“What virus? Can an Air phone even get a virus?”
Hearing the call, Everly quickly put down the MRE rations in her hand, weaved past the rows of shelves, and ran back to Old John’s side.
“Look, this is really strange. We’re clearly in an underground shelter—there shouldn’t be any signal—but I still received a text ssage.”
Old John handed his phone to Everly. She took it, and the mont her eyes fell on the screen—before she even had ti to read a single word—a powerful wave of panic suddenly struck. The fear felt almost tangible, clenching tightly around her heart. Sweat broke out across her forehead, and her breathing beca uncontrollably rapid.
—It was her danger premonition!
“Everly, what’s wrong?” Old John’s concerned voice sounded nearby, yet to Everly it felt as if it were coming from sowhere extrely far away.
“Huff… huff… I’m fine…”
Everly panted for a mont, wiped the cold sweat from her brow, and focused on the ssage Old John ntioned.
The text was from soone nad “Jake–GG,” and it read:
[Hi there, my dear friend:
As you can see, this is a cursed ssage (heart). With great joy, I hereby announce that from the mont you receive this ssage, you only have three long days left to live! After three days, the great ssenger of death will personally pay you a visit and guide you into Death’s embrace~
Also, after receiving this ssage, please forward it to any five people in your contact list (excluding the sender) within three days. Otherwise… oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to know what happens “otherwise” (smiley)~
—Your loyal ssenger of death]
It was obvious—this was a chain letter ant to curse its recipient.
Everly rembered that back in her previous life, when Penguin (QQ) was still popular, ssages like this were extrely common in group chats and social feeds. So were blunt, directly saying that if you didn’t imdiately forward the ssage to a certain number of people, you would suffer misfortune and bad luck. Others were more malicious—they would start with a ghost story, and at the end warn that if you didn’t share it right away, the ghost from the story would co for you that very night.
If this had been her previous life, upon receiving such a ssage, Everly would either send it straight back to the sender or simply ignore it. She would never have taken it seriously.
But in this life, things were completely different. Setting aside the fact that this cursed chain letter had already triggered her danger premonition—even if it hadn’t—in a world where horrifying incidents lurked everywhere, receiving a cursed chain ssage was sothing that absolutely could not be treated lightly as a joke.
“Who is this Jake who sent the ssage?” Everly asked, pointing at the sender.
Old John had always been sharp and observant. Earlier, it had all happened too suddenly for him to react, but now, seeing his granddaughter’s tightly furrowed brows, the sweat on her forehead, and the seriousness mixed with worry in her expression, his heart sank. He let out an involuntary sigh.
“Is it sothing bad? I’m sorry—I didn’t think much of it before. I just opened it as soon as I saw the ssage.”
Everly couldn’t stand hearing her grandfather apologize. She took a deep breath, suppressing the slight tremor in her voice, and tried to stay calm.
“Yes. This ssage feels very dangerous to . I suspect that what it says is most likely true… But don’t panic. We still have three days—we’ll definitely find a way to break out of this.”
Old John looked at his granddaughter seriously, his voice as steady and gentle as ever.
“I’m not panicking. At my age, there’s little left that can truly make lose my composure… Everly, relax. Don’t worry. Everything will be alright.”
As he spoke, he patted her shoulder firmly with his broad, warm hand.
The weight of that reassuring touch, along with his calm and composed attitude, unexpectedly soothed Everly’s anxious heart.
That’s right… everything would be fine. She had lived this long and faced so many crises before—hadn’t she resolved all of them perfectly?
And her grandfather—looking back over more than seventy years of his life, the hail of bullets in the Yue’nan campaign hadn’t killed him, vicious criminals hadn’t killed him, and the perilous environnt of the tropical rainforest hadn’t killed him. He had already survived so many hardships—could a re flimsy letter really take his life now?!
No matter what, with danger looming, panic and fear were aningless. What mattered was to start investigating and resolve the crisis.
Quickly steadying her emotions, Everly made an “upstairs” gesture to Old John.
The two of them left the carefully constructed underground shelter one after the other, returned to the surface, and began examining the ssage in the living room.
According to Old John, the sender of the text—Jake—was a hardcore military enthusiast who privately dealt in “Ghost Guns.”
Ghost guns, as the na suggested, were firearms without serial numbers that could be assembled manually. The “GG” after Jake’s na stood for that.
Jake would purchase kits, assemble ghost guns himself, and sell them to people who needed them. A few years ago, when Old John wanted to add so new types of firearms to his shelter, he had contacted Jake through certain channels. The two later completed two offline transactions.
“After that, Jake remarried and moved to West State with his wife. As you know, gun-related transactions are very troubleso to carry out online. Coincidentally, a friend of mine from the police departnt introduced to a new channel for buying guns. Since then, I haven’t had any contact with Jake. I just figured it’s always good to have more connections, so I didn’t delete his number,” Old John recalled.
“If you’re no longer in touch, why would Jake send you this ssage?”
Old John shook his head, indicating he didn’t know.
“How about we call and ask him?”
There was no point in just thinking about it—after all, to both Old John and Everly, the sender of the ssage was practically a stranger.
Old John agreed with Everly’s suggestion.
He picked up his phone, turned on the speaker, and dialed Jake’s number.
