(5)
It wasn’t just Bethany. After reviewing all the autopsy reports, Everly discovered that the five female students who had died at Mouster College all shared the sa issues in their reports.
In simple terms, all five bodies had the following two characteristics:
1. The cause of death was severe dehydration. Before dying, each of them had gone without food and water for about three days. Among them, the causes of death reported in the news for the second and third victims did not match the autopsy results—clearly falsified.
2. After their bodies had already died, all five of them continued to appear lively and active in front of others for two to three more days before finally collapsing and ceasing all movent.
Since Bianca’s case involved a “Monster M” that replaced her, could it be assud that the other four girls had also been replaced by similar entities?
Everly found this highly likely.
Aside from the autopsy reports, Orff had also bundled and sent over the internal police investigation files for all five cases.
According to testimonies from people close to the victims, although all five girls died from starvation and dehydration, during the period when the forensic examiners determined they had stopped eating and drinking (based on intestinal residue), their eating habits had actually appeared completely normal. More than one witness confird that the girls had good appetites and showed no signs of dieting.
This was yet another contradiction—and Everly’s hypothesis that “Monster M had replaced the real person” happened to explain it perfectly.
Of course, there were still things she couldn’t figure out.
For example, aside from the first victim, Bethany, the other four girls all collapsed in full view of others. Before collapsing, they were “Monster M”; after collapsing, they beca their original dead bodies. The swap had occurred right under everyone’s noses without anyone noticing—it was almost unbelievable.
Perhaps this question could only be answered once Everly uncovered the true nature of Monster M…
After going through all the files, Everly also learned so information that didn’t seem particularly useful.
In the news reports, the second victim, Cassandra, was said to have died from a fall that caused brain injury, while the third victim, Mia, was reported to have died suddenly. Their actual causes of death were vastly different from what was reported. Everly had initially suspected there might be so major conspiracy behind this, but it turned out the discrepancies were purely man-made and had nothing to do with Monster M.
For example, in the second case, the police had never officially released Cassandra’s cause of death to the public.
The report Everly saw was written by the university’s news club. The so-called “primary brain injury” was rely an offhand guess made by a police officer during an on-site interview—based on experience, not evidence—and held no real authority.
As for the classroom sudden-death case, the forensic examiner had detected trace amounts of marijuana in Mia’s body.
Mia’s parents were rather conservative. When they learned that their daughter had mysteriously died of thirst despite having access to food and water—and that their supposedly well-behaved daughter had used dr*gs—they assud she had gotten high and accidentally caused her own death.
Out of a desire to keep the matter private, when both the police and the school proposed concealing the truth and announcing the cause of death as “sudden death,” Mia’s grieving parents reluctantly accepted.
Of course, after handling three consecutive death cases, the police were well aware that Mia’s death had nothing to do with mar*juana. But for the sake of their case closure rate—and to save themselves trouble—they still chose to mislead the victim’s family.
This discovery disgusted Everly. Although she had long since lost any illusions about Arican police, this kind of irresponsible behavior still pushed her sense of their incompetence to a new low.
If it weren’t for her sharp instincts, picking up connections from scattered clues, she might have completely overlooked the cases of Cassandra and Mia!
Everly took out a pen and paper and began organizing all the information she had gathered so far.
Everly organized the tiline, and the sequence of events looked like this:
* Early morning, January 2 — Bethany dies.
* That sa afternoon — surveillance footage from the apartnt lobby captures a “Bethany” leaving for class. For clarity, Everly labels this entity “Bethany M”. During class, Bethany M even borrowed perfu from another girl.
* That night — Bethany M returns to the apartnt. After that, no one ever sees or hears from her again.
* January 31 — Unable to reach Bethany, her family calls the police. Officers arrive at her apartnt and discover that she has already been dead for so ti; the body has begun to decompose.
* February 1 — Cassandra dies of dehydration (this is the forensic estimate, which Everly tentatively accepts as correct). Afterward, “Cassandra M” replaces her and continues appearing in the dormitory, classrooms, cafeteria—everywhere a normal student would go.
* February 3, afternoon — While showering in a public bathroom, Cassandra suddenly collapses, reverting into a corpse and never moving again.
