Chapter 207: Chain Letter (2)

Because of Jack’s screams and cries before his death, his wife, Parvati, was alerted.

Following the sound, she arrived at the door of her husband’s workshop and pounded on it, demanding to know what had happened, but no one answered.

When she finally found the key and opened the door, she saw her husband’s corpse lying in a pool of blood.

His head had been split open by the cutting machine. The rapidly spinning grinding wheel kept grinding through his skull, spraying bits of flesh and gore all over the room. The thick stench of blood mixed with the smell of machine oil hit Parvati head-on, making her nearly vomit.

Even though she knew her husband was beyond saving, she still clung to a faint sliver of hope and called for an ambulance and the police.

Afterward, wanting to figure out what had happened before the police arrived, Parvati pulled up the security footage from before the accident. While she was watching it, Old John called.

“…That’s everything I know. I’ve already sent you the surveillance footage through the computer as well. So, Mr. John, can you tell me what exactly happened? Jack was always an extremely cautious person. Dying so suddenly because of a coincidence like this—it just doesn’t feel right!”

It was no wonder Parvati was suspicious. The accident was simply too coincidental.

Whether it was the spark that perfectly avoided Jack’s hair and eyeglass lenses to slip through the gap into his eye, or the fixing screw that suddenly cracked apart, every detail carried a chilling sense of unnatural coincidence. It was as if, somewhere unseen, some force had influenced the magnetic field around Jack, carefully calculating every step and playfully manipulating events to steer things toward the outcome it desired.

Could that be the “guidance of the messenger of death” mentioned in the cursed chain letter?

Old John’s gaze lingered for a moment on the timestamp in the upper-left corner of the surveillance footage before he replied, “Before I reveal the answer, ma’am, I’d like you to check your husband’s phone inbox and see whether he received a text message three days ago cursing someone to death.”

“A text message cursing someone to death? What kind? One of those messages that says if you don’t forward it, you’ll die within three days?”

“You found it, ma’am?”

“No… Actually, not long ago, for some reason, my phone received a message like that. It said a messenger of death would come for me within three days and told me to forward the message.” Parvati’s voice carried doubt and uncertainty, along with a deeply hidden fear. “Mr. John, is this the kind of message you meant?”

Old John exchanged a glance with Everly. He switched his phone screen to the messaging interface, reread the message he had received, and then asked Parvati whether the contents matched hers.

Parvati’s voice grew even tenser. “Yes, exactly the same… And just now, I checked my phone. This message was sent to me by Jack at 4:10 p.m. today, but… but…”

But according to the surveillance footage, Jack had already died at 4:09 p.m.

Modern surveillance systems generally synchronized their time automatically, and the video Parvati had sent clearly displayed a timestamp in the upper-left corner. Assuming the time was accurate, it meant Parvati’s phone had received a cursed text message from Jack after his death.

Old John glanced at his own phone. The message he received in the underground shelter had also arrived at 4:10 p.m., which all but confirmed that this was a “message sent after death.”

But he did not point it out directly. Instead, he tried to reassure Parvati. After all, the person on the other end of the phone was just an ordinary woman. If she became too terrified and stopped cooperating, it would take Everly and Old John far more effort than expected to uncover the truth behind the cursed chain letter.

“Ma’am, I understand your panic. But in places with poor signal, text messages can sometimes be delayed. That alone doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Right now, what’s more important is uncovering the truth behind Jack’s death. This was absolutely not a simple accident. You can’t place your hopes on the police. When they see this footage, they’ll only conclude that Jack was unlucky and careless. But both of us know that Jack was not that kind of person…”

Old John’s deliberately calm and steady voice soothed the woman on the other end of the phone. At his request, Parvati put down her own phone, picked up her husband Jack’s phone instead, unlocked it, and opened his text messages.

Through the speaker, Everly and Old John heard a sharp gasp.

“What did you see?”

“At the very top of the screen, I found the sending records. Five messages were sent to five different people, including me. The contents were that cursed chain message, and the sending time was 4:10 p.m. today—after Jack collapsed… One of the recipients is named John Breton. Is that you, Mr. John?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Parvati reacted quickly. “You asked me to check the messages because there’s something wrong with them?”

“Yes. Although this may not be pleasant to hear, I have to say it—the cursed text message is very likely genuine. It really can kill people.”

“But—”

“Before arguing with me, you should check Jack’s inbox and see whether he received the same message three days ago.”

After Old John said this, Parvati obediently fell silent. Rustling sounds came from the other end of the phone, and before long, the woman’s trembling voice returned, thick with fear:

“You may be right… I found the message in Jack’s phone. He received it three days ago, at 4:09 p.m. on June 27. By the moment Jack died, exactly seventy-two hours had passed. Not one minute more, not one minute less.”

Yes, there was now no doubt that the cursed chain message was real. Everyone who received it would die exactly seventy-two hours later, and Jack’s death had already proven this rule.

Old John took a deep breath. “Mrs. Parvati, don’t panic. We still have three days to investigate all this… First, you need to find out who sent the message to your husband, and who that person received it from. We need to trace it back step by step until we find the source of the cursed message. If we can deal with the source, we may be able to escape this cursed fate.”

“O-Okay… I understand. The sender’s name is Connie Dofolo. I don’t know him, but I know who might. I’ll ask my husband’s friends and find out.”

“Good, ma’am. As soon as you learn anything, call us immediately. I used to be a detective with the Dwight State Police Department, so perhaps I can help you gather information.”

