Chapter 53 Butterfly: It Spreads Like a Virus

Chapter 53 Butterfly: It Spreads Like a Virus

School breaks in America are usually only four or five minutes long—just enough time to switch classrooms. If a student needs to use the restroom during class, they can simply stand up and quietly slip out through the back door. So when the dean spotted Everly wandering the halls, he didn't chew her out.

What puzzled him was how dead quiet the school building had suddenly gotten.

On his rounds, except for a few classrooms doing interactive games, every other room—teachers and students alike—had gone dead silent. Everyone sat with their heads down, not moving a muscle, lost in something. The only sound echoing through the halls was the faint, hollow laughter drifting out of the interactive classrooms.

Everly's appearance gave Mr. Miller someone to question. He called out to stop her and asked what everyone was up to.

"Mr. Miller, they're all watching a video. There's something weird about it—after watching it, everyone gets hypnotized, forgetting they're in class, just replaying it over and over... I got scared and left the classroom," Everly replied.

Mr. Miller was a pretty old-school guy, and the moment he heard that, he blew his top: "What?! It's class time! The students I get, but the teachers are joining in on this nonsense too? No, I need to put a stop to this!"

Everly hadn't expected this little old guy to be so bold. She quickly tried to talk him out of it: "Mr. Miller, don't go over there. I think something's off. We should call the Exorcist to handle this!"

"Exorcist? Come on, Miss Everly. I thought you were a hardcore materialist—don't tell me you've gone superstitious like those parents. Witches, curses—it's all just coincidence. Our school just had a contagious disease outbreak back then..." Mr. Miller shot down Everly's suggestion, muttering about old times as he sidestepped her and marched over to a nearby classroom door.

Everly couldn't stop him and didn't dare follow. She just stood there, watching helplessly as he pushed open the door, walked down the aisle, marched to the podium, and rapped his knuckles hard on the desk.

But despite his dramatic entrance and all the noise he made, not a single teacher or student in the room looked up. They remained fixated on their phones, completely motionless.

"Ms. Laura, please raise your head."

Miller first turned his anger on the teacher, Laura.

Laura stared blankly at her phone, not moving an inch, like she hadn't heard Miller at all.

"Ms. Laura! It's not break time! You should be teaching your students, not glued to some pointless video like an internet addict!" Miller raised his voice and tried again.

Laura still didn't react. If her eyes weren't still blinking, Everly would've thought the figure at the podium was a way-too-realistic wax statue.

Miller was the only one who hadn't noticed how weird this was. His chest was heaving, his gaunt face flushed red with rage. After shouting "Ms. Laura!" again, he grabbed a history textbook and slapped it down over her phone.

That finally did the trick. The second the screen was covered, as if waking from a long dream, Ms. Laura jolted. The stiff, wooden look on her face suddenly came back to life.

She blinked, looked at the history textbook in confusion, then followed the hand holding it up to Mr. Miller. Confused, she asked, "Mr. Miller, what's going on? We're still in class—why are you here?"

"Ms. Laura! How dare you ask that! Have you been watching videos till you've lost your mind?! You were glued to your phone, completely forgetting to teach! I came in to remind you, and this is the attitude I get?!" Miller roared, not caring about his image, looking like he was about to explode.

"Video?" As if the word had triggered a memory, Ms. Laura's expression froze for a second, and tears welled up in her dark brown eyes. "...Right, the video! Seradia... Seradia is dead... ahh, Seradia... I need to—hurry, hurry and watch the video..."

As she spoke, she lowered her head and started yanking at the history textbook, trying to move it so she could keep watching the video underneath. To Everly, this was a clear sign of "possession," but Miller just thought Laura was deliberately humiliating him.

He shouted "Snap out of it!" and slammed his hand on the podium with a thunderous "BANG!"

The sound was like a thunderclap, echoing through the big classroom and shattering the silence. At the desks, the students with bowed heads all flinched in unison, raising their heads in perfect sync, eyes full of confusion as they looked toward the noise.

"Mr. Miller? Why did he suddenly barge into our classroom..."

"Ms. Laura is crying—did the old man Miller scold her?"

Once they looked away from the video, most students seemed to have no memory of what just happened. They pointed at the two teachers on the podium, who had this weird tense vibe, whispering and chattering excitedly.

Only a few stood out in the crowd. While everyone else was waiting for the teachers to duke it out like a good show, these few seemed completely out of it. Their faces were grief-stricken, their eyes vacant, tears streaming down as they muttered Seradia's name over and over.

As they muttered, their heads slowly drooped back down, and they went back to watching the video with sad, obsessive focus.

"Seradia?... Yes, Seradia is dead..."

"The video, the video, where's the video... I need to watch..."

"I want to watch, I want to watch, I want to watch..."

The words "Seradia" and "video" were like some kind of trigger—once mentioned, anyone who'd seen the video would immediately get the urge to watch it again. Starting with those tearful, muttering students, the people around them got affected too, one by one lowering their heads to get lost in the videos on their phones.

This urge quickly spread through the whole classroom. Even Mr. Miller on the podium, after accidentally catching a glimpse of the phone screen under the textbook, zoned out.

