The investigation into the chain letter was not going smoothly.
After Mrs. Parvati called the police, officers arrived at her and Jack’s house before long. Dealing with the police investigation and questioning took quite a while, and by the ti Mrs. Parvati finally had a mont to herself, it was already the next morning.
Ti was tight. After a brief rest, she took her husband’s phone and began visiting his friends one by one. Around noon, she finally learned the identity of Connie Doverlo from one of them.
The man ran a weapons shop in Demca City, Caesar State, and had connections in both the underworld and legitimate circles. Occasionally, he could get his hands on extrely rare firearms and weapons. Jack would sotis place orders with Connie for hard-to-find goods, and the two exchanged contact information because of it. After several interactions, they had beco fairly close.
But Connie Doverlo was already dead.
His ti of death was extrely close to Jack’s—also on the afternoon of June 30th, only one minute earlier—
At 4:08 PM that afternoon, he had gone out shopping. While crossing an intersection, a truck suddenly slamd into a roadside signpost without warning. The massive tal pole toppled violently from the impact, and the triangular sign at the top ca crashing down onto the road across from it like a butter knife. With a loud clang, it landed perfectly in Connie’s path, slicing him cleanly in half.
Judging from the ti of death, Connie must have received the text ssage at 4:08 PM on June 27th. And perhaps because he found it amusing, he forwarded the ssage within a minute of receiving it. Unlucky Jack ended up receiving that death-bringing text because of it.
So then, who had sent Connie the ssage?
Parvati found Connie’s wife and son.
Both of them were still alive and well for the mont, which seed to an Connie had not forwarded the ssage to either of them.
Connie’s family knew nothing about the cursed text ssage. Parvati understood that even if she told them the truth, they probably would not believe her, so she did not waste her breath explaining. Instead, following Old John’s suggestion, she made up an excuse and briefly borrowed Connie’s phone from his family, secretly checking through the records.
“The person who sent Connie the ssage was soone called D.A., contact number XXX. D.A. and Connie had always communicated by phone before this—they had never texted each other. I asked Connie’s family, and they don’t know this D.A. either…”
After leaving Connie’s house, Parvati called Old John and reported the information to him.
“Understood. Next, please ask Connie’s family about any close acquaintances or friends Connie had. Maybe one of them knows D.A. On my side, I’ll start with the contact number and investigate D.A.’s identity.”
Old John hung up and imdiately began looking into D.A.’s information.
But it was far from simple.
Arica was a highly decentralized country, with each state relatively independent and possessing considerable autonomy.
Although Old John had once worked for the Dwight State Police Departnt and could use so police resources through personal connections, that only applied within Dwight State itself. Once the investigation crossed state lines, things beca much more difficult.
Judging from the area code, D.A.’s phone number ca from Yonah State.
Under the current procedures, the Dwight State police could not directly investigate D.A.’s real identity across state borders. To obtain D.A.’s information, they would need support from Yonah State law enforcent, or involvent from agencies such as the FBI or the courts.
Of course, strictly speaking, “nothing is impossible if you have enough money.” With his life on the line, Old John was naturally willing to spend money greasing the wheels. But building those connections also took ti, which ant the investigation on his side could not progress quickly no matter what he did.
As for Everly’s side, they ran into an entirely different problem—there was simply too much information.
She entrusted the online investigation to Orff.
Orff typed the full text of the cursed chain letter into a search engine and used an exact-match search, only to discover that it was identical to real-life cursed chain letters that had once circulated online, not even the punctuation had been changed!
Chain letters had probably appeared not long after postal services beca widespread in the last century. Their formats varied greatly: so spread blessings, so spread curses, so beca entangled with pyramid sches, and so extremist religious groups even used chain letters for proselytizing.
According to the search results, the chain letter Old John received had originally been spread through physical paper letters.
Later, with the rapid developnt of the internet, so bored people transferred this type of cursed chain letter from paper onto the web, turning it into a template for countless electronic chain ssages.
As a result, when Orff searched for it, he found huge amounts of prank content completely unrelated to the current incident, despite having exactly the sa text.
Naturally, the chain letters involved in those prank posts could not all have been real. Otherwise, the cursed-ssage phenonon would have erupted long ago. But the overwhelming flood of information still created another kind of “information pollution,” making it nearly impossible to sift useful clues out of the endless sea of data.
With ti running short, Everly could only suggest that Orff change strategies and instead search for recent accidental death cases across Arica, especially clusters of them.
But that did not help much either. After all, this was a horror-movie world, where all sorts of deaths occurred every second of every day. Even narrowing the scope to the area around Yonah State barely improved the situation.
So deaths were obviously caused by human hands, while others were more concealed, cleverly disguised by the perpetrators to appear as “accidents.”
Trying to filter out suitable cases from the countless death reports was like searching for a needle in the ocean.
Orff replied: [Wait a bit. I’ll try writing a web crawler to scrape information that matches the criteria.]
After saying that, he stopped sending any further ssages.
Besides asking Orff for help, Everly mobilized all of her own connections as well. She separately contacted Rebecca, Wester, and the curse witch Natalie, hoping to gather so information from people connected to the supernatural world.
As always, Rebecca was enthusiastic and patted her chest confidently, saying she could ask around among fellow practitioners to see whether anyone had encountered sothing similar before.
