Under the erosion of the mold, the third chapter belonging to Old John—both its text and pages—completely turned to ash, fluttering down with the wind.
After the ashes drifted away, a jagged, torn page suddenly appeared in the middle of the otherwise intact book.
On the left side of the torn page, the second chapter belonging to the previous user, “Thompson,” still remained unaffected.
On the right side, there should originally have been a fourth chapter titled “Gary.” However, because Old John had killed that Gary, the text on that page had already vanished, leaving it blank.
And now, under everyone’s watchful eyes, blood-red letters slowly began seeping out of the blank page—
[Chapter 3: John
John Breton will die today at 16:10 in a car accident caused by fatigue (death by a certain vengeful spirit’s curse).]
Yes, that’s right. The “life extraction” of the Book of Death had failed. But since Old John was holding and reading it, the book simply re-recorded his chapter again!
Seeing this, even though Everly had no supernatural abilities, she could faintly guess that just monts ago, the massacre between the mold and the text-based iron-thread worms had actually been a battle between two “rule-based” cursed objects—the Chain Letter Curse and the Book of Death—with the book’s pages serving as the battlefield.
The outco was obvious: the Book of Death, which Everly had placed such high hopes in, was completely outmatched by the Chain Letter Curse. It was thoroughly beaten, and even had a page forcibly torn out!
This book was a terrifying artifact that blades couldn’t cut and fire couldn’t burn!
Everly’s heart sank heavily.
As expected, things would not go so smoothly.
Fortunately, the Book of Death had deep reserves. Even after losing a page, its thickness remained considerable. When Old John picked it up, it could still generate new chapters, aning the book’s underlying rules were still functioning normally.
Moreover, as Everly observed, when the mold ca into contact with the text-based iron-thread worms, those writhing, worm-shaped letters had actually inflicted damage on the mold as well. It was just that the damage was too minor—like dust-sized iron-thread worms opening and closing their mouths, managing to gnaw off only hair-thin fragnts of mold. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t even notice it.
As the saying goes, constant dripping wears away stone, and a rope saws through wood. If a single “text worm” could erase dust-sized patches of mold, what about hundreds of them? Thousands? Even tens of thousands?
The Book of Death still had many, many pages. A temporary disadvantage ant nothing. What mattered was who could endure longer. Even if, in the end, the beast known as the Book of Death truly couldn’t beat the Chain Letter Curse, it could at least drain a significant amount of Narcissa’s power. At that point, with the full set of exorcism tools Everly had brought, they might still have a chance to fight back.
However, since the Book of Death could not imdiately break the rules of the Chain Letter Curse, Old John had to prioritize the matter of forwarding the ssage.
After all, no one could be sure whether they and Old John would succeed in ending Narcissa’s curse before the final deadline arrived. To protect the innocent contacts in Old John’s phone, they had to seize control of how the curse spread.
Thinking of this, Everly took a deep breath and forced down the unease and panic surging in her chest—just the re thought of her grandfather’s death left her mind blank and her heart aching as if it were being torn apart.
But now was not the ti to sink into fear. She had to act.
As for the recipients of the forwarded ssage, Everly and Old John had already conducted their research. Among them, the primary choice was naturally the murderous man right in front of them—Gary.
Apart from Gary, the two of them had also compiled five additional backup options. All of them were individuals found within the police system—people who had committed grave cris yet remained at large due to various circumstances.
Of course, considering the curse’s tendency to spread, Old John would not casually forward the ssage to those criminals unless absolutely necessary. After all, who knew whether those kinds of people would recklessly forward the chain ssage on to even more innocent victims?
Everly raised a hand to signal a pause to Old John, then turned and ran back to the car. She opened the glove compartnt and pulled out a brand-new phone, along with a stack of fresh SIM cards.
These SIM cards had been bought at a convenience store on the way here—prepaid cards that required no real-na registration, currently still in an “ownerless” state.
Everly carried the phone and SIM cards back over to Gary.
By now, after the earlier “repair,” the young man’s face—previously blown apart by a gunshot—had completely healed.
He lay on a blood-stained rack bed under the harsh beam of a spotlight. His skin was so pale it seed almost luminous, his blond hair gleaming like gold. At a glance, he looked like an angel born from a pool of blood—pure, innocent, almost untouchable.
When he saw Everly approaching, he rolled his eyes toward her, looking at her with anticipation.
“Everly, what were you doing just now? I could feel a very strong death aura… it slled delicious.”
“Gary, I’ve got a gift for you. Do you want it?”
Without waiting for his answer, she shoved the phone—now fitted with a SIM card—straight into his hands.
“This is a new phone. The number is XXXX. From now on, it’s your phone. Do you like it?”
Even if he didn’t, it didn’t matter. Since she said the phone was his, then it was his.
Gary blinked. His fingers fidgeted restlessly, brushing against the back of Everly’s hand before she could pull away. A flush of excitent quickly rose on his pale face.
“Ah, is this for ? Amazing… this is the first gift I’ve ever received!”
“Does it have your phone number in it? Can I use it to call you?”
Don’t even think about it. No chance.
With a cold expression, Everly struck Gary’s hand sharply with the gun stock, then stepped back and nodded toward Old John.
On their way here, the two had already analyzed every possible scenario and prepared corresponding plans. Receiving Everly’s signal, Old John imdiately took out his phone, found the chain curse ssage, and long-pressed to forward it—to the newly created contact: Gary No. 1.
The campsite had no signal, so ordinary text ssages couldn’t be sent. But Old John had been able to receive the cursed chain ssage even deep inside an underground shelter, which proved that ordinary network conditions did not affect this kind of cursed dium at all.
As expected, the mont the send button was pressed, the new phone in Gary’s hand imdiately began to buzz. The screen lit up, displaying an incoming ssage.