The first two calls didn’t go through. On the third attempt, the irritating “beep” rang for a long ti. Just as it was about to hang up automatically, soone finally answered.
Unexpectedly, the person who answered the call wasn’t Jake, but a woman. Her emotional state was clearly off—her voice trembled, tinged with sobs, as if she had just experienced sothing deeply tragic.
“H-hello… listen, no matter what you’re calling Jake about, I have to tell you—he can’t answer the phone right now… maybe he never will again… Oh, I’m really sorry, things are a ss here. Please call back later…”
With that, the woman was about to hang up.
Having finally gotten through, Old John wasn’t about to let the call end like that.
“Hey, ma’am, wait a mont! Sothing’s happened to Jake, right? I think I might know sothing—could you tell what’s going on?”
“What?”
Old John slowed his speech and repeated himself, “I an, regarding Jake—I might be able to provide so information. But first, please don’t hang up. Tell what happened so I can understand the situation.”
“Ah… oh—sorry, you’re Mr. John, right? I don’t think I’ve heard Jake ntion you before, but…” The woman hesitated, stumbling over her words, clearly lacking trust in the stranger on the other end of the line. Still, the fact that she stayed on the call instead of hanging up imdiately was already progress.
As a forr detective, Old John had encountered countless people like her throughout his long career—people wary of the police. He knew how to guide others with his words, how to gradually earn their trust, and how to pry the information he needed from mouths sealed as tightly as clams. For him, this was nothing difficult.
A few minutes later, Everly and Old John successfully received a piece of surveillance footage. From it, they learned what had happened to Jake—
Jake was dead.
He had died just over ten minutes ago, in his private workshop.
Jake was a military enthusiast and a hardcore firearms hobbyist. He had his own dedicated workshop, where he spent his ti assembling and modifying various weapons, then selling them through different channels.
According to the workshop’s surveillance footage, at the ti of the incident, he was operating a tal cutting machine, cutting a firearm component.
This was sothing Jake had long been accustod to. Over more than a decade, he had used this cutting machine to modify countless weapons and had never once been injured. Because of that, he worked with great ease, as casually as if he were simring a pot of stew in the kitchen.
But this ti, misfortune struck.
Jake was pushing the part forward with his fingers, pressing it against the rapidly spinning grinding wheel. The sharp blade and tal made violent contact, producing a shower of sparks. As one spark fell, it sohow slipped past the rim of his glasses and landed directly in his eye.
The scorching tal fragnt caused an intense burst of pain.
Jake let out a scream. In his mont of distraction, his right hand shifted slightly, and his fingers accidentally pressed against the grinding wheel.
“Ah!”
Sparks and blood burst outward together, and an even more piercing scream followed. When Jake finally managed to blink frantically and flush the foreign object out of his eye with tears, he saw that the index finger and thumb of his right hand had already been severed by the grinding wheel.
He had never seen such a large wound on his own body.
Blood gushed from the severed fingers like a fountain, dripping onto the machine below. So of it ran through the gaps between his fingers, staining his entire palm red. At the cut site, the exposed nerves felt as if they were being violently pulled by so invisible force, sending waves of searing pain through him. Before he realized it, dizziness set in and his limbs went weak.
Clutching his injured hand, face covered in tears, he howled in agony for a while. Then, he turned and reached toward the storage rack behind him.
At the top of the rack was a dical kit containing first-aid supplies. Jake lived in the suburbs, far from the city, so before he could reach a hospital, he needed to treat the wound himself first.
The surveillance cara was installed at the top of the rack, very close to the dical kit.
Jake stood in front of the rack, rising onto his tiptoes as he reached for the dical kit above. As the distance closed, his face—twisted in pain—gradually filled the cara fra. Everly could see cold sweat covering his forehead, along with a few droplets of blood splattered across his cheeks and lenses.
The dical kit was sowhat heavy.
Normally, Jake could simply lift it down with both hands, supporting the bottom from left and right. But this ti, with his fingers injured, only his left hand remained usable.
He placed his left hand under the base of the kit and carefully tried to pull it out. Amid the faint rustling noise, the image of the dical kit slowly shifted forward in the fra as Jake moved it—little by little, inch by inch—until it finally reached the outer edge of the rack.
But just as its center of gravity shifted beyond the shelf, and before Jake could react in ti, the heavy kit suddenly tilted and slipped from his grasp, slamming straight into his forehead.
“Ah!”
The unlucky Jake let out his third scream of the day.
The impact split his head open, blood pouring out as darkness flashed across his vision. Rembering that the machine was still running behind him, Jake instinctively reached forward with his only usable hand in a panic and grabbed the tal rack in front of him.
Creeeeak—!
The massive tal shelving unit emitted a grating, ear-piercing groan as it was yanked. Screws fixed into the wall snapped off one by one, and the entire structure slowly tilted, casting a terrifying shadow downward.
Beneath it, Jake was still groaning from the pain in his head. He didn’t even manage to lift it before the roaring collapsing rack dragged him backward. His skull slamd directly into the spinning grinding wheel.
Slash!
Amid a nauseating sound of bone being cut, a mixture of red and white matter splattered outward. Soon, a large spreading pool of blood ford across the machine table beneath the fallen rack.
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