“Mm… I understand now. Mr. John, thank you.”

Suppressing her fear, Parvati thanked him and hung up.

“So? What do you think?” Old John looked toward Everly after the call ended.

“We’ve already figured out the effect of the cursed message. Whoever receives it dies seventy-two hours later through a series of coincidences. But there’s one thing I still don’t understand…”

What puzzled Everly was the latter half of the curse message—the clause related to forwarding it.

Judging from the timing, Jack’s messages had been sent automatically by his phone after his death. This suggested that Jack had probably dismissed the cursed chain message as a prank and never paid it any attention after receiving it. Naturally, he also never completed the “forward it to five people” requirement.

From this, one could infer that even if the recipient ignored the message and refused to spread it as instructed, the chain letter would still automatically forward itself to five other people in the recipient’s contact list after the recipient died.

In other words, the message seemed almost alive—it was capable of spreading itself.

If that was the case, then why did the cursed message still include the condition in its text that “the recipient must forward this message to five people within three days of receiving it”? Could there be a difference between forwarding it voluntarily and the message spreading on its own?

After listening to her, Old John thought for a moment before replying, “There definitely is a difference. If I forward it voluntarily, then I can control where those five messages go and make sure they’re sent to people who matter less to me. But if I don’t forward it, then after I die, there’s a chance the message will be sent to people I care about most—or maybe not just a ‘chance,’ but a certainty. After all, the curse message itself says that if the recipient refuses to forward it as instructed, the consequences will be something they do not wish to see.”

“So that’s why Mrs. Parvati received the text from her husband?”

“Most likely.”

“Then this curse is truly vicious.”

It was practically a massive social experiment.

If someone who received the message completely believed in the curse, then they would face two choices: uphold their kindness and sense of justice by refusing to spread the message, or protect the people they cared about by sending it to those they felt less attached to.

In the first case, those who clung to justice would, after their deaths, cause the people they loved most to suffer because of their righteous choice—those loved ones would receive the message and die horribly. In the second case, those who chose to forward the message in order to protect their loved ones might save the people they cared about, but they would also burden themselves with terrible guilt.

And if the recipient didn’t believe in the curse, the result would still be hellish. If they forwarded the cursed message as a joke, then considering that jokes and pranks are usually played on close friends or family, the people closest to them would most likely end up harmed. But if they ignored it like Jack had, they might instead cause the death of someone they loved…

In short, anyone who received this message would either face the torment of human morality or the cruel mockery of fate. No one could walk away untouched. No one could achieve a happy ending. It was vicious to the extreme.

“What do you think we should do about it?”

Everly had already been thinking about this question, so her answer came quickly.

“There are two ways we can investigate this. The first is to follow the chain of transmissions backward, tracing the cursed messages step by step until we find the source. The second is to search news outlets and the internet for reports related to cursed messages or large numbers of accidental deaths. But I think we should focus mainly on the first approach, because the curse’s spread is probably still in its early stages, meaning the transmission chain shouldn’t be very long yet.”

It was actually a very simple math problem.

Suppose the cursed chain message first appeared on the phone of a single host, A, and every time it spread, it automatically forwarded itself after the three-day deadline expired. Then during the first wave of spreading, the death toll would be 1 (A themself). In the second wave, it would become 1 + 5¹… and so on. By the nth wave, the number would be 1 + 5⁽ⁿ⁻¹⁾.

At first, the death toll might not seem especially alarming. But once n reached 6, the number would already climb to 3,126. And when n reached 7, the death toll would explode to a terrifying 15,626—well over ten thousand people.

The cursed message spread through phone contacts. Even if some contacts lived in different cities, considering modern social habits, along with the curse’s tendency to “prioritize the victim’s close friends and family” when auto-forwarding itself after three days, the people most likely to receive the message would still be those closest to the victim.

As a result, once the cursed chain message appeared in a city, the death toll would, within just a dozen or so days—roughly four to five transmission cycles—spread outward from that city in multiple clusters, showing a clear two-dimensional normal distribution pattern.

The population of the United States wasn’t especially dense, and some smaller places, like Lemot Town, had only a little over a thousand residents in total. Under those circumstances, by the time the curse reached the third generation of transmission—when twenty-six people had died—the townspeople and police would already start becoming suspicious. By the fourth wave, with 126 deaths, panic would spread further and the situation would rapidly worsen. The local police department would immediately realize something was terribly wrong, report it to higher authorities, and request assistance.

In a large city, because of the much bigger population base, the process might progress a bit more slowly, but at most it would only last until the fourth wave of spread. After all, this wasn’t wartime—if over a hundred people in a major city suddenly died in accidents at the exact same time, even an idiot would realize something was wrong.

And a death toll in the hundreds was already enough to attract the attention of the Special Affairs Investigation.

Yet up to this point, more than an hour had already passed since Old John received the chain message, and neither the SAI nor the police—or any other organization—had come knocking.

From this, Everly inferred that the cursed chain message had probably only spread through a few generations so far and had not yet drawn widespread attention.

If that was the case, then tracing the transmission chain backward would make finding the source relatively easy.

Old John nodded, agreeing with Everly’s reasoning. “That sounds about right. I’m getting old, and I’m not nearly as good with the internet as you young people are. You handle the investigation into media reports and online information. I still have connections inside the police department, so I’ll help Mrs. Parvati trace the transmission chain upward. How does that sound?”

“Understood.”

After discussing things for a while and deciding on their next course of action, the grandfather and granddaughter quickly finished dinner and each set off to work on their own tasks.