Chapter 94 Planning: [7W Nutrient Solution Bonus Chapter]

Chapter 94 Planning: "7W Nutrient Solution Bonus Update"

Even though Gary had been taken care of, Everly still didn't want to linger at Red Oak Camp.

This time, it was mostly because she felt guilty.

As the saying goes, "Torch a mountain, and you'll rot in jail." Summer was right around the corner, the air in the woods was dry, and thanks to that rocket launcher from earlier, the red oak forest on the hillside was still burning—who knew when it'd finally burn itself out.

Even though Everly hadn't meant to start the wildfire, she wouldn't bet on what a judge would think. America came down hard on setting fires in the woods—if she got convicted, she'd be looking at jail time and some serious fines.

So, sorry Gary, but she was pinning this one on him.

Rocket launcher? Shotgun? Glock? All of 'em were weapons that psycho murderer had gotten his hands on from God knows where! Old John and Everly were just passersby who got a call from Misha and came to pick up a friend. They didn't know a thing.

—You ask where those weapons are now?

Well, they sank into the lake with the murderer, of course—gone, no trace!

After rounding up all the survivors, getting their stories straight, and clearing herself and Old John of any suspicion, Everly and Old John cleaned up the leftover rocket launcher tubes and hightailed it out of there with Misha.

The others wanted to leave too, but they had to stay and cover for Everly and the rest. After watching Everly unload a shotgun into the killer, they were all a little scared of this ruthless chick and didn't dare cross her.

So Everly and Old John made their getaway from Red Oak Camp with Misha in tow.

On the road, as the emotional rollercoaster of the whole thing started to settle down, Misha's head gradually cooled off, and she finally had the headspace to think through the whole thing.

"Everly, how exactly did you figure out that Andy was the murderer in disguise?" She mulled it over and over, then finally asked the question she was dying to know.

With her best friend, Everly naturally held nothing back. She raised three fingers: "Three reasons."

"What are they?"

"First, the mask. In the visions I saw, the murderer wasn't wearing a white porcelain mask—my description was off. Yet when the murderer appeared, he was wearing a mask matching that description, which meant he might've been hiding among us." To explain her freaky premonitions, Everly used the excuse that she could see flashes of danger.

"Second?"

"The second thing was that Andy usually came off as wishy-washy and low-key around us. But after we left, he was the first to speak up, telling Benjamin that the right type of fuse could be found in a nearby house—which was totally out of line with how he'd acted before. Super suspicious."

"If it was just those two things, I still couldn't be sure. What really made me sure about Gary was this." Everly opened her hand and showed Misha a small ID photo.

When she was putting the fuse in Andy's car, Everly accidentally knocked over a little ornament on the dashboard. The base was magnetic, and when it hit the ground, it popped open, and a dozen blue-background ID photos spilled out.

The guy in the photos was a young man with short reddish-brown hair and a face full of freckles. Aside from being around the same age, he looked nothing like Andy.

"Seeing that photo, I started getting suspicious. Later, when I looked closer, I found cigarettes in the door pocket. There were cigarette burn holes in the seats, and I found ash and a few reddish-brown hairs in the cracks. But from what I remembered, Andy was a super clean guy—when I got close to him, I never smelled smoke on him."

"For a guy, having cigarette ash and another dude's hair and photos in his car was already weird—I mean, he didn't seem gay by any stretch... Anyway, putting it all together, I figured the Andy we saw wasn't the real Andy—it was the murderer in disguise."

"I see!" Misha suddenly understood.

There was actually another reason: "Gary was really good-looking." With a face like his, in a movie, he could never be just some background character. But as the protagonist, he seemed too impulsive, and his logic didn't quite add up—so that left him as the villain.

And that guess turned out to be right... But that reason touched on the truth of the world, so she couldn't tell anyone.

The Jeep drove on for almost another day. Luckily, this time there were three people to take turns driving instead of two, and the interior was roomy enough that sitting for long stretches wasn't too bad.

Late at night, they pulled up in front of a house in Lemort Town. After watching Misha go inside, the Jeep turned around and headed to a quiet gas station.

It wasn't until she was lying in her own familiar bed that Everly finally relaxed.

The next day, she and Old John got to sleep in for once.

After waking up, Everly started figuring out how to deal with the leftover problem.

What Gary said before he sank into the water kept bugging her, and according to the movies, there was a good chance he'd eventually break free and crawl out of Emerald Lake. If that happened and Gary came after her for revenge, wouldn't that be a huge pain?

If only there was a way to break his immortality.

The scientific side couldn't accomplish that—Everly knew without even trying. In the *Bloody Camp* film series, the victims had already tried every method imaginable. In one movie, people even shoved Gary into a furnace and melted him into ash, but the moment they turned around, Gary crawled right back out of the furnace, lively as ever—completely unkillable.

But what if she brought in the supernatural side? What would happen then?

So Everly called Rebecca and asked her to post in the Exorcist group chat, inquiring whether anyone knew how to kill an unkillable person.

Unfortunately, the group that had always worked like an extension of her own arm proved less useful this time. After hearing Rebecca's description, the exorcists in the group had two main reactions: some believed there was no such thing as an immortal body, unless it was a demigod with divine blood, or something on the level of a mythological being like Lamia; others said nothing in the group but privately spammed Rebecca with messages, trying to get the exact location of the "immortal" or buy a vial of his blood.

"Then I asked in the group again—if the target was a demigod with divine blood, how would you kill him? Everyone in the group thought I was crazy. They told me that unless the deity in question had already fallen, I should never entertain such a dangerous idea, unless I wanted to incur that deity's wrath. As for those who privately messaged me asking for the location, I blocked them all, because it was obvious they had ill intentions." Rebecca added.

"..." So that meant Gary really was a child of a god?

