After being harassed by the teenagers for nearly half a month, Narcissa had accumulated a belly full of anger.
Finally catching one of them, she ignored Soros’s pleas. Her thin, bony fingers clutched his arm like chicken claws as she dragged him in front of his parents to demand an explanation.
It happened to be a sumr evening. The villagers had finished their farm work and were bored out of their minds, so when they saw there was drama to watch, quite a few people gathered outside Soros’s house.
In front of everyone, Soros’s parents opened the letter and discovered that it was a cursed chain letter.
At the ti, those kinds of paper chain letters were very popular. Soros had probably learned about them from classmates at school, then written one himself in an attempt to play a prank.
With both witnesses and physical evidence present, and so many villagers watching nearby, there was no way to deny it. Soros’s father cared a lot about saving face; furious, he slapped Soros on the spot and promised everyone he would properly discipline his son afterward.
“There’s no need for punishnt. As long as he stops disturbing my life, that’s enough.”
Narcissa gave the family a cold nod, then limped slowly back ho.
She thought the matter was over.
However, having been beaten by his parents in public, Soros felt deeply humiliated and harbored a grudge.
That very night, he secretly gathered the other four mbers of the teenage group. Bringing gasoline and a lighter, they climbed over the wall into Narcissa’s yard in the middle of the night.
Originally, they had only intended to burn down the haystack in her yard “to teach her a lesson.” But the teenagers did not know that gasoline is highly volatile and spreads extrely easily.
When the night wind picked up, the flas quickly spread from the haystack to the nearby wooden house. The boys tried stomping on the fire, burying it with sand and dirt, and even splashing water on it, but nothing worked. At so point, the gasoline had already seeped through the piles of straw scattered across the ground and reached the underside of the wooden house.
As the fire grew bigger and bigger, the teenagers exchanged glances. Without saying a word, they all turned around and fled the scene.
Not a single one of them thought about waking Narcissa.
After nearly half a month of harassnt, Narcissa had accumulated endless exhaustion. As a result, despite normally being a light sleeper, she slept especially deeply that night. By the ti the heat woke her up, it was already too late.
Early the next morning, after the blaze was finally extinguished, people found her curled-up body at the entrance to her bedroom—burned black into a lump of charcoal.
…
Soros and the others had not covered their tracks carefully. At the scene of Narcissa’s death, they left behind their lighter, a gasoline can, and a tal badge beloved by one of the teenagers.
In truth, even without those pieces of evidence, the villagers knew who had started the fire.
After all, the village was only so big. Truly hiding sothing from everyone was extrely difficult.
Back when the teenagers had been destroying Narcissa’s farmland, the villagers had already noticed, yet no one stepped in to stop them. Everyone simply watched with a spectator’s amusent, observing the poor old woman being toyed with by the children like a sewer rat.
So people even thought the children had done a fine job—just look at how plump the chickens and ducks they stole were. Why should such good things go to that old woman who had married in from outside the village?
These belonged to their village. What right did an outsider have to occupy them for so many years?!
Thus, through the collective indifference and indulgence of the crowd, malice beca like a seed scattered into the soil. As ti passed, it grew more and more rampant, until finally, in a corner no one had expected, it bore the heavy fruit of sin.
“What should we do next?”
“Why are you looking at my child? This has nothing to do with our William!”
“My Soros is a good boy—he wasn’t involved either!”
Standing before the burned ruins of the wooden house, surrounding Narcissa’s charred corpse, everyone looked at one another before, almost in unison, turning their eyes toward the village chief.
Feeling everyone’s gaze fall upon him, the village chief stiffened his face and lightly tapped the ground with his cane.
“In truth, this was rely an ordinary fire,” he announced in a hoarse voice, his throat bobbing. “Narcissa was old. She must have been careless while using fire and accidentally knocked over the oil in her house. These things happen.”
Everyone knew why the village chief said this.
