Ryan spent a week in London before moving on to Paris. His plan was to do a city a week and publish a leak right before he left so he couldn't be tracked. To make his savings last as long as possible he lived as frugally as possible, only carrying with him a backpack that contained two changes of clothes and his laptop. He stayed at cheap hotels or at youth hostels, and if he managed to sleep on the train between destinations then he didn't bother with finding a place to stay. Sometimes when he arrived in a new town he would meet someone and they would invite him to stay with them. It surprised Ryan how easy he was finding it to meet people and socialize with them given what a shut-in he'd been his whole life. Of course, were it not for the unusual owl perched on his shoulder, people would have been a lot less curious about him and he would have been experiencing far fewer social interactions. During his discussions with those he met, Ryan would often bring up Solomon and ask the people he was speaking with if they were familiar with the website and the leaks published there. Dispiritingly, only a few of the people he met were familiar with Solomon, which, when he thought about it, made sense, after all, why should someone in Dusseldorf care about what was going on in Bogota? The owl reminded him that they needed to be patient, building trust and an audience takes time. They continued on their travels and they continued publishing leaks. The owl was right, the more they leaked the more Solomon's fame grew beyond the hacking community that had been following him for years. Through his website he received messages from activists, journalists and opposition politicians thanking him for exposing dirty secrets that the beholden and compromised establishment had been keeping covered up. Every leak, as soon as it was published, became the #1 trending topic on social media, which forced news channels to cover it as their headline news story lest they be accused of refusing to cover the story because they were part of the beholden establishment. After leaking at a consistent rate of twice a week for six months, Solomon's popularity had skyrocketed to the point that Solomon.com was one of the top ten most visited websites on the net. They had achieved the fame that they were aiming for. Millions of people worldwide were making Solomon.com the first place they visited to get their news and all of them accepted that because it was from Solomon it was true. Ryan and the owl visited Italy two weeks after posting a story on the website about an Italian politician who was stealing money from funds that the EU had given to Italy to help them deal with the African migrant crisis while at the same time taking money from people smugglers in exchange tipping them off about the timing and routes of naval patrols. Outside of the politician's house in Naples, thousands of people gathered to protest and demand her arrest. Ryan was in the crowd of protestors with the owl and got to see for the first time firsthand the power that he had as Solomon. Some of the protestors wore Guy Fawkes masks, others wore cheap crowns and robes and carried cheap scepters. They carried signs that read "THERE'S NO HIDING FROM SOLOMON" or "SOLOMON HAS SPOKEN" or "SOLOMON HAS DRAWN HIS SWORD FOR YOU". It occurred to Ryan that he could post whatever he wanted about whomever he wanted and people would believe it and mobilize against whomever he had fingered as Solomon.

"Get that thought out of your head," the owl said to him after they had left the protest.

"What are you talking about?"

"Are you forgetting that I am omniscient? You're thinking about abusing your power and taking shortcuts, many of my adoptees have succumbed to this temptation in the past, it never ends well, and if you decide to go down the same road I won't do anything to help you when you get yourself into trouble."

"Okay."

They were too close to achieving their goal for the owl to allow the same old problem of excessive hubris to derail everything. The time had now come for them to move on to the next phase: actively targeting the Raven's disciples. This was when things were going to get dangerous; as soon as unflattering details about David Huntsman, Jim Balmer, Fyodor Milichenko and the raven's other disciples began appearing in the public domain courtesy of Solomon the raven was going to know that the owl was behind it and given how much trouble the owl had given the raven in the past the raven was going to respond swiftly and without remorse. To prepare Ryan for what was going to be coming their way the owl told him all about the goose, the raven and the guardians and asked him if, knowing everything that he now knows and the stakes involved, he wished to continue. Ryan's answer was an unequivocal yes, which committed them to moving forward on this path but did nothing to ease the owl's worries about the danger that it was exposing Ryan to.