While the Yonah State detective had been contacting campus police for information about the band, Everly had already carefully studied Dylan’s help post.
The post was extrely useful, because it indirectly explained why Dylan and the other four victims did not die until ten days after receiving the cursed text ssage—
At so point, they had briefly “resolved” the source of the cursed chain letter, causing the countdown to death to temporarily stop.
With the intention of replicating what they had done, Everly turned her attention back to the post once again.
Not long after D.A. posted the request for help on the night of June 17th, enthusiastic mbers of the paranormal forum began replying.
About half of them thought Dylan was making things up, fabricating a story, or trying to spread the cursed ssage itself under the guise of asking for help.
But so people were genuinely and seriously trying to analyze the situation:
[8F: Go to a church first. If you run into sothing like this, you definitely need to find people capable of dealing with it.]
[9F: Pfft! If you ask , instead of going to a church, you’d be better off finding a psychic. Churches nowadays aren’t nearly as spiritually pure as they used to be. OP, are there any powerful witches or diums in your area? You could ask them to take a look.]
[10F: Hey now, 9th floor, you can’t say that so absolutely. At the very least, the Vatican’s exorcists are still incredibly badass. (upside-down smiley) (upside-down smiley)]
…
Most of the earlier replies basically advised them to seek help from professionals involved in the supernatural world. D.A. apparently thought the suggestions made sense, because he quickly replied with an “OK.”
By the ti he posted again, it was already the following night.
[28F: During the day, the five of us split up and investigated separately. My girlfriend and I went to see the most famous dium in the area. The mont she saw us, she said a terrifying shadow was hanging over us, and that Death’s scythe was suspended above our heads, ready to take our lives at any mont.
We thought the dium was really powerful, so we begged her to help us. At first, she agreed very readily and said she would conduct a séance to communicate with the thing haunting us.
However, during the ritual, sothing happened—I don’t know what she saw, but she suddenly started screaming as if she had witnessed sothing horrifying. Then she grabbed a candlestick, stabbed it through her own tongue, and yanked hard, tearing off most of it…]
[29F (Original Poster): The dium’s assistant called the police. My girlfriend and I had to stay at the station until evening to cooperate with the investigation. After leaving the station, we learned that it wasn’t just us—our three friends had run into similar situations too.
Whether it was priests or pastors from churches, after agreeing to help my friends, they all imdiately suffered accidents. One person went insane and repeatedly smashed his own head with a cross, while another stepped outside, suddenly hallucinated, ran into the street, and was hit by a speeding car, falling into a coma.]
[30F (Original Poster): The only person who didn’t suffer an accident was a spiritualist. Besides communicating with spirits, she also specialized in exorcism and warding off evil, and she was considered extrely famous locally. We placed great hopes on her and thought she might be able to help us, but in reality, she refused to co out or et with us at all.]
[31F (Original Poster): It’s obvious that the evil entity lurking behind the cursed chain letter is incredibly powerful. We’ve already contacted every psychic and supernatural practitioner we could find locally. There are only two days left, and trying to seek out practitioners from other places will probably end the sa way. In this situation, how are we supposed to save ourselves?]
The thread had originally been close to sinking into obscurity, but after D.A. bumped it again, the discussion imdiately beca lively once more.
After hearing about what had happened to him and his friends, aside from a few insensitive people making sarcastic remarks because it did not concern them, the overwhelming majority of users genuinely tried to help brainstorm solutions.
So recomnded spiritual practitioners they personally knew. Others uploaded piles of images, attempting to teach them exorcism spells and rituals of questionable usefulness. So people even suggested tracing everything back to the source of the curse itself.
That person’s theory was very similar to Everly’s own thinking.
They believed that since there still had not been any large-scale wave of suspicious deaths attracting public attention, the cursed text ssages had most likely only begun spreading recently.
If that were the case, then as long as the original poster traced the chain upward through the senders, found the origin point of the disaster, and tried to resolve the problem there, they might still have a chance of survival.
Judging from the replies afterward, D.A. seed to have followed exactly that suggestion.