Before long, the whole classroom went back to that eerie silence, with only the faint "shhh-shhh" static of the videos echoing around, making everyone uneasy.

What the hell—it's spreading like a virus...

Everly watched from outside, her heart racing.

She hadn't watched enough movies in her past life—she'd never seen a plot where a video brainwashes people like this. Thinking back, this contamination pattern was kind of similar to the "Megan Clinic" incident when she was ten. Both involved "anomalies" spreading through video, and both caused brainwashing-like symptoms after watching. She wondered if there was a connection...

So far, Everly hadn't seen the video herself, so she couldn't draw any conclusions—and of course, she had no intention of watching it. No matter how curious she was, she wouldn't. Who knows if watching it would connect her to some evil god again? She'd already learned that lesson the hard way!

But how was she supposed to deal with the contamination from this video? The students seemed fine for now, just heavily addicted to watching. But if they kept watching, who knew what could happen—maybe they'd suddenly snap and grab a knife if someone took their phone, or become followers of some twisted deity and start causing chaos...

Just as Everly was worrying about her theories, a sudden "whoosh" of noise erupted. The silent school building seemed to wake up all at once, with all kinds of racket coming from every direction.

"What's wrong with me? Why was I staring at my phone?"

"'This video has been deleted'?... Ah, right—Seradia just posted a farewell video. She killed herself."

"...Seradia, Seradia!"

"I want to watch the video, I want to watch, I want to watch, I want to watch..."

...

Everly stood there bewildered in the school building, which had suddenly gotten as noisy as a marketplace. For a split second, she almost thought she'd been affected and was hallucinating. Why else would everyone who'd been hunched over their phones suddenly come back to life and start chattering away?

She took a deep breath, forced herself to calm down, and listened to the students' conversations. That's when she learned that just moments ago, the Twitter page had auto-refreshed, and Seradia's video had been urgently taken down, no longer viewable.

That made sense. After all, Twitter was a global social entertainment platform. If the video was really problematic, the impact wouldn't be limited to just tiny Fino Middle School. Once enough people showed signs of being affected, someone would step in—no need for Everly to worry.

With that thought, Everly let out a long sigh of relief and walked back to her classroom amid the lively, human noise.

Even though the video had already been taken down, the classroom was still in an uproar, far from getting back to normal. Teachers included, no one had any mind for lessons. Students either huddled together whispering about the video's contents, or speculated back and forth about the reasons behind Seradia's suicide. A few students who had been more deeply affected by the video ignored everyone around them, faces streaked with tears, frantically tapping the "refresh" button on their phones, desperately trying to watch the blocked video one more time...

It was a struggle to make it through the morning classes. As students were released, outside information finally trickled into the semi-isolated middle school, albeit with a slight delay.

Seradia was a world-famous singer. The impact of her video extended far beyond a single middle school.

At 10:06 AM on May 23, 20X0, the video was officially released. At 10:19 AM, it was taken down. During those thirteen minutes, across all of America—or rather, everywhere Twitter reached—anyone who had watched the video was, without exception, just like Everly's classmates: mesmerized by the video, forgetting everything else, trapped in an endless loop of viewing. Only covering the screen or making a loud noise could break the trance. But the moment someone mentioned "Seradia" or "video," people would be seized by an overwhelming urge to watch again, falling back into the loop...

According to statistics, during those thirteen minutes, thousands of car accidents of varying severity occurred across America, resulting in over a thousand deaths. Industrial accidents caused by watching the video were even more numerous. At a local lumber mill in Mikanoh, someone had glanced at a coworker's phone during a break, fallen into an unconscious state, and stuck their hand into a running wood chipper.

In Hedhwa State, a plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing the entire crew and 98 passengers. Although the airline had not yet released the official accident investigation report, rumors suggested the cause was the pilot having opened and watched Seradia's Twitter video before takeoff...

#OfficialBanOnSeradiaVideo, #XXStateChainReactionCrashKills17, #PassengerPlaneCrashes—CauseSuspectedToBeVideoViewing...

Various news stories were pushed to the top of the headlines, but even with so many lives lost, none of them came close to half the heat of the number one trending topic: "#SeradiaDeath."

According to students who had watched the video, it was a suicide video.

Amid the faint, almost inaudible "shhh-shhh" static, Seradia, dressed in a pure white robe, smiled like a bird and leaped gracefully from the rooftop. The video was shot from a top-down perspective, capturing the entire process from her stepping onto the rooftop to her hitting the ground. The footage wasn't very clear—filled with the white snow and grain typical of old videos from the last century, with a few seconds of white screen—but it was filmed beautifully.

After a brief moment of falling through the air, the camera suddenly zoomed in, freezing on Seradia's body.

Despite dying from a fall, her death was not the least bit gruesome.

Dressed in white, the young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes lay on her back, eyes open, smiling, amidst a splash of blood. Vivid red blood flowed from beneath her, creeping in thin threads up the hem of her robe. The thick plasma formed two wing-shaped shadows on the ground—at first glance, it looked like a blood-winged butterfly spreading its wings to take flight.

The video ended with a screen filled with repeating numbers. 0101010101……