Read this if you don’t want to die this year

“Read this if you don’t want to die this year.”

The title caught Sam’s eye as he scrolled through his news feed on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Normally, he would have ignored such blatant clickbait, but something about those words felt different—urgent, almost like a warning.

Against his better judgment, he clicked the link. The page loaded slowly, revealing a stark white background with a single line of text in bold red letters: “Once you read this, there’s no turning back.”

Sam hesitated, his finger hovering over the back button. But curiosity got the better of him. He scrolled down.

The story began with an ancient legend from a forgotten village in Eastern Europe. It spoke of a cursed manuscript, known as the “Necro Nomini,” which detailed the names of those destined to die within the year. According to the legend, the manuscript was written by a mad monk who had discovered a way to see the threads of fate.

The curse, it was said, was simple: anyone who read the manuscript would see their own name written within its pages, followed by the exact date and cause of their death. The only way to avoid this fate was to find the manuscript, decipher its riddles, and destroy it before the foretold death could occur.

Sam’s heart pounded as he read on. The article detailed the last known whereabouts of the Necro Nomini—an abandoned library in a small, unmarked village on the edge of a dense forest in Romania.

Without realizing it, Sam had already started planning his trip. He had no family, no job to anchor him—just a deep, gnawing fear of the unknown. What if the manuscript was real? What if he was fated to die this year? The only way to know for sure was to find it.

A week later, Sam stood at the entrance of the decrepit library, its rotting wooden doors barely hanging on their hinges. The journey had been arduous, filled with obstacles that seemed almost designed to deter him. But he was here now, and there was no turning back.

Inside, the library was a maze of collapsing shelves and dust-covered tomes. Sam moved cautiously, guided by the eerie light filtering through broken windows. He felt an inexplicable pull toward the back of the library, where a hidden door led down to a secret basement.

The air grew colder as he descended the narrow stairs. At the bottom, he found a small room lit by a single flickering candle. In the center of the room, on a pedestal, lay the Necro Nomini.

With trembling hands, Sam opened the manuscript. The pages were filled with names, dates, and causes of death, all written in an elegant, flowing script. He flipped through the pages frantically until he found his own name. His breath caught in his throat as he read the words: “Samuel Evans—August 23rd, 2024—Heart failure.”

Sam’s mind raced. That was just two months away. He had to find a way to destroy the manuscript. The next page contained a series of cryptic symbols and riddles. As he deciphered them, he realized they formed a map leading to a hidden ritual site deep within the forest.

Time was running out. Sam followed the map, the forest growing denser and more foreboding with each step. Hours passed before he reached a clearing, where an ancient stone altar stood beneath the gnarled branches of an enormous tree.

The final riddle instructed him to place the manuscript on the altar and recite an incantation. As he spoke the words, the ground trembled, and the tree’s branches seemed to come alive, wrapping around the manuscript and pulling it into the earth.

A blinding light erupted from the altar, and Sam felt a searing pain in his chest. He collapsed, gasping for breath, as darkness overtook him.

When he awoke, he was lying on the ground in the clearing. The manuscript was gone, and the altar was shattered. He felt different—lighter, somehow. Checking his watch, he realized it was August 24th. He had survived.

Sam returned home, but the experience left him changed. He had glimpsed the fragility of life and the thin veil between fate and free will. The manuscript was destroyed, but the memory of those blood-red letters stayed with him forever.

“Read this if you don’t want to die this year.”

Sam had read, and he had lived. But the warning was still out there, waiting for the

 next curious soul to challenge fate.