For the remaining ti, Everly no longer read every page of the diary carefully. Instead, she flipped through the pages with a “rustle, rustle,” beginning to skim.
After learning about the existence of the ‘Ti bon ange,’ Mark conducted countless experints centered on this special type of soul. Along the way, because the voodoo magic he used was insufficient, he also drew upon techniques from different systems, including African voodoo and Thailand’s sorcery practices.
Finally, he creatively developed a thod to artificially create a “living person”:
First, using secret voodoo techniques, he stripped flesh containing the Ti bon ange from various corpses.
Then, using the thod of refining corpse oil from Thailand’s sorcery, he produced a special yellow oily substance to coat the flesh, thoroughly saturating both the flesh and the Ti bon ange, which extended their preservation.
Lastly, he used hair taken from the deceased—hair that carried resentnt and unwillingness—to stitch the pieces of flesh together into a human form. This step was inspired by the creation of voodoo dolls.
Because each person’s Ti bon ange resides in different pieces of flesh, Mark sotis had to use magic to artificially fix the positions of the Ti bon ange in order to assemble a complete human form. However, the success rate of this magic was not 100%, so the entire process took him a long ti.
He worked continuously from April until the end of November. Only when Barbara’s corpse was delivered did he finally obtain the last piece of flesh he needed.
It is worth noting that during this period, compared to his usual long-winded entries, one day’s diary was extrely brief. That entry was so striking that Everly deliberately paused to read it carefully.
The diary entry read as follows:
[August 17, 2X14
Haha, today I heard so good news—Dr. Wu was assassinated. I knew it, I knew it! That selfish, self-serving guy only cared about satisfying his own sense of morality, completely ignoring everyone else’s lives. Everyone had long been annoyed by him… After Amur took over the lab, things changed. Unlike Dr. Wu, he has always wanted the X virus to beco more “perfect.” Wonderful! Could it be that the long-delayed plan is finally about to be implented?
I’m in a good mood today, so I’m pausing my research and waiting for good news.]
Seeing the date of the diary, Everly’s expression imdiately darkened.
The X virus could grant immortality, but at the sa ti, it turned people into mindless corpses that only knew how to consu their own kind. She had suspected before that this virus functioned like a zombie virus, though she hadn’t been able to confirm it.
After reading this diary entry, Everly could now be almost certain that the zombie outbreak she experienced in Radyard was caused by the X virus.
Three years ago, after accidentally creating the X virus, Dr. Wu had insisted on his professional ethics, consistently refusing to test it on humans, and had locked away all virus-related experints. His authority must have been significant, because research on it remained stagnant afterward.
However, on August 17 of this year, Dr. Wu was assassinated. Amur, who took over managent of the lab, was a staunch advocate for human testing.
On August 18, Everly and Misha flew to Radyard, where they encountered Grant gan, the heir of the gan Group.
On August 19, Radyard experienced a zombie virus outbreak, and the entire city fell. At the sites of the first few infections, Grant gan’s presence was also noted.
That sa night, the U.S. military captured so zombie samples and then proceeded to bomb Radyard.
Clearly, all of these events were connected. But who exactly controlled the lab that developed the virus—Grant gan, or soone else? And what role did the governnt play in this incident?
All these questions could wait until later.
The urgent matter was still finding a way to deal with the flesh monster.
Everly paused for a few seconds on the page dated August 17, pushed aside her distractions, and continued rapidly flipping through the diary.
At the end of November that year, Mark used magic to successfully transfer Barbara’s Ti bon ange into her right index finger, using her corpse to fill the last gap in the artificially created undead.
He carefully stitched the index finger onto the assembled human form using specially treated hair.
When the final stitch was completed, the patched-together figure radiated a strange red-and-black glow. Mark’s whole body trembled with excitent. He opened his eyes wide, srized, obsessively watching, hoping that the corpse on the tal bed would rise and move like a living person.
He did not succeed—the corpse remained a corpse, unable to act.
But from the corpse, as if using it as an incubating bed, that terrifying “flesh monster” appeared.
Mark nad the creature “Xipe Totec,” aning “Lord of the Flayed Skin,” a god of rebirth in Aztec mythology. According to legend, Xipe Totec would flay his own skin and give it to humans as food, symbolizing the shedding of the golden husk of a corn seed before it sprouts—a taphor for new life and transformation. Thus, in manuscripts and murals, he is often depicted wearing the skin he has removed from himself.
In a way, the na was quite fitting.
[…It—my dear Xipe Totec—rose from the body I had painstakingly crafted, a mirror image, identical to the corpse. But sadly, it had no physical form, nor did it need one. It was less a soul than a mindless undead, entirely driven by resentnt.
The anger and resentnt of the young girls had fused together, forming an incredibly powerful monster. Xipe Totec was entirely driven by hatred; the mont it was born, it attempted to take my life—the life of its “father” and “creator.”
