I spent more than two hours just scrolling through this person's social media profile.
I came back to myself when Mom called from outside, telling me to come eat.
During dinner, I was somewhat distracted. It wasn't until I heard the evening news report a suicide, with the anchor introducing this year's and previous years' suicide statistics and citing numerous authoritative global studies, that I shifted my gaze to the charts on the television.
Among those staggering numbers, surely quite a few weren't suicides at all, but cases where ghosts had killed people and made it look like suicide.
After dinner, I went back to browsing social media and came across news about suicide rates. There was an international suicide prevention education week coming up next month, so the news was serving as a warm-up for the event. Some organizations had already started related activities.
Some of the comments beneath those stories struck a discordant note.
I knew that ghosts had faked suicides among the cases in those statistics. And I knew that plenty of other people knew it too.
Since the harm caused by the last global Truth or Dare, the world had deteriorated at an accelerating pace. The underworld had vanished, and ghosts had returned to the human world. The number of people who had come into contact with such things had risen sharply.
Ghosts and monsters, once mentioned only in small circles, and hauntings or encounters with ghosts, once dismissed as jokes, were now regarded by many as real phenomena—as facts science couldn't yet explain.
As a result, no topic was entirely free of comments like these.
And when it came to death, there were even more of them.
Following those comments and reposts, I checked the posters' social media profiles and discovered a new subculture.
These