Soros, the ringleader among the teenagers, was—by blood—the grandson of the village chief’s younger sister.
The village was small. After generations of living and multiplying there, the villagers were all more or less related to one another. Those five children were not only their parents’ children, but also the relatives of the villagers, children everyone had watched grow up.
Why ruin the bright futures and youth of those children for the sake of an outsider…? They were just kids, after all. They had been frightened too. Poor things.
And so, when the police sent from town arrived to investigate the incident, what they found was a fire scene that had already been tampered with, along with villagers whose testimonies were astonishingly consistent.
Narcissa’s case was thus closed as an accidental fire.
Afterward, perhaps out of guilt, the villagers pooled together so money and held a grand funeral for Narcissa.
The strange events began on the seventh day after her death.
In Western religion, “seven” is a special number. God created heaven and earth in the first six days and rested on the seventh, giving the number anings tied to creation and rest. The number also repeatedly appears in concepts such as the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Heavens.
It symbolizes sacred order, perfect completion, and the cycle of the universe.
On the seventh day after Narcissa’s death, the entire village was shrouded in a sudden thick fog at dawn.
Before the sumr sunlight could burn away the mist, so early-rising villagers heading out to work passed by a hunched figure dressed in black.
The witness saw the black-clad figure stop for a while in front of one villager’s house, leave behind a letter, and then turn and disappear into the dense fog.
At first, the villager did not pay much attention to it. But very soon, he heard sothing strange—on that very day, the families of the five teenagers, including Soros’s, had all received mysterious letters.
The envelopes bore no postmarks, and the sender field was blank. Only the recipient’s na was written on them. Strangely, the recipients were not the heads of the households, but the children themselves.
Who had sent the letters, and for what purpose?
So parents, not particularly concerned with their children’s privacy, secretly opened the letters out of curiosity.
The mont one parent saw the contents, they let out a terrified scream—the letter was a cursed chain letter written in blood!
But even more horrifying events were yet to co.
Three days after receiving the letters, all five children died simultaneously in a variety of accidents!
Before their deaths, not a single one of the teenagers had mailed out the chain letters as demanded by the blood-written curse. And so, after they died, the cursed letters automatically spread in their nas. The new recipients beca the teenagers’ parents and relatives, along with several randomly selected villagers.
After witnessing the grueso deaths of the teenagers, everyone who received a letter was terrified.
So people tried fleeing the village. Others traveled to the town to seek help from the church. There were also those who believed the so-called curse was nothing more than people scaring themselves, that everything was rely a coincidence.
Three days passed in the blink of an eye.
When the deadline arrived, no matter where those twenty-five people had gone or what asures they had taken, they died suddenly at the exact sa mont, just like the five teenagers before them.
Then ca the third wave of cursed letters…
As the curse spread, the villagers discovered sothing: unless the recipient was killed—or committed suicide—before the three-day deadline, the cursed letter would definitely continue forwarding itself after the ti limit expired. Moreover, the sa person could only receive one cursed letter, making it impossible to reduce the curse by repeatedly finding the sa scapegoat.
The entire village descended into chaos. There were suicides, murders between neighbors, and people deliberately spreading the curse to others…
At that mont, the ugliness of human nature was laid completely bare.
Perhaps the villagers were not destined to perish after all. During the fourth spread of the cursed letters, an exorcist who happened to be passing through intervened.
“You are mistaken. Narcissa was not a witch—she was just an ordinary person. Because the hatred she felt at the mont of death was too intense, she beca a vengeful spirit lingering in this world after her death, carrying out revenge under the drive of that hatred,” the exorcist told the villagers after inspecting both the fire scene and Narcissa’s grave.
“But haven’t the people who hard her already died? Why is she targeting us?”
“Please save us! We’re innocent!”
The villagers—who had coldly stood by while the children b*llied Narcissa, acting as enablers and protectors—gathered before the exorcist, crying and begging for help.
Even now, not a single one of them believed they had done anything wrong.