Everly was first shocked, then deeply troubled.

Rebecca's meaning was clear: it was possible to kill Gary through non-physical means, but doing so would invite retaliation from his father—some obscure eldritch god—so it wasn't recommended.

Everly was absolutely furious. But what could she do about it? Having a "god" above you just meant you were a cut above the rest.

She could only hope Gary would stay put in his refrigerator and not go wandering around.

...

The rest of the summer vacation passed very peacefully.

The survivors left at Red Oak Camp were loyal to their word—or perhaps they were simply afraid of being settled up with later by Everly. Either way, they kept their stories straight and answered police questions exactly as Everly had instructed before leaving.

Although the Visga police vaguely sensed something was off, the forensic results showed that there had indeed been a superhumanly strong murderer who had killed over a dozen people around Mirror Lake. Honestly, even the police didn't want to deal with such a troublesome entity. Since the students all said the murderer had been dealt with, they might as well close the case.

And so, thanks to the combined efforts of victims and police, the massacre around Mirror Lake ended up as an inconspicuous little blurb in the local newspaper's social news section.

Misha had also been thoroughly shaken by the camping trip. For the rest of the summer, whenever other friends invited her on trips or camping outings, she flat-out refused them all. Every spare moment, she'd drive her parents' old clunker to the gas station to find Everly, reading, studying, or working out together—practically turning herself into a second Everly.

New Osebukh State University started on August 25th. By mid-August, Everly began planning her route to the university in advance.

Dwight State was in the southwestern United States, while New Osebukh State was in the northeastern corner—about 3,300 kilometers apart in a straight line, with vast stretches of uninhabited land in between.

With such a distance and unfamiliar territory, driving herself was immediately ruled out. After all, road-trip themes were a perennial staple of American horror films, and Everly had no intention of letting her beloved car get caught up in endless chases and ambushes.

She planned to have her fully modified Grand Cherokee shipped directly to New Osebukh State via freight. As for herself, taking public transportation to the university was definitely the safer bet.

Though American public transit could still be dangerous—18 years ago, for instance, Old John had taken her on a plane and they'd nearly been swept into a cult's suicide sacrifice. But that was a low-probability event—at least far lower than the odds of running into trouble on a road trip.

America had 50 states, and naturally not all of them had direct flights between each other. Dwight State, where Everly lived, had three airports, the busiest being Senk International Airport in the state capital, Senk City. From there, to reach New Osebukh State where the university was located, there were three routes, none of them direct—all requiring a layover at a transfer point.

The first was Senk → Geja → Konkad (capital of New Osebukh State), with a 24-hour layover.

The second was Senk → Jilosha → Konkad, with a 36-hour layover. Also, since Jilosha was in Yanifley State to the west of Dwight, this route actually took a detour, requiring more time in the air.

The third was Senk → Ladyard → Konkad, with a 40-hour layover. Ladyard was in the southeastern corner of the country, so this route essentially traced a right angle around the southern and eastern parts of America—also somewhat roundabout.

All three routes required a 1–2 day stay in the transfer city. For safety's sake, before booking tickets, Everly opened her computer and searched for information on those three cities and their surrounding areas.

Gega City is located in the heartland of America. As soon as the search bar registered the city's name, a flood of suggested search terms popped up beneath it—a quick glance showed none of them were anything good.

Sure enough, after hitting Enter, Everly immediately found a string of disasters connected to the place:

It turned out that not long ago, Gega City had suddenly been hit by one calamity after another. First, the Gary River flowing through it turned into a river of blood overnight, with all the fish and shrimp rotting and reeking. Then, a freak rain of frogs poured down from the sky over the whole city. After that, flies, lice, and locusts began plaguing the land, hail pelted down, and sores erupted on both people and livestock... One disaster after another descended upon the region, leaving the locals frantic and at their wits' end.

But that wasn't even the scariest part. A theologian posted online that the disasters currently hitting Gega City perfectly matched the first eight of the Ten Plagues that God inflicted on Egypt through Moses in Exodus—the famous "Biblical Ten Plagues."

The theologian argued that some evil force must have ticked off God, bringing down such harsh punishment, and he urged the local church to immediately seek help from higher-ups, to nip the situation in the bud before the remaining two plagues struck!

"..."

Good grief, even the legendary Biblical Ten Plagues had shown up. Americans really were living up to their necks in trouble.

Everly silently scratched off the first route and moved on to the second one.

Compared to Gega City's apocalyptic mess, Gilossa City was far more peaceful. No supernatural incidents had occurred there recently, and serial killers had been laying low, staying quiet.

However, the dockworkers in Gilossa had recently walked off the job.

The government had tried to step in and mediate between labor and management, but it wasn't working out. As time dragged on, the striking workers lost their livelihoods and got together on their own, flooding the streets in big protests and marches. Among them were opportunists who took advantage of the chaos to break into shops along the way, engaging in free-for-all looting and smashing things up...

By yesterday, the situation had escalated to the point where Gilossa dockworkers and police were hurling homemade Molotov cocktails and tear gas canisters at each other from behind riot shields, like monkeys flinging poop.

"..."

Everly silently scratched off the second route too.

Her eyes turned to the last hope: Radyard City. Located in Yabazi State, it was a relatively low-key small city. Due to geographic limitations, the local economy had never managed to take off. To address this, three years ago, the local government invested heavily in building a sprawling airport—Jack-Field Airport—hoping that convenient transportation would kick-start the local economy.

This was also why Radyard, an out-of-the-way small town, could serve as a transfer point.

Radyard City wasn't well-known, so there wasn't much news about it. All Everly could find were praises for the airport's convenience or fluff pieces promoting local tourism—nothing hinted at any major incidents recently.

After weighing her options, Everly decided to go with the third route.