Because roughly two days later—on the very night the three-day death deadline should have arrived—D.A. returned to the forum once again, bringing good news.
[112F (Original Poster): Thank you all so much for your help! Following your suggestions, we traced the text ssage upward layer by layer through the previous senders, and very quickly found the source of the cursed chain letter.
[The specific details involve personal privacy, so I won’t go into them. In short, after finding that place, we overca countless difficulties and finally succeeded in defeating the illusions and restoring the loosened seal.
It has now been 73 hours since we received the cursed text ssage, and all five of us are still alive. Everyone survived! Thank you all so much!]
This was D.A.’s final post in the thread.
After that ssage, no matter how curiously the other forum users pressed him for details, he never appeared again.
So after only a few days, the thread sank into obscurity, buried beneath newer and even more sensational paranormal posts.
…
Based on Dylan’s thread, Everly was able to obtain the following information:
1. The evil force behind the cursed chain letter was extrely powerful, and ordinary supernatural practitioners were largely incapable of opposing it.
2. Dylan and the other four had once traced the source of the cursed chain letter and confronted it directly, encountering illusions during the process.
3. The source of the cursed letter had previously been sealed away. Between June 19th and 20th, Dylan and the others restored the weakened seal, temporarily stopping the spread of the curse.
With all this information in hand, tracking down the origin of the cursed letter suddenly beca much simpler.
Everly asked Orff to search Chatter using the na of the campus band as a keyword. Before long, they found the band’s account, and from its performance announcents, they located the personal Chatter accounts of all six band mbers.
After attempting to hack into several of those accounts, Orff followed the trail and soon discovered a private group chat created by the six mbers.
The group had originally been used for organizing activities, arranging outings, and chatting casually.
But after the first band mber died in the accident, the remaining five had continuously used the sa group chat to exchange and share information about the cursed chain letter.
Orff copied the group chat logs and sent them to Everly.
After opening and carefully reading them, Everly quickly extracted the information she needed:
Among the band mbers, the first person to receive the cursed text ssage was the bassist Mark. He had received it from an off-campus friend nad Bruce, and the estimated ti was the afternoon of June 14th.
On June 17th at noon, the band mbers gathered in the music room to rehearse for their performance later that day. During a casual conversation, they sohow ended up talking about paranormal stories. Mark then recalled the ssage he had received three days earlier, and—treating it as a joke—forwarded it to the rest of the band mbers.
Not long after that, Mark died in an accident during the performance, right when the curse supposedly reached its deadline.
Everyone who witnessed Mark’s death felt the timing was far too coincidental.
Dylan’s girlfriend Vivian may have had so degree of psychic sensitivity; she saw a fleeting shadow at the mont of the accident. Because of this, she carefully checked Mark’s phone afterward and discovered that his ti of death matched exactly the 72-hour countdown after receiving the cursed chain ssage. The details aligned perfectly with the chain letter’s pattern.
This led the five of them to suspect that the cursed ssage might be real. That sa night, Dylan posted a help request on the paranormal forum.
From June 18th to 19th, the group chat showed that the five of them had been actively trying to deal with the curse.
At first, they tried seeking help from supernatural practitioners, but the results were poor—almost no one was able to resolve the situation. So starting on the 19th, they followed the chain of ssages to trace the origin of the curse.
They first found Bruce, the person who had originally sent the ssage to Mark.
Bruce was, of course, already dead as well. His girlfriend received the five visitors and provided a new lead: Bruce had received the ssage from his friend Fred.
The five of them then called Fred.
Bruce’s distant cousin was the one handling his funeral affairs. After hearing from Dylan’s group through Bruce’s phone, the cousin told them in a weary voice that this whole situation was very likely connected to a curse from Bruce’s hotown.
“I don’t know the details, because our family moved away from that place a long ti ago… I only rember hearing Bruce’s parents ntion that there was a curse circulating in that village,” the cousin added.
Following this thread step by step, the five of them finally traced the origin of the curse—to Bruce’s hotown: a small village called Laketon in Jafaspin State.