West did not answer his phone, probably off sowhere carrying out another thrilling exorcism.
As for the curse witch, Natalie, the ssages showed as read but unanswered the entire ti. Everly guessed the woman probably had little interest in getting involved in this matter…
In the end, after struggling from dayti until nightfall, she and Old John gained very little, though they exhausted themselves thoroughly.
That night passed in restless, anxious sleep.
By the next morning, however, bits of good news finally began arriving one after another.
The first breakthrough ca from Old John’s side.
Sharon, the female police officer whom Old John had once helped during the serial female disappearance case, put in trendous effort. After working through the entire night, she finally managed to connect Old John with a detective from the Yonah State Police Departnt.
That detective had a family mber suffering from cancer, and the insurance payout was nowhere near enough to cover the enormous treatnt expenses, leaving him in severe financial difficulty and in urgent need of money.
Through interdiaries, Old John got in touch with the detective and paid him a “consultation fee” of two thousand dollars, successfully obtaining information related to D.A.
The records showed that D.A.’s full na was Dylan Adams, a university student in Yonah State.
As one link in the cursed chain, he was naturally dead as well.
His ti of death was 4:10 PM on June 27th—two minutes after Connie received the text ssage. The cause of death was ruled an accident.
This indicated that D.A. had forwarded the cursed ssage willingly.
According to the accident investigation report, Dylan, his girlfriend Vivian, and three friends from their university band had been driving past a construction site when a sudden gust of wind swept through the area.
The construction materials hanging from the crane arm swayed violently in the wind. The steel cables binding the materials together strained under the pressure, emitting a teeth-grinding screech before suddenly snapping.
The heavy steel plates ca crashing down from above with a deafening slam, crushing the five of them along with the car into mangled pulp.
Considering that, up to this point, the cursed chain letter had never claid the lives of uninvolved bystanders, the logical conclusion was that the five of them had most likely received the cursed ssage from the sa sender at the sa ti.
Which brought the investigation back to the very beginning: Who had forwarded the ssage to them?
All five phones had been completely flattened in the accident, so tracing the previous sender by checking the devices was no longer possible. And under Arican law, police needed court approval before telecommunications companies could release private text-ssage records, which ant that avenue was blocked as well.
Old John could only try investigating through people connected to Dylan and the others.
He asked the Yonah State detective to check whether any other accidental deaths had occurred at the university between June 24th and June 27th. That was sothing the detective could investigate, and he quickly replied that no deaths had occurred on campus during that period.
This suggested that the sender before Dylan was most likely not soone from the sa university.
At this point, Old John’s investigation temporarily hit a dead end. If the sender was not a fellow student, then identifying a common contact shared by all five students would be extrely troubleso.
Fortunately, just then, good news arrived from Orff’s side.
After relentless effort, he had successfully finished writing the web crawler program, and within only three hours, it had already scraped several pieces of information potentially connected to the cursed chain-letter incident.
One of them, a help post from a paranormal enthusiast forum, imdiately caught Everly’s attention.
The contents of the post were as follows: [Help: I received a real cursed chain letter. How do I break the curse?]
[Just like the title says, one of our band’s friends received a cursed chain text ssage from soone else. The ssage said…
My friend thought it was a prank, so he forwarded it to the rest of the band mbers. I received it too.
At first, all of us thought it was just a joke. But three days later, that friend really did die in an accident. It was a horrible death, and the ti of death was exactly 72 hours after he received the ssage—not even a minute off.
Looking at it now, the cursed ssage must be real. Does anyone know anything about this kind of situation? We don’t want to die. What should we do?]
…
There were two reasons this post attracted special attention.
First, the userna of the poster was “D.A.,” which perfectly matched Dylan Adams’s initials.
Second, the post ntioned a band, while Dylan and the other four victims happened to belong to a student band at their university.
Orff said:
[But the tiline doesn’t match. You know how it is—when we filter information, we usually keep the conditions a little broad so we don’t accidentally miss useful clues… So is this D.A. really the person you’re looking for?]
After hearing his reminder, Everly checked the tistamp of the forum post.
Sure enough, the post had been made on the night of June 17th, ten days before Dylan’s death. That completely contradicted the three-day deadline of the cursed ssage!
The paranormal forum did not publicly display users’ IP addresses, so after thinking for a mont, Everly asked Orff to trace the poster’s IP location.
The result showed a complete overlap with Dylan’s university.
Horror Movie Survival Rule #1: pay attention to hints.
With this many overlapping details, there was no way this could be just an irrelevant piece of information.
Because of this, Everly did not discard the post. Instead, she asked Old John to contact the Yonah State detective again and have him investigate whether any mbers of a student band at the university had died on June 17th. If so, then D.A. really might have been Dylan.
Deaths occurring at universities were generally handled by campus police, though local city police sotis got involved as well due to overlapping jurisdiction.
The detective worked for the state police, so to learn about a case at a university within the state, he first had to contact the campus police.
The communication process took so ti. Finally, shortly after ten in the morning, Old John received a return call:
“I checked. It’s true—on the afternoon of June 17th, during an outdoor performance by a student band, part of the stage suddenly collapsed. One of the band mbers fell into the pit below and was impaled from underneath by a steel rebar rod. He died on the spot.”
“Then may I ask—was Dylan among the mbers of this band?”
“Yes. That’s correct.”
!!!
So it really did match up!
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