After Kyoko and the others made their way over, they soon found the village where the girl Li Li once lived. However, nearly all the villagers were already dead. Following the clues provided by the journalist and Detective Yusaku Motomiya, they eventually located the only surviving person from back then—an old woman who had lived through it all.
When the journalists questioned her, the old woman was so terrified that she hid in her room. Only after persistent coaxing did she gradually begin recounting what had happened in the village back then.
At the time, Li Li was regarded as a strange girl. She seemed to possess the ability to foresee death—whenever she said someone would die at a specific time, that person would indeed die at exactly that moment. Because of this, she was ostracized by the entire village and bullied by the local children. The old woman, who was a young girl back then, didn't participate in the bullying; she merely stood at the side and watched.
Later, after Li Li predicted that one of the children would die—and he really did—the enraged parents grabbed Li Li, tied her up, and threw her into the nearby coal mine. Li Li died there. Everyone in the village kept silent about it. But her revenge soon arrived. Through the calling curse, Li Li brutally killed everyone in the village. No one survived—except the old woman, who only lived because she had gouged out her own eyes.
Even so, the old woman lived in constant fear for the rest of her life, terrified that Li Li would one day come for her too.
Here, Edward personally believed that Li Li actually had no intention of targeting the old woman. Perhaps it was because the old woman never hurt her, so Li Li spared her out of a lingering bit of sentiment. And since the old woman had already blinded herself in fear, that might have been why she was left alive. Later on, however, Li Li began committing indiscriminate killings, and her methods became increasingly deranged.
Still, Li Li always left her victims with a choice: if someone else answered the cursed phone call in your place, then you would survive—while the person who answered the call would die instead.
This was a key foreshadowing for events later on.
After obtaining the information, the journalist and Kyoko went to investigate the coal mine. But the mine had already been sealed. With no other option, they split up to search for an entrance. While the journalist was searching, she received a phone call—her father, who was a police officer, calling to inform her of something important. Afterward, the female journalist located an entryway into the mine. But once she went inside, she felt dizzy and immediately collapsed.
When she regained consciousness, she called her ex-husband. Since ex-husband had previously received a cursed call, she was worried about him. However, due to being underground in the coal mine, the call didn't go through, so she went to search for him directly. When her ex-husband saw her, he was terrified and shouted at her to stay away. Fortunately, nothing happened to him in the end, and she finally breathed a sigh of relief.
Meanwhile, on the other side, after Kyoko and her boyfriend entered the mine, the two became separated. Kyoko found the chair where Li Li had once been restrained. Seeing the horrific state of the place, she finally understood how miserably Li Li had died, and she even began to feel sympathy for her. But right then, she was suddenly tied up. Just when she was about to die, Kyoko shouted, "I'm willing to stay and play with you!" Hearing that, Li Li stopped her attack.
But then Kyoko's boyfriend arrived and rescued her. As they approached the exit, a powerful force struck them. The boyfriend was flung outside the fence. When he turned his head, he saw that Kyoko's appearance at that moment perfectly matched the death premonition she had previously received.
At that moment, Li Li crawled out, preparing to take Kyoko away. But before that, she gave Kyoko one final phone call.
And this was where the earlier foreshadowing came into play. The journalist had previously deduced that Li Li's killing method was different from Mimiko's. Mimiko only killed the owner of the phone—whoever owned it would die. But Li Li was the opposite; she killed whoever answered the call. That meant someone could willingly take the victim's place.
At the beginning, the boyfriend had given Kyoko a small accessory and told her that it could protect lovers and keep them safe.
And now, at this critical moment, he made his choice. He picked up the phone lying inside the fenced area and answered it.
The moment he answered, he and Kyoko switched places. Standing inside the fence, he looked at Kyoko with a gentle smile. Then Li Li dragged him into the mine—and killed him.
Kyoko fainted from grief. When she woke up, she was already in the hospital, with the journalist comforting her. After a while, the journalist left. And that was when the movie delivered its big twist.
Two police officers from Moon-Sun Island arrived to notify Kyoko that two corpses had been found in the mine. They expressed their condolences.
But Kyoko was confused. She knew one of them had to be her boyfriend, but who was the other?
The camera then cut to the journalist. She had gone to her ex-husband's home to talk to him, but he wasn't there. On the table lay his DV recorder.
Driven by curiosity, she picked it up and watched the footage. What she saw stunned her: the video showed herself breaking into her ex-husband's home earlier that afternoon, face twisted with malice, then brutally killing him in the bathroom. The funniest part was the ex-husband shouting, "Don't come any closer!" at the top of his lungs, which Edward felt was hilariously out of character in such a scene.
Unable to accept what she was seeing, the journalist hurried to the bathroom. There, she found her ex-husband's corpse—confirming everything.
Back in the mine, she had actually encountered Mizuo Mimiko, who killed her then and there. The body discovered in the mine was the journalist's corpse.
After that, Mimiko had taken on the journalist's appearance and used it to murder her ex-husband. That was why he was so terrified when he saw her earlier. At this moment, the journalist finally realized she herself had already died. She opened her mouth and spat out a piece of candy—proof that she had indeed been killed by Mimiko.
Even the "phone call" from her father that had misled her earlier wasn't from her real father—he had already died. It was Mimiko who had called her while impersonating him. The person who accompanied her into the mine had also been Mimiko all along.