* February 7 — Mia dies of dehydration. Like the others, “Mia M” replaces her and continues normal activity for three days.
* February 10 — Mia collapses in class, reverting into her dead body.
* February 13 — Abby dies. “Abby M” likewise impersonates her for three days.
* February 16 — During a stage play performance, Abby suddenly collapses mid-show, terrifying everyone present.
* Finally, Bianca:
* February 15 — Bianca sends a private ssage via Chatter to the curse witch Natalie, asking for help. Natalie senses intense suffering in the ssage and decides to accept the request—but because others are ahead in line, she doesn’t act imdiately.
* Afternoon, February 16 — Bianca’s behavior on Chatter changes drastically. She goes from being quiet and reserved to unusually talkative, frequently posting strange, aningless content. Everly suspects that from this point onward, Bianca had already been replaced by Monster M.
* February 19 — The autopsy shows that Bianca died around 10 a.m. that morning from dehydration.
* February 20 — Natalie finishes her backlog of commissions and prepares to fulfill Bianca’s wish. However, she cannot sense Bianca’s presence, so she finds Everly and assigns her the task of “locating the client.”
* February 21 (Friday) — Everly makes her preparations and officially sets out for Mouster College.
That afternoon, in the drama club activity room, “Bianca M” gets into a conflict with several bullies. Shortly afterward, she disappears on the spot, leaving behind Bianca’s real corpse. At the sa ti, Everly receives an update from Natalie: Bianca’s body has been found, but her soul is missing.
…
After organizing everything, Everly studied the tiline for a while and realized that certain points between the cases could actually connect with one another.
That is—if the periods of food and water deprivation ntioned in the autopsy reports were taken into account:
* February 3 — In the afternoon, the second victim Cassandra’s body is discovered in the bathroom. That sa night, the third victim, Mia, stops consuming food and water.
* Mia, who was sowhat overweight, survives nearly four days without water before dying on February 7.
* Afterward, “Mia M” continues to act in her place for three days, until abandoning her body during class on February 10. On that sa day, the fourth victim, Abby, begins her own period of starvation and dehydration.
* Three days later, on February 13, Abby dies.
* Another three days pass. On February 16, Monster M ends its impersonation of Abby. That sa afternoon, Bianca’s behavior on Chatter changes drastically, and her body stops taking in food and water.
* February 19 — After three days without water, Bianca dies.
Yes—once she filled in the missing pieces, everything started to line up.
She could reconstruct the exact rotation pattern of Monster M across the five girls.
From a certain point onward, the victims were likely taken and confined sowhere where they had no access to food or water. That would explain why they all died of thirst.
And verifying these tilines would be simple—just check their Chatter accounts.
Chatter was extrely popular at the mont, and almost every university student had one. Monster M was also highly expressive and talkative. After replacing Bianca, it had posted 73 consecutive updates using Bianca’s account—there was no reason it wouldn’t behave the sa way when replacing the others.
If she could identify when each of the other four girls’ posting styles suddenly changed, and compare those points with her reconstructed replacent tiline, then her hypothesis would be confird with near certainty.
Beyond verification, the Chatter accounts could also provide valuable personal information about the victims—such as their interests, social circles, what they had been doing before their abnormal behavior began, and where they had gone.
Why had Monster M chosen these five girls as targets instead of others? Was it because they knew each other or had participated in so shared event? Or did they all et certain hidden conditions? Everly suspected the answers might be buried in that data.
Mouster College was not Everly’s school.
As an outsider, investigating the social dia accounts of four students would be extrely difficult. She couldn’t complete it quickly on her own—she would still need Orff’s help.
By now, she had already asked Orff for assistance multiple tis for this case. Even soone as emotionally hardened as her couldn’t help but feel a faint sense of guilt for repeatedly overworking him.
The problem was that this hacker could already make money on his own—he didn’t need Everly to pay him a commission.
So, after so thought, Everly decided to “allocate three drops of All-Purpose Elixir” to Orff.
The more she dealt with supernatural cases, the more she realized that, in many situations, these cases were fundantally information wars. Whoever controlled the most accurate and complete information would be the one to pierce through the fog and find the path to the truth.