The exorcist let out a long sigh. He was a kind-hearted man; even though the villagers before him were stained with guilt, he could not bear to stand by and watch them all die.
“I ca too late,” the exorcist said. “If I had encountered Narcissa when the cursed letters first appeared, a newborn spirit like her would have been no match for . But before my arrival, this spirit has already used the cursed letters to kill over a hundred people. Vengeful spirits can draw strength from slaughter—the more people they kill, the stronger they beco. Narcissa has now grown beyond my ability to handle. I’m afraid only a high-ranking clergyman at the level of a Purple-Robed Bishop could completely purify her…”
“Then what are we supposed to do?”
“Who is a Purple-Robed Bishop? Can we find one in the nearest city?”
The villagers tearfully asked one foolish question after another.
Looking at the ignorant and cowardly villagers before him, the exorcist shook his head helplessly.
“You are unfortunate, for this land nurtured such a monster. But at the sa ti, you are fortunate, because I just so happen to be carrying this with …”
As he spoke, the exorcist took a small box from inside his robes.
Inside the box lay a roll of old, yellowed linen cloth. Brownish oxidation stains marked the fabric, making it look as though it had once been used to wrap sothing.
“This is…”
“This is a replica of the Shroud of Turin.” Seeing the villagers still looking utterly confused, the exorcist had no choice but to explain in detail. “The Shroud of Turin is said to be the burial cloth that once wrapped the body of Jesus. Although mine is only a replica, it still possesses powerful spiritual energy. If Narcissa’s corpse is wrapped in it, it should be enough to seal her away.”
With that, the exorcist instructed the villagers to bring hoes and accompanied them to the cetery, where they dug up Narcissa’s grave.
The mont Narcissa’s corpse was exposed, every villager participating in the exhumation was seized by hallucinations. Their eyes turned vacant, their expressions twisted viciously, and they roared as they lunged at the exorcist.
Fortunately, the exorcist was agile, and he also carried the replica Shroud of Turin with him. After enduring considerable hardship, he still managed to wrap Narcissa’s corpse in the burial cloth, place it back into the coffin, and rebury it.
Strangely enough, once Narcissa’s body had been reburied, all the villagers regained their senses. The blood-written cursed chain letters in their possession also crumbled into ashes and vanished.
“The burial cloth is only a replica. At most, it can restrain this vengeful spirit—it cannot destroy it. From now on, you must carefully guard Narcissa’s grave. Under no circumstances can anyone remove the burial cloth, otherwise the spirit will inevitably return to this world!”
Before departing, the exorcist gave the villagers this warning.
After the exorcist left, the villagers did indeed follow his instructions and carefully watched over Narcissa’s grave.
At least, in the beginning, they did.
But ti is a very strange thing. No matter how unforgettable sothing may once seem, after years and years pass, even the deepest impressions gradually fade from mory.
More than forty years passed in the blink of an eye.
During those decades, Laketon Village changed trendously. More and more people grew tired of the isolated and backward life in their hotown and chose to leave for the big cities, causing the village to shrink year by year.
At the sa ti, the older generation in the village—the ones who had personally experienced the cursed chain letter incident—grew old and died one after another. Before anyone realized it, people had forgotten the terror once brought upon them by the woman nad Narcissa.
As the village declined, the cetery also beca increasingly dilapidated and desolate.
Two weeks ago, grave robbers trafficking in human bones ca to the village and dug up Narcissa’s grave.
When they were discovered, the grave robber lay stiff in the cetery, eyes bulging wide open, two trails of bloody tears running beneath them. Beside him were an opened, empty coffin and a filthy, tattered burial cloth.
That cloth was naturally the replica of the Shroud of Turin. As for Narcissa’s corpse—it had vanished without a trace.
From that day onward, the nightmare repeated itself. New cursed chain letters began appearing on the phones of the surviving villagers, this ti in a form more fitting for the modern age.
…
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