Because of Jack’s screams and cries before his death, his wife, Parvati, was alerted.
Following the sound, she arrived at the door of her husband’s workshop and pounded on it, demanding to know what had happened, but no one answered.
When she finally found the key and opened the door, she saw her husband’s corpse lying in a pool of blood.
His head had been split open by the cutting machine. The rapidly spinning grinding wheel kept grinding through his skull, spraying bits of flesh and gore all over the room. The thick stench of blood mixed with the sll of machine oil hit Parvati head-on, making her nearly vomit.
Even though she knew her husband was beyond saving, she still clung to a faint sliver of hope and called for an ambulance and the police.
Afterward, wanting to figure out what had happened before the police arrived, Parvati pulled up the security footage from before the accident. While she was watching it, Old John called.
“…That’s everything I know. I’ve already sent you the surveillance footage through the computer as well. So, Mr. John, can you tell what exactly happened? Jack was always an extrely cautious person. Dying so suddenly because of a coincidence like this—it just doesn’t feel right!”
It was no wonder Parvati was suspicious. The accident was simply too coincidental.
Whether it was the spark that perfectly avoided Jack’s hair and eyeglass lenses to slip through the gap into his eye, or the fixing screw that suddenly cracked apart, every detail carried a chilling sense of unnatural coincidence. It was as if, sowhere unseen, so force had influenced the magnetic field around Jack, carefully calculating every step and playfully manipulating events to steer things toward the outco it desired.
Could that be the “guidance of the ssenger of death” ntioned in the cursed chain letter?
Old John’s gaze lingered for a mont on the tistamp in the upper-left corner of the surveillance footage before he replied, “Before I reveal the answer, ma’am, I’d like you to check your husband’s phone inbox and see whether he received a text ssage three days ago cursing soone to death.”
“A text ssage cursing soone to death? What kind? One of those ssages that says if you don’t forward it, you’ll die within three days?”
“You found it, ma’am?”
“No… Actually, not long ago, for so reason, my phone received a ssage like that. It said a ssenger of death would co for within three days and told to forward the ssage.” Parvati’s voice carried doubt and uncertainty, along with a deeply hidden fear. “Mr. John, is this the kind of ssage you ant?”
Old John exchanged a glance with Everly. He switched his phone screen to the ssaging interface, reread the ssage he had received, and then asked Parvati whether the contents matched hers.
Parvati’s voice grew even tenser. “Yes, exactly the sa… And just now, I checked my phone. This ssage was sent to by Jack at 4:10 p.m. today, but… but…”
But according to the surveillance footage, Jack had already died at 4:09 p.m.
Modern surveillance systems generally synchronized their ti automatically, and the video Parvati had sent clearly displayed a tistamp in the upper-left corner. Assuming the ti was accurate, it ant Parvati’s phone had received a cursed text ssage from Jack after his death.
Old John glanced at his own phone. The ssage he received in the underground shelter had also arrived at 4:10 p.m., which all but confird that this was a “ssage sent after death.”
But he did not point it out directly. Instead, he tried to reassure Parvati. After all, the person on the other end of the phone was just an ordinary woman. If she beca too terrified and stopped cooperating, it would take Everly and Old John far more effort than expected to uncover the truth behind the cursed chain letter.
“Ma’am, I understand your panic. But in places with poor signal, text ssages can sotis be delayed. That alone doesn’t necessarily an anything. Right now, what’s more important is uncovering the truth behind Jack’s death. This was absolutely not a simple accident. You can’t place your hopes on the police. When they see this footage, they’ll only conclude that Jack was unlucky and careless. But both of us know that Jack was not that kind of person…”
Old John’s deliberately calm and steady voice soothed the woman on the other end of the phone. At his request, Parvati put down her own phone, picked up her husband Jack’s phone instead, unlocked it, and opened his text ssages.
Through the speaker, Everly and Old John heard a sharp gasp.
“What did you see?”
“At the very top of the screen, I found the sending records. Five ssages were sent to five different people, including . The contents were that cursed chain ssage, and the sending ti was 4:10 p.m. today—after Jack collapsed… One of the recipients is nad John Breton. Is that you, Mr. John?”
“Yes, that’s .”
Parvati reacted quickly. “You asked to check the ssages because there’s sothing wrong with them?”
“Yes. Although this may not be pleasant to hear, I have to say it—the cursed text ssage is very likely genuine. It really can kill people.”
“But—”
“Before arguing with , you should check Jack’s inbox and see whether he received the sa ssage three days ago.”
After Old John said this, Parvati obediently fell silent. Rustling sounds ca from the other end of the phone, and before long, the woman’s trembling voice returned, thick with fear:
“You may be right… I found the ssage in Jack’s phone. He received it three days ago, at 4:09 p.m. on June 27. By the mont Jack died, exactly seventy-two hours had passed. Not one minute more, not one minute less.”
Yes, there was now no doubt that the cursed chain ssage was real. Everyone who received it would die exactly seventy-two hours later, and Jack’s death had already proven this rule.
Old John took a deep breath. “Mrs. Parvati, don’t panic. We still have three days to investigate all this… First, you need to find out who sent the ssage to your husband, and who that person received it from. We need to trace it back step by step until we find the source of the cursed ssage. If we can deal with the source, we may be able to escape this cursed fate.”
“O-Okay… I understand. The sender’s na is Connie Dofolo. I don’t know him, but I know who might. I’ll ask my husband’s friends and find out.”
“Good, ma’am. As soon as you learn anything, call us imdiately. I used to be a detective with the Dwight State Police Departnt, so perhaps I can help you gather information.”
“Mm… I understand now. Mr. John, thank you.”
