Everly deeply suspected that movie characters all loved speaking in riddles.
After transferring the consultation fee into the curse witch’s account, she pondered over it alone for quite a while, but still couldn’t make much sense of it. In the end, she simply picked up the phone and sought outside help.
When it ca to the occult, Rebecca definitely knew more. Everly needed an expert’s help!
“You an rules? Umm… hmm… I think there really is a theory like that. Don’t hang up yet, let check.”
After listening to Everly’s description, the sound of pages flipping ca from the other end of the phone. Everly waited patiently for about five minutes before Rebecca finally found the information she wanted.
“Found it. Now that you ntion it, that vengeful spirit’s behavior pattern really is very unusual… Let think about how to explain it…”
What Rebecca wanted to explain was rather profound, and it took her quite a bit of effort before she finally made it clear to Everly.
Generally speaking, the logic behind a vengeful spirit’s actions is “repay hatred with hatred, repay grudges with vengeance.” Like hyenas, they pursue the targets of their resentnt, attack them, kill their enemies, and devour their flesh.
Occasionally, there are also vengeful spirits that beco especially attached to certain objects or places. These spirits linger around the things or locations they care about and indiscriminately attack any humans who co near.
But Narcissa was different.
According to the stories from the past, the people she wanted revenge against were actually the villagers led by those five teenagers.
However, during the actual course of her revenge, she did not obsess over the guilty parties. Instead, she used the cursed chain letter as a dium to actively spread her curse. Whether soone had wronged her or not, as long as they received the letter, she would choose them as a target and take their life. And if so villagers never received the letter, she would not go out of her way to kill them.
Seen this way, her revenge process had actually long since lost its “self.” She had been acting under the coercion of the killing rules all along.
“This is an extrely rare type of ‘rule-based’ vengeful spirit…” Rebecca sighed.
“Rule-based” vengeful spirits, as the na suggests, are spirits that create a set of rules of their own and then use those rules to carry out killings. In the classic Japanese horror film Ring that Everly had watched in her previous life, Sadako, who kills through videotapes, was a typical example.
These kinds of vengeful spirits are very common in Japanese horror movies. In Arican thrillers, however, ghosts are more often tied to elents such as religion, evil gods, revenge, and psychological horror, so rule-based vengeful spirits rarely appear.
Becoming a rule-based vengeful spirit is not easy.
First of all, the spirit must possess strong self-control, enough to suppress the overwhelming urge to kill that floods its mind at the mont of its birth, and instead devote all its energy to constructing rules.
Restraining hatred is extrely difficult. A newly born vengeful spirit usually has a chaotic consciousness, so achieving this alone is already incredibly hard.
The second difficulty lies in creating a set of rules with rigorous logic, clear directives, and a certain capacity for self-replication and spread. This is far from simple, and many vengeful spirits fail at this stage.
Narcissa was very fortunate. Right before her death, she had just received a “cursed chain letter,” allowing her to directly borrow the rules already attached to the letter and skip the “creation” step entirely.
The third difficulty is that constructing rules consus a trendous amount of energy. Moreover, when the rules are first completed, their “hunting” capability is relatively weak, and the energy a rule-based vengeful spirit can gain from killing is significantly less than that of ordinary vengeful spirits.
As a result, rule-based vengeful spirits are very weak in their early stages.
However, once they survive this fragile period, after their rules spread and hunting becos systematized and automated, the harvesting speed of a rule-based vengeful spirit becos astonishing. Before long, they turn into sothing extrely troubleso.
All of the above was fairly common knowledge regarding rule-based vengeful spirits.
But beyond that, rule-based vengeful spirits actually possess a little-known flaw. Rebecca had only learned about it by chance, after obtaining a translated copy of an ancient text from Japan—
“Rule-based” vengeful spirits are bound by their own rules.
This was easy enough to understand.
When Narcissa was just an ordinary vengeful spirit, she could act however she wished and kill whover she wanted.
But once she completed the rules of the cursed letter, Narcissa herself beca part of that system. She could only kill when two conditions were t: 1 the victim had received the cursed chain letter; 2 three days had passed since receiving it.
At all other tis, the most Narcissa could do was use psychic attacks to make people harm themselves or attack each other. For example, the diums, priests, and pastors whom Dylan’s group of five had once sought help from only suffered superficial injuries after seeing hallucinations.
“And that’s not all. Once a rule that incorporates its creator is fully ford, do you know what that ans?”
“What does it an?”
Rebecca did not explain directly. Instead, she gave Everly another analogy:
“Imagine a house like this: its foundation is ford from the roots of a giant tree, its walls are made from the thick trunk, the room people live in is a hollow within the tree, and the roof protecting it from wind and rain is the enormous canopy. Every part of this house cos from that sa tree, so it is both a house and the tree itself.”
“I understand now,” Everly replied.
The completed rule was the finished house, while Narcissa, the vengeful spirit, was the giant tree.
When the frawork of the rules and the power sustaining them all ca from Narcissa, and when Narcissa herself had been incorporated into the system, then the vengeful spirit and the rules had essentially beco one and the sa.
Kill Narcissa, and the rules would lose their effect.
Likewise, destroy the operation of the rules, and Narcissa’s very existence would also be destroyed.
That was the most fatal weakness in Narcissa’s killing logic.
So then, how could the operation of the rules be destroyed?
The rules of the cursed chain letter gathered so far were as follows:
1. The recipient will die in an “accident” 72 hours after receiving the letter.
2. The recipient may choose to voluntarily forward the chain letter to five people, and those five people will repeat the recipient’s fate.
3. If the recipient does not voluntarily forward the letter before death, the chain letter will automatically forward itself within one minute after the person dies, and the forwarding targets will most likely include people close to the deceased.
