance of order in his past life, but even then, the lowly villages had reverted to a primitive state. Rapes and murders had been almost a daily occurrence.

It’s been barely 24 hours.

Jacob would be angry if he did not see scenes such as this one over and over. He would maybe use force, try to coerce the people fleeing. But he had learned better.

“Miss! Miss! Oh my god!” Jacob screamed with panic in a performance worth an Academy Award.

Andrew and Geneva both turned toward the kid who was approaching them during their scuffle. They recognized him as the one who had come with Frederick to evacuate them, but neither remembered his name.

“Someone managed to hack with their phone into the satellite network, the same the President uses, and it worked for a couple of minutes! Apparently, Rome has been razed to the ground! L’Aquila too! Oh my God, I’m so glad I caught you! We need to go over to our neighboring town and see if they have some way to get their hands on another satellite phone! Then, we might actually be able to get in touch with the real secret services! Apparently, the Americans set all the world up, and now the apocalypse is upon us! The military is setting up hidden shelters in the Apennines and Alps mountains! The most isolated cities are the only ones that survived! The big ones were instantly swarmed since the density of population correlated with the appearance of the stronger monsters! Oh, man, I’m so happy you didn’t go yet! We have to reach Fort Mountain and hope they did not catch a whiff of these shelters yet! I’m scared that they already all went to safety!”

Jacob panted hard as if he had been running toward them to stop their trip to a death trap.

“What…”

Andrew had seen the kid thirty seconds before, and he looked as calm as a Buddhist monk. So what had gotten into him? What the hell was he saying?

Turning toward Geneva to restrain her, she found her eyes widened.

“Oh my God! It’s true! It’s true! Guys, come listen!” she shouted to the whole convoy.

“Do you know who among the Americans did this?” Geneva ran toward Jacob and almost tackled him.

“We don’t know much, but it seems that Hillary Clinton and George Soros were the ones who started the experiment! Sadly, until we get a new satellite phone, it will be impossible to know for sure. Those bastards probably wanted to become cannibal superhumans to eat all of us, and it backfired!”

Jacob had read the stuff he was saying in a notebook he found among some corpses. Apparently, cults sprouted like wild grass after the apocalypse, and most of them had made up substantial conspiracy theories based on those that already existed before the world went to hell.

He had used most of his knowledge about one conspiracy, dropped some keywords like Americans, Soros, Clinton, Cannibals.

“Not just that, but we may have spies among us! We can’t trust anyone who wants to go to bigger cities! They just want you to fall to the Demonic Beasts so that the elite can come and sweep over the village! They want us to die without reaching the shelters!”

You would expect any person with some sense into them to laugh it out loud. Instead, however, Jacob manipulated his aura and Qi to project fear and terror. He also leaked a bit of unaimed killing intent, and, boy, that indeed did the trick.

People in the convoy who heard his theories immediately started relaying them to the others with already new made-up details. No one wanted to feel excluded right now. And after he had said that there could be spies, the few who didn’t want to let Jacob mislead the others were immediately punched silly. The agitators of this mob had not wanted to lose power over them, which spelled their plans' failure.

Jacob was inconspicuous, but he had had to survive for centuries on his own. He could tell the most bald-faced lie as if God had spelled it through a flaming bush.

“Guys! Guys! We need to check Fort Mountain! The shelters! There should also be another stop on the way. Come with me!”

See, other people didn’t know that there is no way to convince someone that a conspiracy theory is wrong. You can’t approach these people with facts; it wouldn’t work. So what you should do is just makeup something bigger, something they could feel a part of, a sense of belonging.

People who wanted to believe in conspiracy theories needed to feel like they knew; they wanted to feel superior to the average person.

Jacob did not blame humans for such a trait. He was just saddened to see so much diffidence and mistrust, so much divisiveness. When humanity should have banded together, they split even more.

Humans were built to think they could always spot a secret way, a new way to do everything better than before. It was what made them the most advanced civilization; and also what fueled conspiracy theories.

When humans still hunted, they would not rush into bushes. Bushes could hide predators, and they would feel an adrenaline rush, anticipation. What if there was a predator? What if they could actually build a trap in advance for such a predator? What if they knew better?

Jacob looked at the crowd that was now eyeing him with expectancy and realized that his own team to explore Fort Mountain and the Ancient Ruins had just grown dramatically.