Ti was tight. Everly and Misha didn’t talk much before they ran into the convenience store and split up to gather the supplies they needed.
Everly bought several boxes of compressed biscuits, a few packs of bottled water, a box of instant noodles, and several sets of spare clothes.
Other essentials such as tissues, wet wipes, toothbrushes, toothpaste, thin blankets, and a camping tent were already standard items kept in the Jeep’s trunk, so there was no need to buy them again.
By the ti she loaded the last few cases of water into the car and filled the trunk to capacity, Misha finally ca running back to the front of the vehicle, carrying a plastic bag in a hurry.
“Everly, I couldn’t get the tapeworm dicine. The pharmacist said it’s a prescription drug, and without a hospital prescription he wouldn’t sell it to . So I bought ten Black Pills as you asked, and also picked up so common dicines like vitamin B, vitamin C, cold dicine, and painkillers.”
“Mm, that’s fine. Get in the car quickly.”
Everly took the bag and carefully placed it into the center console compartnt.
Like the ergency supplies, the Grand Cherokee also always carried so common dicines. Combined with what Misha had just bought, it was enough to handle the comfortably mild weather of June.
Most importantly, the Black Pills—those needed to be stocked in larger quantities. Misha had been quite generous, buying ten at once. Split between two people, it should be more than enough no matter what.
After leaving the convenience store, Everly next drove to a nearby outdoor equipnt shop, where she bought a camping cooking set, including a kettle, cooking pot, frying pan, small bowls, and a complete set of utensils.
By this ti, the incident at the state university stadium had already spread widely online after its initial surge of attention. However, even though videos of countless white ribbon-like monsters erupting from within Gracie’s body were circulating across the internet, people in real life were still going about their daily lives as usual.
Most citizens treated it as a frightening but unknown creature attack; so even assud it was part of a film shoot. Very few people considered the possibility that such dangerous organisms might actually affect their own lives.
Therefore, the city of Dalami remained calm and peaceful for the ti being, showing no significant reaction to the public death of a girl.
Thanks to this, after leaving the outdoor equipnt store in the city center, Everly was able to drive smoothly without much difficulty all the way to a gas station on the outskirts of the city.
There, she filled the car’s tank and additionally bought two crates of gasoline to store in the vehicle. After that, she and Misha headed northeast toward a birch forest, where she parked the car in front of a ranger’s cabin.
This ranger’s cabin was the sa wooden house where “the Butcher” Michael had once lived during the earlier ti-loop case.
During the investigation of the Dalami city massacre livestream case, this place—being the primary cri scene—had been sealed off for several months, and the police tape had only recently been removed.
Since then, the cabin had remained abandoned.
After all, the perpetrators connected to the massacre livestream case, including “the Butcher” Michael, had all died in extrely grueso ways, and even at the end, the police were unable to determine who had crushed their heads. Gradually, rumors began to spread that the spirits of the murdered girls were still lingering around the cabin, killing anyone burdened with sin.
Over ti, it beca an “ominous place” that no one was willing to approach.
But this was exactly the kind of place Everly needed—sowhere no one would co near.
If it were a horror film with a relatively small scope, escaping the school might have been enough to ensure safety. However, the horror film involving Gracie clearly did not belong to that kind of low-budget, small-stage production—it was directly affecting the entire United States.
Ever since she first heard about the SSU Fat-Burning Capsules, Everly had not had a good impression of them.
A drug that was clearly very powerful, yet failed to obtain dostic approval even after developnt, and instead had to be smuggled overseas to be sold in foreign markets—there was sothing inherently suspicious about that.
In addition, the side effects ntioned in the drug’s description were extrely severe, and the so-called nanorobot technology did not resemble anything that should exist in this era. With multiple red flags stacked together, the drug was essentially labeled as “suspicious” in Everly’s mind.
However, after SSU successfully obtained sales authorization in the United States and exploded in popularity nationwide through livestream promotions by various internet influencers, Everly gradually beca sowhat uncertain again.
Because from March to June, the weight-loss drug had been popular for nearly three months, and aside from the occasional “genius” user who didn’t follow the instructions and ended up hospitalized, no other adverse effects had been observed among those taking it.
This gradually dulled Everly’s vigilance, leading her to develop the optimistic belief that SSU’s popularity was simply due to its effectiveness and had nothing to do with the plot of a horror film.
But just before she could fully relax her guard, Gracie’s incident occurred.
The white ribbon-like creatures that erged from Gracie’s body had heads covered in suction cups and long, flattened bodies resembling wide noodles. On closer inspection, their bodies were segnted—an appearance that made Everly think of tapeworms.
And tapeworms, in fact, have historically been associated with the topic of “weight loss.”
In Britain during the Victorian era, between 1830 and 1900, when society’s beauty standards strongly favored extrely thin waists, people attempted all kinds of bizarre weight-loss thods to achieve a slim figure. Among them, swallowing tapeworm eggs was one of the more obscure practices.
Tapeworms are intestinal parasites that use their heads’ suckers to firmly attach themselves to the host’s intestinal wall, absorbing nutrients through their body surface via tiny hair-like structures.
