“You just don’t get it, do you? This nation is broken! It needs a forceful change! It’s because of people like you that nothing good ever happens!”

“You ungrateful child! Do you not know how much we have sacrificed to let you have the life that you have?!”

“This life where people like you have been constantly shooting down every attempt made to make a difference! There are people out there that want to change things for the better, for all of us! And because of people like you, they will never be able to do so as easily as they should!”

“Name these seditious people! Name them and point them out! We need to know who it is who is trying to destroy the way things ought to be!”

“THIS! This is why those who can see the truth don’t want anything to do with people like you! Any time someone wants to change anything for the better, you rat them out and string them up! Since you don’t want to push the world forward, then I want nothing to do with you! I hate you, all of you, you blind, deaf, stupid fools!”

“Don’t you talk to your parents like that, young man! Look at your mother! She’s crying! Now go to your room and-!”

“I’m leaving! I have people who know me for the man that I am and accept me! They were right, they were all right! You really are enemies of progress, of enlightenment! Never, ever talk to me again!”

As Jacob slammed the door behind him, he walked out into the late hours of the day. It had been several weeks since he had started meeting with like-minded people from all over the town. At first, he had felt some degree of apprehension. A small part of him wanted to keep up good relations with his family and his elders. Sure, they were conservative and thought that all of the progress that he and his generation wanted (and voted for) was a load of horse shit, but he still cared for them.

Now?

Now his eyes were open. Now he saw them as the parasites that they were. They were roadblocks on the road the greatness, his greatness. Vaile was right; they were in his way and would always be in his way unless he removed them from his life. They were impediments to the enlightenment he was promised, baggage holding him down, holding him back. How had he been so blind to as not have seen it? They didn’t love him, not as the Arachnos Church did.

He was told it, time and time again in the early days of his joining with them, and their words rang true. His elders, his parents… they had never loved him. They saw him as a tool, as a useful pawn to put into place to take their own place and uphold their own, backwards ideas when they eventually kicked the bucket. He thought that he loved them and that they loved him back. But they never reciprocated his affections, not in reality.

As he stormed off into the night, he saw others from the growing gathering doing the same. This only further deepened his belief that what the Church said was true. How could it not be, when so many old fogeys all viewed their children the same way? The Church had advised him and the others to confront their families today, to show them that there was another, better way. It seemed that their fears were correct; there were many, far too many, who did not wish for the betterment of all and just sought to be stuck eternally in an ever-deepening and darkening rut.

…

Vaile watched as more and more people trickled into the hall. His buffs (most of which was temporary due to chugging no small number of potions and wearing certain gear) had been more than enough to force this ‘new’ version of the cult into being far more quickly than it normally would have. A cult would normally take months, if not years to even begin to reach this level, but it wasn’t just this town that had a resurgence in what was once a nearly extinct underground and deviant faith.

He had dipped into his absurd storage to hand out a few hundred potions for the few remaining true demagogues among the surviving cultists, further buffing their ability to convince the masses to join what was essentially a pseud-death cult. Normally, only the truly disaffected would have bitten down on that hook, but with a bit of buffing the number of not-so-secret cultists jumped up not by mere tens or hundreds, but by exponents that made their total number far exceed the most optimistic expectations.

Truthfully, the potions he had handed out were extreme overkill. These were potions designed to buff the basic charisma of a near-max level character by several hundred points, more or less. In the hands of a level 30 or level 40 person, however? That was like using a VR version of a WW2 Railway Cannon that had been modded to have 100% accuracy as a flyswatter. It was obscene overkill and based on what the spiders kept telling him, the cult in those places was growing faster than it was here. But then again, he was just using his own abilities and his basic knowledge of the steps by which cults recruit people.

He ad let the cultists know how o do so more efficiently, but aside from that and the potions, he kept his hands clean. He wasn’t sure how far along the cultists were, but he figured that with the potions buffing things, that they had probably gotten to the point where they had fully indoctrinated at least 20-40% of the people in their areas of operations. As for himself? Well, he was just perfectly content to take things slowly. After all, he didn’t worship a bunch of monsters and he had absolutely no intention of ever doing so.

He just needed to take a bit more time and drive the wedge between these people and society a bit deeper. It would take a bit more indoctrination, along with getting them to make a few more promises and do a bit more groupthink rituals, and just like that he would have a bunch of sheeple who truly believed that they weren’t and that everyone who wasn’t one of them was instead. He both marveled at and was concerned by the realism of how easily he could get reasonable, fully sentient people to just… throw away everyone and everything that they had ever loved, cared for, valued, and more.

The nature of the human beast (and the other Races, in this new world’s case) was that of tribalism, and it was frighteningly easy to make someone turn on their tribe and defect to another, along with viewing their former tribe as ‘non-persons’. Then again, a fringe, ultra-nationalist far right-wing group had done that rather easily in Germany, and the same had happened with a left-wing group in Russia and China.

Humans, and, in this case, The Races, were far less logical and more easily swayed by empty emotion than they led themselves to believe. And, unfortunately, he knew he was also a victim of that primal nature.