I almost died.
The carefully gathered magical tools were fragile in its presence, like sheets of paper that could be torn with a single pull. I frantically recited protective spells, but they were completely useless.
As it charged toward , fully aware that death was imminent, I desperately raised my cara. I thought that, before dying, I had to capture the best work of my life—so that everyone would know that I, Mark Callaway, had achieved sothing rivaling the Creator.
However, the mont the cara was aid at Xipe Totec, it stopped moving…]
It worked! A way to control the flesh monster!
Everly read carefully to the bottom of the page and flipped to the next.
[…But using the cara to control Xipe Totec was not a permanent solution. It is a very strange existence—though the lens captures nothing at all, the cara’s mory fills at a terrifying rate. In just a few minutes, the cara warned ‘mory card full.’
Fortunately, I still had my phone. Before it recovered and ca to kill , I opened the phone’s cara and once again froze it in place. Then I cleared the cara’s mory and alternated between the two devices, keeping Xipe Totec immobilized.
That was an extrely difficult period.
Luckily, in the end, before both devices ran out of power, I managed to bring in more caras. I set them to periodically clear their mory and arranged them around Xipe Totec, forming a cage made entirely of caras…]
Everly turned her flashlight and shone it toward the caras surrounding the tal bed. She had wondered before why there were so many caras here—so they were ant to control Xipe Totec!
She turned her attention back to the diary.
Putting everything else aside, Mark really was well-suited to be a researcher.
Most people, after finally managing to control such a monster, would think first about escaping—but what Mark thought about was studying it.
The existence of Xipe Totec fascinated him deeply. Over the next ten or so days, Mark conducted extensive research on it.
From the rambling notes in his diary, Everly roughly summarized the following characteristics of Xipe Totec:
Xipe Totec is not affected by being photographed. Recording video or livestreaming are the only two thods that can temporarily restrain it.Xipe Totec’s energy can interfere with real-world devices and networks, specifically:
When filming Xipe Totec, although the cara cannot capture its image, the video consus an enormous amount of storage—estimated at up to 1GB per second. A 64GB cara would be filled in less than 70 seconds.
When livestreaming Xipe Totec, its figure still cannot be captured. However, it places an imnse strain on bandwidth and servers. Typically, in under a minute, the streaming device crashes, and the livestream is forcibly shut down due to overload.
3. Xipe Totec kills by destroying the target’s eyes, brain, and tongue.
4. Xipe Totec’s targets are all those who have watched snuff videos on the dark web. For example, if Mark used the remains of girls A, B, and C to create Xipe Totec but did not use D’s remains—so long as D was killed in a dark web livestream, anyone who has watched D’s torture video would still beco a target of Xipe Totec.
To verify the four points above, Mark crazily conducted experints on multiple living people. His thods were brutal, his actions inhumane, and utterly shocking.
Having finished summarizing, Everly glanced at the ti: 17:17. In just two minutes, the monster would reach the school and kill Abel and Ronald.
After them, it would be Orff’s turn.
With ti still on her side, she quickly spoke up in the team voice chat, first relaying all the information she had discovered to the human “data archive” Orff, then asking if he had any devices capable of recording video.
Orff, who was driving, seed to be checking. After a mont, he replied: “Besides my phone, only your laptop, Everly.”
“…”
Everly regretted not installing a dashcam in her Grand Cherokee.
Westerners generally care a great deal about personal privacy. Each U.S. state has high autonomy, and in so states dashcams are strictly regulated because people consider them potential invasions of privacy. Moreover, dashcam footage often cannot be used as legal evidence in traffic accidents. To avoid compliance issues, most Aricans simply don’t install them.
Considering these factors, Everly had followed the norm and left her vehicle without a dashcam.
Now the downside had beco apparent! If she had installed one earlier, Orff would have had one more recording device available, giving him more flexibility when swapping devices to keep filming the monster.
After all, clearing mory takes ti. If one device’s mory fills up, and while it’s being cleared, the other device also fills up, Orff would be dood!
“Then quickly clear the mory on your laptop and phone. If possible, see if there’s a store nearby selling electronic devices or mory cards so you can get extra equipnt for recording video. That way, when the flesh monster catches up to you, you can control it like Mark did—by filming it.”
“No way. I’ve already passed Johanna City and am on the state highway toward Nakto City, still 35 kiloters from the city. Around are only trees—no gas stations, nothing…”
Johanna City is the first city southwest of Dalami City, and Nakto City lies further southwest of Johanna. Judging by this, Orff is moving fairly fast. He should be able to reach the second city and buy so equipnt before the monster catches him.
“Alright, then I won’t keep you. Just keep driving—every bit of ti you buy counts.”
Everly stopped talking and continued flipping through the diary.
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