And so, the two storylines ended simultaneously:
Li Li killed Kyoko's boyfriend and continued spreading her coal-mine curse.
Mizuo Mimiko killed the journalist who investigated her and continued feeding candy to her victims.
This was where "One Missed Call 2" officially ended. To be honest, it wasn't bad at all. The two narrative threads introduced a new concept that could have been used for a third film—maybe even something fun like Li Li versus Mizuo Mimiko. If done properly, it could've made some decent money.
But "One Missed Call 3" turned out to be a very strange movie instead—its ratings dropped compared to the previous ones. Truly unfortunate.
"Uncle Edward, you seem to know my story really well?"
A soft, milky voice came from beside him. Edward turned his head and saw Mizuo Mimiko's large round eyes staring at him. He admitted—seeing that made his heart skip a beat.
Mimiko was just a little girl, one with asthma and severe mental issues. But her sudden appearance was still extremely frightening.
"You seem fine now. Did you go through all of that already?" Edward asked, calming himself as he smiled at her. Mimiko nodded.
"Yes. I killed that woman, and that really is how it happened. Originally, Li Li intended to use Kyoko to expose the truth of her death so she wouldn't die in vain, but that woman insisted on interfering," Mimiko pouted. Edward's mouth twitched.
Unlike Kayako, who seemed almost rehabilitated after arriving in this world—finally able to think clearly after breaking free from the Grudge—Mizuo Mimiko had no sense of remorse at all. She didn't regret anything she had done. But that was simply her nature.
Kayako had become a vengeful spirit because of prolonged abuse and suffering. Mimiko, on the other hand, had tormented her younger sister since childhood due to her mental illness, and afterward would give her a candy as "comfort." Later, when her mother took her sister away and neglected her, she suffered an asthma attack and died—thus becoming a vengeful spirit.
In the "One Missed Call 2" storyline, Mimiko was the unfortunate substitute victim for her mother, who had answered Li Li's cursed call. But regardless of the circumstances, once Mimiko became a ghost, she remained true to her twisted nature and began killing indiscriminately.
"You shouldn't be able to kill anyone here, right?" Edward glanced at her. In the Pokémon world, Mimiko's powers couldn't harm anyone, and the system's restrictions were extremely strict. Honestly, if Edward weren't such a morally upright person, if some deranged lolicon had appeared instead, Mimiko might have been reduced to a pastry several times by now.
"Yeah, it's super boring. If staying here didn't stop my asthma, I wouldn't want to stay at all." Mimiko admitted. She didn't mention the other reason—here, she didn't have to relive the painful moment of her death every day.
All vengeful spirits pay a price: they must relive their death experience daily. The agony strengthens their hatred, which increases their power. But eventually, the cycle drives them insane and makes them crave killing the living.
Yet here in Edward's world, Mimiko didn't have to suffer that torment. She and Aunt Kayako even agreed that whenever her daily "death time" came, she would come hide with Edward.
Edward's mouth twitched again. This little brat was truly… twisted.
"How many did you kill yesterday? Also—have you ever possessed a bullied girl before?" Edward suddenly remembered the plot of "One Missed Call 3."
Maybe it was his perfectionism—or something else—but ever since he finished filming the final chapter of The Grudge 3, he had wanted to give the One Missed Call series a proper ending as well.
"One Missed Call 3" did exist, and it even starred Horikita Maki. Edward remembered thinking she looked somewhat similar to Kwai Lun-Mei.
But the movie itself was boring. The horror was greatly reduced. Even though more people died, it wasn't entertaining.
The plot was roughly this:
A girl who was bullied and ostracized by her whole class committed suicide, but was chosen by Mimiko afterward. Given the power of revenge, she started sending cursed calls to the classmates who bullied her.
Those classmates were on a field trip.
The result? Students and teachers died one after another. They tried to pass the curse along. In the end, Horikita Maki's character tried to stop everything with the power of friendship. The remaining students attempted to overload Mimiko's computer with emails to erase her existence.
Naturally, it failed.
The curse continued.
And that was it.
"One Missed Call 3" simply ended there—almost like a joke saying, "The Grudge never ends."
From Edward's perspective, this plot was meaningless as a finale. It existed solely to squeeze out the last bit of value from the franchise. If the box office had been better, investors would definitely have milked it further.
"Mimiko, have you ever thought about under what circumstances you might stop doing 'One Missed Call'?" Edward asked. He figured he could learn something directly from Mimiko herself—she was a ghost, after all.
"Hm?" Mimiko tilted her head, as though trying to think seriously.
"Probably when there's no one left nearby," she said with an innocent childlike smile. But her words made Edward feel a chill run down his spine. As expected of Mizuo Mimiko—she said such horrifying things as casually as breathing.
But that really was her personality. Perhaps due to her mentally ill father, Mimiko herself had a naturally unstable, chaotic disposition.
In other words, she was a "born villain."
Unless she had received long-term psychological treatment while alive, but unfortunately she had already died. Her personality was fixed.
"That wouldn't work as a finale at all," Edward muttered, rubbing his temples. But after thinking it over, he realized he was getting ahead of himself. He hadn't even filmed "One Missed Call 2" yet.
Once he started filming the sequel, he could continue thinking about how to give the entire series a proper ending.
(End of Chapter)