People in Britain believed that by swallowing tapeworm eggs and allowing them to grow inside the intestines, the worms would reduce the amount of nutrients the host could absorb from food. Over ti, they thought this would allow them to lose weight effortlessly.
Whether this weight-loss thod is actually effective is questionable, but its negative consequences are very real—abdominal pain, bloating, intestinal obstruction, nerve damage… As a result, this practice gradually disappeared by the 20th century.
Everly first heard about this from her grandfather while studying a parasite atlas with him. At the ti, she thought to herself how ruthless humans could be toward themselves just for the sake of losing weight and beauty.
She never expected that, more than a decade later, sothing that had only ever existed in historical records would reappear in modern tis.
Of course, ordinary tapeworms could not possibly grow as thick as a wrist, nor could they erge from a human body on their own like the white ribbon-like creatures seen inside Gracie, rapidly crawling out to attack others. And in reality, tapeworms can reach lengths of 2 to 8 ters—much longer than what had been seen on the field.
But this was, after all, a horror film. Monsters grounded in reality, yet slightly altered from it, were entirely possible.
If SSU Fat-Burning Capsules were linked to tapeworms, then its strange thod of consumption suddenly made much more sense.
The white pill—the only capsule-form component of the weight-loss drug—was likely not filled with nanorobots, but rather so kind of modified, mutated tapeworm egg. Once swallowed, after the outer casing dissolved, the eggs would hatch inside the human body and parasitize the intestines, continuously absorbing the host’s nutrients. That was why only one white pill was needed.
The pink pill, Everly guessed, probably contained so kind of inhibitor that suppressed the growth of the tapeworm. Taking one every three days would keep the worms in a semi-dormant state—not overly active, but still functioning—allowing the user to lose weight in a gradual, controlled manner.
This also explained why those who failed to take the pink pills on schedule experienced sudden extre weight loss or even organ failure—because without the inhibitor, the tapeworms inside them would go unchecked, consuming far too many nutrients as they fed and multiplied.
Finally, the black pills taken either at the end of the six-month cycle or when one wanted to terminate the weight-loss regin early were likely a “targeted deworming drug” specifically designed for tapeworms. After ingesting the black pills, the tapeworms inside the body would be killed and expelled, bringing the entire tapeworm-based weight-loss process to an end.
Based on this hypothesis, Everly had asked Misha to purchase so black pills at the pharmacy.
If she and Misha accidentally ingested mutated tapeworm eggs in the future, those ten black pills would serve as their safeguard.
Of course, if possible, it was still best not to accidentally ingest any eggs in the first place.
The SSU weight-loss drug was simply too popular, and many people in the city had already taken it. These people likely all harbored mutated tapeworms in their bodies—just not yet developed to the horrifying extent seen in Gracie.
Anyone who keeps cats or dogs would know that one of the key signs of tapeworm infection is the appearance of small white grain-like particles in the animal’s feces. Those are segnts shed from the tapeworm’s body, containing eggs.
And Everly vaguely rembered that, in early May, Gracie had once delayed taking her pink pills due to financial difficulties. During one training session, she experienced severe discomfort and vomited in public, expelling a yellow-green semi-solid mixture in which there seed to be white “rice-like” particles.
This suggested that mutated tapeworms, like ordinary tapeworms, were capable of releasing eggs from inside the host’s body.
If that was the case, densely populated cities were not suitable for staying long-term. Who knew whether the tap water used to wash your hands might be contaminated with eggs?
This was not alarmist thinking. Everly rembered that in her previous life, she had heard of soone in the United States who died after accidentally using tap water to rinse their nose and becoming infected with a so-called “brain-eating amoeba.” Because of that, she could not place much trust in the country’s water system.
Not only tap water, Everly suspected that even the city’s groundwater system could be contaminated by tapeworm eggs accidentally released through human feces. Viewed this way, the entire city of Dalami had essentially beco a dangerous parasite breeding ground.
If Everly’s weight had not still been normal—with no signs of abnormal rapid weight loss—she would have already started to beco paranoid, anxiously wondering whether there were parasites inside her own body.
“First, call our family mbers and tell them to be careful about anything they ingest in the next few days. All food and water must be thoroughly boiled before consumption. Be cautious about parasites. If possible, buy a few black pills for protection. From now on, when we eat, we must also be extrely careful to clean our hands properly, and once we open food, we finish it completely and don’t leave anything for the next day. Understood?”
Misha obediently nodded.
At this point, the only comforting thing was that SSU Fat-Burning Capsules were simply too popular. So many people across the United States had taken them that if sothing went wrong, the consequences would be catastrophic.
The U.S. authorities would absolutely not be able to ignore such a terrifying outco. To minimize the damage, they would undoubtedly do everything in their power to resolve the crisis.
Therefore, in theory, as long as they survived the initial chaotic phase when the tapeworm disaster first broke out, things would eventually stabilize once the authorities intervened.
After all, this was the United States—a place that had stubbornly survived countless horror scenarios in so many films. One had to trust in the world’s ability to self-repair.
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