At Yomi Yamaboku Middle School, Shizuku met the client, who was the principal of this middle school. However, he seemed unwilling to talk more about the matter, so he directly referred Shizuku to a librarian, Chihiki Tatsuji, and listened to the principal's introduction.

, this was the instructor of class three in the third year when that incident happened.

But now he is no longer a teacher, but has chosen to be a librarian.

Chihiki Tatsuji is about forty or fifty years old, but he looks quite haggard and has white hair. He looks similar to an old man in his sixties or seventies.

"Are you here to investigate the curse?"

Looking at Shizuku in front of him, Chihiki Tatsuji did not hide his inner doubts, but Shizuku didn't care and just smiled slightly.

"Yes, I am the exorcist who was entrusted to handle this matter, so can we skip this step and exchange some more useful information?"

"……………certainly."

Facing Shizuku's question, Chihiki Tatsuji nodded, then sat down on the chair and stared at her.

"What do you want to ask?"

"I already know most of the situation from the information the principal sent me, but I still want to ask, when you knew that the target of the curse was the third class of the third grade, did you take any other measures? For example

Only two classes are left for the third grade? Although it will be more crowded if students from four classes are placed in two classes, but this can also prevent the curse."

"We have indeed considered it."

Qian Yechenzhi gave a bitter smile.

"But it didn't work. On the contrary, the curse only expanded... The number of people who died that year was the largest, and all the third-graders in the entire school died accidentally. In the end, we had to compromise and reorganize Class Three of Three Years.

Put it back... At least this way, the curse can be limited to a certain range."

"I see."

Hearing this, Shizuku nodded, and then she took out the list.

"Mr. Qianye, when I saw this list, I discovered a problem. Ten years ago, the pattern of one death per month was broken for a period of time. What is going on?"

"Ah...that was someone in the class who thought of a way."

"Method?"

"Yes, according to the curse, there is an extra student in Class Three in the third year. If this is the case, then as long as one student is selected and treated as if he does not exist, the extra student can disappear again...

The original number of students was maintained in three classes for three years. I have to admit that this method is indeed very effective. As you can see, there were no further deaths in the first semester."

"But in the second semester, things changed?"

"Ahhh..."

Qianye Chenji nodded.

"Because the student couldn't stand it anymore. He couldn't stand others treating him like he didn't exist, so he shouted, 'I'm right here, take a good look at me'... Then, bad luck struck again."

"...In other words, if the student chosen as the non-existent person does not cooperate, then it will be of no use even if everyone ignores him?"

"maybe."

Chiyuki Tatsuji sighed.

"I admit that this is unfair to the child himself, but there is no way. After that, basically every three years and three classes will choose this method to avoid bad luck. Of course, the truly successful ones

Not many..."

Saying this, Chihiki Tatsuji stared at Shizuku curiously, sizing her up.

"Speaking of Kasugano-kun, people think this is the work of evil spirits or a curse. What do you think?"

"I don't think it's related to either."

Shizuku shook her head.

"I have already experienced that there are no evil spirits in the school. Curses need to have a subject. That student back then... must have been very popular in your class. He would curse this class, or curse those students.

?"

"...I don't think so."

"so………"

After saying this, Shizuku sighed, raised her head and looked out the window at the gloomy sky.

"Human willpower...can't be underestimated. I hope it's not what I thought, otherwise things will be really troublesome."

To be honest, after coming to Yamiyama and seeing everything here with her own eyes, Shizuku had a bad idea.

That is - this is not caused by a curse, nor is it some ghost's revenge, but... there is a bug.

Yes, this was what she was most worried about.

After the chat with Chihiki Tatsuji just now, she found that her worries were probably closer to the truth.

As we all know, the world needs a certain order to function.

Birth, old age, sickness and death, the seasons change, flowers bloom and fall.

These are all normal rules.

However, once this is violated, problems can easily arise.

Take the previous story as an example.