Suppressing her fear, Parvati thanked him and hung up.
“So? What do you think?” Old John looked toward Everly after the call ended.
“We’ve already figured out the effect of the cursed ssage. Whoever receives it dies seventy-two hours later through a series of coincidences. But there’s one thing I still don’t understand…”
What puzzled Everly was the latter half of the curse ssage—the clause related to forwarding it.
Judging from the timing, Jack’s ssages had been sent automatically by his phone after his death. This suggested that Jack had probably dismissed the cursed chain ssage as a prank and never paid it any attention after receiving it. Naturally, he also never completed the “forward it to five people” requirent.
From this, one could infer that even if the recipient ignored the ssage and refused to spread it as instructed, the chain letter would still automatically forward itself to five other people in the recipient’s contact list after the recipient died.
In other words, the ssage seed almost alive—it was capable of spreading itself.
If that was the case, then why did the cursed ssage still include the condition in its text that “the recipient must forward this ssage to five people within three days of receiving it”? Could there be a difference between forwarding it voluntarily and the ssage spreading on its own?
After listening to her, Old John thought for a mont before replying, “There definitely is a difference. If I forward it voluntarily, then I can control where those five ssages go and make sure they’re sent to people who matter less to . But if I don’t forward it, then after I die, there’s a chance the ssage will be sent to people I care about most—or maybe not just a ‘chance,’ but a certainty. After all, the curse ssage itself says that if the recipient refuses to forward it as instructed, the consequences will be sothing they do not wish to see.”
“So that’s why Mrs. Parvati received the text from her husband?”
“Most likely.”
“Then this curse is truly vicious.”
It was practically a massive social experint.
If soone who received the ssage completely believed in the curse, then they would face two choices: uphold their kindness and sense of justice by refusing to spread the ssage, or protect the people they cared about by sending it to those they felt less attached to.
In the first case, those who clung to justice would, after their deaths, cause the people they loved most to suffer because of their righteous choice—those loved ones would receive the ssage and die horribly. In the second case, those who chose to forward the ssage in order to protect their loved ones might save the people they cared about, but they would also burden themselves with terrible guilt.
And if the recipient didn’t believe in the curse, the result would still be hellish. If they forwarded the cursed ssage as a joke, then considering that jokes and pranks are usually played on close friends or family, the people closest to them would most likely end up hard. But if they ignored it like Jack had, they might instead cause the death of soone they loved…
In short, anyone who received this ssage would either face the tornt of human morality or the cruel mockery of fate. No one could walk away untouched. No one could achieve a happy ending. It was vicious to the extre.
“What do you think we should do about it?”
Everly had already been thinking about this question, so her answer ca quickly.
“There are two ways we can investigate this. The first is to follow the chain of transmissions backward, tracing the cursed ssages step by step until we find the source. The second is to search news outlets and the internet for reports related to cursed ssages or large numbers of accidental deaths. But I think we should focus mainly on the first approach, because the curse’s spread is probably still in its early stages, aning the transmission chain shouldn’t be very long yet.”
It was actually a very simple math problem.
Suppose the cursed chain ssage first appeared on the phone of a single host, A, and every ti it spread, it automatically forwarded itself after the three-day deadline expired. Then during the first wave of spreading, the death toll would be 1 (A themself). In the second wave, it would beco 1 5¹… and so on. By the nth wave, the number would be 1 5⁽ⁿ⁻¹⁾.
At first, the death toll might not seem especially alarming. But once n reached 6, the number would already climb to 3,126. And when n reached 7, the death toll would explode to a terrifying 15,626—well over ten thousand people.
The cursed ssage spread through phone contacts. Even if so contacts lived in different cities, considering modern social habits, along with the curse’s tendency to “prioritize the victim’s close friends and family” when auto-forwarding itself after three days, the people most likely to receive the ssage would still be those closest to the victim.
As a result, once the cursed chain ssage appeared in a city, the death toll would, within just a dozen or so days—roughly four to five transmission cycles—spread outward from that city in multiple clusters, showing a clear two-dinsional normal distribution pattern.
The population of the United States wasn’t especially dense, and so smaller places, like Lemot Town, had only a little over a thousand residents in total. Under those circumstances, by the ti the curse reached the third generation of transmission—when twenty-six people had died—the townspeople and police would already start becoming suspicious. By the fourth wave, with 126 deaths, panic would spread further and the situation would rapidly worsen. The local police departnt would imdiately realize sothing was terribly wrong, report it to higher authorities, and request assistance.
In a large city, because of the much bigger population base, the process might progress a bit more slowly, but at most it would only last until the fourth wave of spread. After all, this wasn’t warti—if over a hundred people in a major city suddenly died in accidents at the exact sa ti, even an idiot would realize sothing was wrong.
And a death toll in the hundreds was already enough to attract the attention of the Special Affairs Investigation.
Yet up to this point, more than an hour had already passed since Old John received the chain ssage, and neither the SAI nor the police—or any other organization—had co knocking.
From this, Everly inferred that the cursed chain ssage had probably only spread through a few generations so far and had not yet drawn widespread attention.
If that was the case, then tracing the transmission chain backward would make finding the source relatively easy.
Old John nodded, agreeing with Everly’s reasoning. “That sounds about right. I’m getting old, and I’m not nearly as good with the internet as you young people are. You handle the investigation into dia reports and online information. I still have connections inside the police departnt, so I’ll help Mrs. Parvati trace the transmission chain upward. How does that sound?”
“Understood.”
After discussing things for a while and deciding on their next course of action, the grandfather and granddaughter quickly finished dinner and each set off to work on their own tasks.
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