Chapter 3

Immediately, I dug out my high school yearbook, found Simon's contact information, and dialed his number with trembling hands. The phone rang for a long time before someone finally picked up.

A hoarse, tired voice came from the other end. "Hello? Who's this?"

"Hey, is this Simon Holt? I'm Dorian Newman. We went to the same high school," I said as calmly as I could.

"Dorian?" He paused for a moment, then continued, "Oh… Yeah, I vaguely remember you. What do you need?"

I took a deep breath and got straight to the point.

"I want to ask you something. Did something happen to your body over the summer? Like, suddenly feeling exhausted all the time for no reason and… experiencing major changes in your appearance?"

The line instantly fell into dead silence. A full 30 seconds passed before Simon finally spoke again. This time, his voice carried a faint tremor. "H-How did you know that?"

My heart sank. It was just as I thought.

"Because I'm going through the exact thing right now."

I told him everything, including Fletcher's shocking transformation and the bizarre physical collapse happening to me. The longer I spoke, the more uneven the breathing on the other end of the call.

When I finished, Simon was already choking back tears. "It was him! It had to be him!"

He sounded completely broken down. "After the SATs, he skipped our class graduation party—said he was going traveling. Since then, something started going wrong with me!

"I was exhausted every single day. No matter how long I slept, I still felt dead tired. I barely ate anything, but I kept gaining weight like crazy!

"My parents took me to doctor after doctor, but they all said nothing was wrong with me. They said I was just too lazy to exercise! My life… My whole damn life was ruined!"

So, I wasn't the first victim.

Fletcher had started using that wicked ability back during the summer break after our high school graduation. He stole Simon's looks and vitality, then dumped his own mediocrity and exhaustion onto him, completing his first transformation.

Now, he was doing the exact thing to me, draining my life force to maintain his flawless campus-heartthrob image.

After the call ended, it felt like all the blood in my body had turned cold. This was a complete conspiracy, a vicious curse built on feeding off others' lives to elevate himself!

Over the next two days, my condition took a terrifying turn for the worse. The exhaustion became heavier. At one point, I even started having intermittent breathing difficulty and coughing up blood nonstop.

Mom and Dad panicked and rushed me to the best hospital in the city overnight. However, every single test came back stating I was in perfect health.

The doctors looked at me with helplessness and suspicion in their eyes, as if questioning whether I had some kind of psychological problem.

Mom and Dad were drenched in sweat from anxiety, practically begging the doctors to think of another solution.

I lay in the hospital bed, too wiped out to even lift a finger. I could vividly feel my life force draining away from my body at an alarming speed.

Meanwhile, my phone was flooded with updates from the orientation. Fletcher had already become a well-known legend of the entire orientation.

In another week, the orientation closing ceremony would begin, featuring the campus-wide loaded cross-country race. As the student representative, Fletcher would once again run on behalf of the entire college.

That was the event after which my body completely burned out in my previous life.

Time was running out. If I couldn't find the critical piece before then, the very source of the curse, I would die all over again.

Seeing how weak I had become, Mom and Dad secretly wiped away tears behind my back and discussed taking me home from the hospital so I could recover quietly.

Just as a nurse was wheeling me out of the ward in a wheelchair, we passed by an operating room next door.

Outside the doors, a middle-aged woman stood there with her hands clasped together, eyes tightly shut, murmuring prayers under her breath with absolute devotion.

She was praying for a family member in surgery.

At that moment, it felt like a lightning bolt split straight through the chaos in my mind. I finally understood how Fletcher siphoned my life force and transferred his exhaustion onto me.