Jafaspin bordered Yonah State, but Laketon Village was extrely remote and isolated. Even though Dylan and the others rushed without stopping, by the ti they arrived, it was already the early morning of June 20th.
They had received the cursed ssage from Mark at 4:10 PM on the 17th. If they could not resolve the curse before 4:10 PM on the 20th, they would beco its next victims.
Laketon Village was unusually desolate. A large portion of it had already fallen into ruin, and the atmosphere was strange and oppressive.
The few remaining villagers who saw outsiders imdiately shut their doors and windows, clearly refusing any contact. Dylan’s group wandered the village for hours but found nothing.
From one end of the village to the other, they eventually reached the cetery outside.
There, inside the graveyard, was a mad old woman. She was curled up in front of a gravestone, muttering to herself repeatedly.
Overjoyed at finally finding a living person, Dylan and the others approached her without hesitation. Even though she seed insane, they carefully tried to communicate with her—and surprisingly, they managed to extract so useful information.
What follows is Everly’s own reconstruction based on fragnts from the chat logs. It may not be completely accurate, but it should be roughly correct.
All of this disaster originated from a fire more than forty years ago.
At that ti, Laketon Village was not yet as desolate as it was now. It was far from the city and relatively isolated, but the villagers relied on their fields and livestock for production.
They were largely self-sufficient and lived fairly comfortable lives.
At the edge of Laketon Village lived an elderly woman nad Narcissa.
Narcissa had married into the village from outside. Not long after the marriage, her husband was accidentally gored to death by an enraged bull while feeding cattle in the barn. From then on, Narcissa lived as a widow. Aside from farm work, she rarely left her ho and almost never interacted with the other villagers.
She was an outsider, and the locals already had a certain level of prejudice against her. On top of that, her husband had died under mysterious circumstances shortly after the marriage, and all of his land and livestock suddenly fell into her possession. Perhaps out of jealousy, rumors slowly began to spread—that Narcissa might have killed her husband.
Rumors like this tend to grow more detailed and more “realistic” the more they are repeated.
At first, people rely gossiped that she had killed her husband. But as ti went on, and perhaps because she always wore black dresses and had a gloomy expression that resembled the stereotypical image of a witch, the story gradually changed. Before anyone realized it, Narcissa had beco, in the villagers’ mouths, an evil witch.
Not only had she poisoned her husband and seized his property, she was also said to lock herself indoors all day, brewing terrifying potions.
Parents would deliberately warn their children in a threatening tone: stay far away from Narcissa if you ever see her; do not speak to her, do not even look at her. And never buy anything from her fields, because it might be cursed…
Perhaps at first, this was nothing more than a convenient scare tactic used by parents to make children behave. But as the saying goes—“repeat sothing a thousand tis and it becos truth.”
After years of such constant repetition, in the eyes of the younger generation growing up in the village, Narcissa’s image had completely fused with that of a witch.
Witches were seen as evil—harbingers of disease and disaster, the source of all misfortune.
And teenagers, especially those going through adolescence, were restless and unwilling to remain ordinary. They constantly longed for adventure, for attention, for extraordinary achievents, for becoming heroes.
The village was both large and small—large enough to contain them physically, yet too small to hold their growing ambitions.
No one knew exactly when it started, but at so point, they turned their gaze toward the “witch” at the edge of the village.
By then, Narcissa was already over sixty years old. She was thin, frail, her face deeply wrinkled, her back hunched—like a wandering ghost in the human world. Her appearance fit perfectly with the image of a witch from horror stories.
A group of teenagers gathered together. While she was away from ho, they broke into her farmland like bandits, striking her crops’ tender stems with sticks. At night, they sneaked into her barn to steal her chickens and ducks, threw stones at her windows, and even splashed filth across her doorstep…
They were careful, and quick on their feet. Because of that, at first, Narcissa was never able to catch them.
Until one day, a teenager nad “Soros” was caught red-handed while secretly stuffing a letter through the crack of her door.
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