In this information-driven world, Orff, as a hacker, naturally held the key to opening the vault of information. What was rare, however, was that this forr movie protagonist also had a decent character. Soone like him was a valuable asset—worth protecting carefully so he wouldn’t accidentally die and cause her to lose a major force.
Considering that it was already late, and she herself was used to going to bed early, Everly sent Orff the new task and then got ready for sleep.
The next morning, when she woke up and checked her phone, she found a flood of unread ssages—Orff, that night owl, had actually stayed up all night organizing all the information she needed.
Was he really this capable? Did he not need sleep?
Everly quickly opened the compressed file and began reviewing it one by one.
In addition to the social dia accounts she had requested, Orff had also hacked into Mouster College’s internal network and extracted student records for all five deceased girls, including Bianca.
She started with the student files first.
Among the five students, only the fourth victim, Abby from the drama club, was a sophomore. The other four were all freshn. As for majors, each of the five ca from completely different departnts. At first glance, there was no obvious pattern.
Closing the student records, Everly opened Orf’s carefully compiled data on the girls’ Chatter accounts.
First, one key point beca clear: the five girls did not actually know each other—not all of them, at least.
Their Chatter connections showed a specific pattern of unilateral follows: Cassandra had followed Bethany, and Bianca had followed Abby. Aside from these one-way connections, there were no other follow relationships among the five.
So these five people were most likely not a close-knit group of friends who hung out together.
Next, she examined the content each account had posted on Chatter.
As expected—just as Everly had predicted—all five accounts showed a sudden “change in style” at the tis she had identified earlier as “replacent points,” and their behavior shifts closely mirrored Bianca’s.
Summarizing the tiline:
* Morning of January 25 — Bethany, who normally posted selfies in full makeup and fashion looks, suddenly began posting text-only updates. Her tone also changed dramatically, abandoning her “rich, sheltered heiress” persona and instead showing a strange sense of naïveté and rustic awkwardness, as if she had never seen the world before.
* 22:00 on January 28 — Bethany’s Chatter stopped updating entirely.
* Early morning of January 29 — the “nonsensical speech virus” migrated from Bethany’s account to Cassandra’s. This was likely when Monster M completed the replacent during the night.
* 16:00 on February 3 — Cassandra’s account stopped updating.
* Around 18:00 the sa day — Mia’s account began exhibiting the sa pattern of incoherent posts. Her reposts also began including content she had never shown interest in before, such as borderline explicit dancing videos of n.
* 14:08 on February 10 — Mia posted her final tweet: “It itches and slls bad, better replace it.”
* About ten minutes later, around 14:25, the real Mia’s body leaned forward, her head hitting the desk—and she permanently lost all signs of life.
* Also on February 10, 16:03 — Abby’s account reposted a vulgar video of a naked man. Prior to this, Abby had mostly shared classical music and theater-related posts. The contrast was so extre that one of her friends comnted asking whether her account had been hacked. Abby never replied.
* On February 16 at 13:48, roughly before Abby went on stage, she posted a Chatter update saying:
“Just thinking about what’s about to happen makes want to laugh~”
Shortly after that, Abby collapsed forever on the open-air theater stage.
About an hour later, Bianca’s Chatter account began rapidly posting strange, nonsensical content.
…
When Everly drew out this tiline and overlaid it with the one she had reconstructed the night before, she found that they aligned almost perfectly, forming a seamless structure.
From this, she not only determined the approximate switching intervals of Monster M between the five girls, but also traced its earliest possible ergence—the morning of January 25, or possibly even earlier.
After identifying this key point, Everly asked Orff to infiltrate the police database and retrieve all death cases in Concord City between January 1 and January 25.
The results showed that, although various deaths occurred within that period, none of them matched the pattern of the Mouster College serial cases. They were either accidents or deliberate homicides—none shared the sa “structure.”
If that was the case, then Bethany could reasonably be considered Monster M’s first known “host.”
So if she could figure out where Bethany had gone and what she had done before the initial replacent, she might be able to fully unravel this entire case series.
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