4. If the recipient dies within the 72-hour period due to suicide, homicide, or other causes, the cursed letter in their possession will stop spreading.
5. The sa person can only receive one cursed chain letter.
As for Rule 1, if one wanted to break it, they would need to ensure that the recipient did not die after 72 hours. That would be extrely difficult.
Regarding Rule 2, Everly could not think of any way to break it—or rather, she could not think of any truly effective way. If soone voluntarily forwarded the chain letter to fewer than five people, the missing recipients could easily be supplented by Rule 3. If the letter were forwarded to more than five people at once, the rules could simply apply only to the first five selected recipients and spare the rest, or they could affect everyone simultaneously. After all, this was a cursed letter designed for killing; presumably, the more victims, the better.
In short, the rules themselves could patch up loopholes.
For Rule 3, the only way Everly could think of to break it was to forward the letter to soone who had zero contacts.
But in Everly’s view, this thod still was not reliable enough.
Having zero contacts did not an the person knew no one in real life. It might simply an they had not added people to their contact list yet, or perhaps they had just bought a new phone and had not had ti to add contacts.
In situations like that, there was still a high probability that the ssage would sohow find its own way and spread itself among the recipient’s friends and family.
After all, more than forty years ago, when this thing was still a paper letter, it had already been capable of obtaining addresses on its own and mailing itself to people the recipient knew. There was no reason it could not do the sa in the information age, right?
Finally, there were Rules 4 and 5. For the ti being, Everly could not think of any way to break those two rules.
Taking everything into consideration, the most effective approach was still to target Rule 1—if soone could remain alive 72 hours after receiving the letter, the cursed letter’s rules would be broken, triggering a backlash that would kill Narcissa!
At this point in her analysis, Everly placed her pen beneath the first rule and drew a heavy circle around it.
Making soone die was easy, but keeping soone alive was far more difficult.
How could she protect Old John from Narcissa’s curse and keep him alive for more than 72 hours?
Influenced by that earlier prophecy, the first thing Everly thought of was Bloody Mary’s “Mirror World Substitution.”
Bloody Mary’s mirror world was a separate dinsion completely isolated from reality. If Bloody Mary swapped Old John into the mirror before the countdown ended, wouldn’t he be able to evade Narcissa’s pursuit and survive?
At the thought of this, excitent first flashed through Everly’s eyes.
But very quickly, she rembered sothing else—when Dylan and his girlfriend had gone to see the dium, the dium had taken one look at them and declared that they were shrouded in dreadful darkness, with the Grim Reaper’s scythe hanging over their heads.
That ant that from the very mont they received the ssage, Dylan and his girlfriend had already been entangled by the curse.
If that were the case, then the curse would most likely follow the person wherever they went. In other words, even if Bloody Mary transferred Old John into the mirror world, the curse would still cling to him like a parasite, shadowing him wherever he went, and when the ti ca, it would take his life inside the mirror world as well.
If so, then the path of mirror-world substitution would not work. Everly could not gamble with Old John’s life!
She needed to find another way—another thod of extending Old John’s lifespan.
Life… lifespan…
That’s right. She really did know of one thing that possessed a very unique power to prolong life.
So, should she use it?
The answer was yes.
Everly admitted that she was not a saint. At the very least, whenever the people close to her were involved, her moral bottom line would drop without limit.
Therefore, even though she clearly understood that it was not a good thing, in order to save her grandfather, she still decided to use it.
And she had already figured out exactly how to use it.
All that remained now was preparation beforehand.
At present, there was still a day and a half left before the countdown ended. If she hurried, there was still enough ti—but only if everything went smoothly… and experience had taught her that whenever that thing beca involved, “smoothly” was very hard to achieve.
Thinking this, Everly opened a webpage and searched for the relevant keywords.
Sure enough, after two years, the place had already undergone major reconstruction and renovation, and had recently reopened for business.
“Tch, troubleso…”
Everly pushed away the keyboard and stood up from her desk.
If this plan was going to succeed, she would also need Rebecca’s and Old John’s cooperation. There was no more ti to sit around spacing out in front of the desk—she had to act imdiately!
…
After spending most of the afternoon making preparations, by evening, Rebecca arrived at the gas station carrying a tightly wrapped black cloth bundle.
“This is for you. Rember to return it to after you’re done using it… Are you really sure you don’t need to co along?”
Everly accepted the bundle. She only opened it slightly to glance at what was inside before quickly wrapping the cloth back around it.
“No need. That place is very dangerous. Grandfather and I can go by ourselves… Thank you for trusting . I’ll definitely survive and bring it back to you.”
“Of course… Actually, before I left ho, I asked Mother Earth. She told that although your trip will be full of twists and turns, it will definitely end happily in the end.”
Rebecca could not offer her friend much more help. She could only step forward and gently press a reassuring hand onto Everly’s shoulder.
Whether those words were true or not, Everly appreciated the sentint.
Rebecca had already helped her far too much.
She wanted to say that once she and Old John returned, the three of them—plus Misha—should all go to McMurkin Amusent Park together… but on second thought, saying sothing like that before departure was practically raising a death flag. Far too unlucky.
So in the end, Everly simply stepped forward, wrapped her arms around her friend, and gave her a light hug.
“I’ll owe you the consultation fee for now.”
She smiled at Rebecca.
Rebecca froze for a mont, then smiled as well. “Then when the ti cos, I’m definitely charging you interest.”
While they joked around, Old John had already finished placing the last weapon into the trunk.
Driving the jeep over to the two girls, he rolled down the window and beckoned to Everly.
“Well then, I should get going. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye. Co back victorious.”
After the brief farewell, the jeep carried Everly away from the gas station, quickly driving off toward the distant west.
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