Thus, the first required forwarding of the chain curse was successfully completed.
“Grandfather, continue,” Everly urged.
Old John nodded.
He exerted a little force and took back the new phone that Gary hadn’t even fully ward with his hands yet, then replaced it by pressing the Book of Death—which had just recorded his na—into Gary’s empty palm.
“Hey, don’t snatch it! That’s the gift Everly gave … ah? What’s going on, this little thing is biting again!”
Gary tried to grab at it, but failed to reclaim the phone. Instead, he ended up firmly gripping the Book of Death.
According to Gary, the book seed to “bite,” so the lakeside—finally having cald down for a mont—was once again filled with his loud, chaotic complaints.
Despite having just failed a life extraction, the Book of Death was still functioning normally and had not suffered significant damage.
The mont Gary’s hand touched it, a new fourth chapter imdiately appeared on the blank page adjacent to Chapter Three—his chapter.
Old John took the book back and, together with Everly, read it. They discovered that the newly ford Chapter Four was identical to the previous one: it still stated that the ruthless killer Everly would throw Gary into the lake at 16:28 that afternoon.
“Do we do it?”
“Do it.”
“Huh?”
Faced with Gary’s head full of question marks, Old John showed no emotional fluctuation at all. He raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger.
With a loud BANG, the newly ford Gary was once again sent to his death.
This ti, the life extraction still failed.
After Gary died, it was as if “yesterday had returned.” Everly saw the blood-red, worm-like letters in Chapter Three begin writhing and boiling again. Familiar patches of mold re-erged from all four corners, rapidly spreading across the entire page, launching another round of strangulation against the text-based iron-thread worms attached to the paper.
The one-sided slaughter did not last long before it ended with the sound of tearing paper—rip.
Soon, the Book of Death gained another pitiful, dog-chewed-looking fragnt of a page.
That made two pages gone.
Everly did not lose heart. During the waiting ti for Gary’s next revival, she had already replaced the SIM card in Gary’s phone with a second new one.
When Gary No. 2’s facial flesh had fully regenerated, she repeated the sa routine—shoving the newly re-registered phone into his hands and once again offering him a “gift.”
Gary No. 2, clearly unlearned by experience, smiled with his eyes and happily accepted the gift.
It seed that no matter what she gave him, he would accept it without question.
Originally, Everly and Old John only intended to test sothing—to give the revived Gary a new number, send another cursed ssage, and see whether the “new Gary” with a new number could successfully receive the chain curse SMS.
If it worked, they could use this loophole to exhaust all five forwarding opportunities on Gary alone. If it didn’t, at least they would still have backup plans.
But unexpectedly, by sheer coincidence, they had stumbled upon a BUG—
By common sense, one person could have more than one phone and more than one number.
However, the Chain Letter Curse was a relatively intelligent rule-based curse system. To prevent people from being clever and sending the curse to different phone numbers under the sa identity, the system would perform an identity verification check on the recipient after the ssage was sent.
For example, more than forty years ago, during the outbreak of paper-based cursed letters, villagers discovered that the sa person could only receive one cursed letter. This made it impossible for them to “select a few shared targets and concentrate the curse fire” as a strategy.
In modern tis, this rule had evolved into a different form: a cursed SMS could only be forwarded once to the sa person. Even if that person changed to a new phone number, a second forwarding would still fail.
But today, the Chain Letter Curse system was confronted with a problem it had never encountered since its creation: it had been sent to a person who had died and then co back to life.
Q: Are Gary before death and Gary after resurrection considered the sa person?
If you asked a human, nine out of ten would answer yes. Gary was still Gary—being resurrected did not an he had beco soone else entirely.
However, the Chain Letter Curse was not human. It was a system of rules, a set of operational logic constructed by a vengeful spirit. It possessed a degree of intelligence, but not enough to be truly flexible. It contained various logical loopholes.
Simply put, you could approximate the curse system as a piece of executable code. Once an initial value was input, it would automatically perform verification checks, conditional branching, and logical processing, ultimately producing a result.
And so, when Old John long-pressed the cursed SMS and attempted to forward it to Gary No. 2, a BUG erged:
Old John → Gary No. 1 → No. 1 dies prematurely → forwarding completed once, chain breaks
↘ Gary No. 2 → identity verification (only executed when forwarding count ≥ 2) →
① No. 1 dies early, No. 2 survives, identity check passes →
② No. 1 and No. 2 are the sa person, identity check fails →
① No. 1 dies early, No. 2 survives, identity check passes →
② …
Of course, since Everly had never been a rule-based vengeful spirit herself, she had no real understanding of how such systems constructed their rules. So the explanation above was rely her own ntal reconstruction, and there might be inaccuracies or omissions. But she believed the core point of the BUG lay in the two conditions—① and ②.
These two logical branches were originally impossible to satisfy at the sa ti. That was why, for a very long ti, the system had run smoothly without any issues.
But this ti, it had run into a very strange Gary—a person who died, ca back to life, died again, revived again… a walking, breathing, resurrecting contradiction. In short, a massive bug in himself.
The two-minute “spinning” of the SMS was actually the curse system internally wrestling with conflicting logic, performing a kind of left-hand-versus-right-hand struggle between rule branches. Judging purely from the text, condition ① was clearly more objective and more authoritative, so after a period of internal conflict, the system ultimately selected condition ①, and Gary No. 2 successfully received the ssage.
At first glance, the impact of this BUG didn’t seem significant.
But then the mold appearing on the Book of Death made things unmistakably clear to both of them—no, it was far from insignificant.
It was enormous.
So enormous that the color of the mold had noticeably faded compared to before, and even its spread had slowed down.
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