[1] 25 years after the events of Spiral, Takanori Ando, graphic designer at Studio Oz, a CG production company, is dating high school teacher Akane Maruyama.
Company president Yoneda gives Takanori a USB drive with a recent viral video of a man committing suicide by hanging to reconfigure for a future project.
The man is revealed to be Seiji Kashiwada, a serial killer convicted and executed a month ago for murdering four girls.
Analyzing the video, Takanori deduces the location where it was shot and heads there, finding out that the room is currently occupied by a man named Hiroyuki Niimura.
From the video and the crime scene photos of Kashiwada's house, the two notice a first-edition copy of Ring, a book written by Kazuyuki Asakawa and published by his brother Junichi 25 years ago.
Digging into the Ring case, Takanori is surprised to find his father Mitsuo, who now heads a private hospital, was involved.
Considering the physical similarities of Kashiwada's victims, Kihara theorizes that they were all clones of Sadako Yamamura, the originator of the ring virus.
Akane arrives shortly, prompting Ryuji to reveal his secret: he fathered her with Masako Maruyama, the alias of the Sadako clone born from Mai Takano.
Ryuji managed to save Akane, but in the process implicated the real Seiji Kashiwada, whom he impersonated and as a result, was wrongly arrested and executed.