Under normal circumstances, when a popular student dies, everyone will feel sad about it. It is not unusual to be sad. However, the biggest problem is that they actually imagined that the other person was still alive, and they completely disguised it. The fact is

Shang Shizuku suspected that those students at that time might have pretended to believe it—this kind of group hypnosis phenomenon is actually not uncommon.

But this is troublesome.

This is like a system self-check, and then scanning the area. When the folder of Class Three of Three Years was scanned, the system suddenly discovered in surprise - "Hey? Shouldn't the number in this file be n-1? Why is it still there?

Is it n?”

Then it checks again... Huh? Wasn't this saKI.DLL deleted by itself? Why does it still exist as a hidden file?

This is wrong!

So when the next round of self-inspection starts, the system starts to automatically search and delete files. If the value of n in the third class of three years remains unchanged, then it is a normal value. But once there is one more person in the third class of three years, the value

becomes "n+1", then the system will automatically think that the saKI.DLL was not deleted, so it will actively start to look through the folders to find the virus-infected DLL file to delete.

What should I do if I can't find it?

The file name is wrong, but the folder value is also wrong, so... delete them one by one.

That mysterious saKI.DLL is definitely disguised as some other file, just pull it out one by one and delete it to find out!

This is the truth about the deaths in three shifts every month for three years.

Because the Tiandao system cannot determine what file the mysterious saKI.DLL is disguised as, it may be a DLL, it may be Lag or TxT, it may even be exe or InI, so it will randomly delete files, including students, teachers and

Parents' "files" to find the mysterious saKI.DLL that does not exist in the first place.

The reason why Shizuku speculated that there was a problem with the system of Heaven's Law itself was because Chihiki Tatsuji told her that when the non-existent deceased disappeared in the second year, the memory of her would also disappear from the minds of other students.

They will not remember this person at all, and all records about her, including written records and photos, will be tampered with.

This involves the law of cause and effect at the root of the world. Ordinary evil spirits and monsters absolutely do not have this ability.

After chatting and investigating with Chihiki Tatsuji, Shizuku had almost guessed the entire incident.

First of all, the system deleted the mystery saKI.DLL in the folder of class three for three years according to the "Book of Life and Death" program. This is a routine operation of the system self-test.

But unexpectedly, everyone in class three of the third year was unwilling to accept this fact, so they actually created a mystery saKI.DLL.

Of course, they are just mortals, and naturally they cannot pull out the DLL file that Tiandao put into the recycle bin. So they just pretended to have such a file, which caused an abnormality in the file value of Class Three, Three Years, from the original "n

-1" is fixed on "n".

But in the next year, a problem arose. Due to the influence of this obsession, there was an extra person who did not exist in the folder of the third class of the third year with a value fixed at n, which changed from n to n+1.

This immediately attracted the attention of the Tiandao program, because the folder value of the three-year class three folder was wrong and needed to be cleaned up, and the culprit was naturally the mysterious saKI.DLL that should have been deleted by itself. So in order to correct the error, the Tiandao system began to kill special characters.

Kill - It's no surprise that Kaspersky doesn't care if your system crashes when it kills viruses.

This forms an endless loop. The value of the folder of Class Three in Three Years is wrong. Tiandao wants to kill the root cause, but in fact the root cause has been deleted...

If this is really a system, it would be easier to just format and reinstall it.

But alas, this is not the case.

This is the part that makes Shizuku scratch her head the most.

If the heaven in this world has self-awareness like the Xingyue world, then she can call Alaya and Gaia out and tell them that the program has gone wrong and reset it. But the problem is that the heaven in most worlds does not

Self-aware, they are like a system program that runs automatically. In this case, no one can find it.

It's even more difficult to solve it. You can't reinstall the entire system just because the error message is as small as it can be and doesn't affect your daily use.

To put it here would be to destroy the world and recreate it.

Just for this three-year, three-year class, someone dies every month?

This commission is really tricky.

Shizuku thought so, but when she walked into the hospital, she became even more depressed.
To be continued...