Anime

I visited a museum exhibit once featuring the Dead Sea Scrolls, mostly discovered in the 1940's and 50's. A good portion of the exhibit was about the recovery and early analysis on them. The pictures of all these archaeologists smoking in a laboratory while being directly over scrolls that are thousands of years old was wild to me.

I'm kinda excited to see which pathogen it turns out to be and what flammable substance it turns out to generate.
Really hope it doesn't turn out to be something which would not, realistically combust in said circumstances, as I have seen in a few other stories. That would be another let down.

The human combustion does seem to be unrelated to the world's dumbest firebomber.

Thankfully, it would've been way too obvious

The odd thing about the world's dumbest firebomber is, why did he do it? There's no obvious profit to him in shoring up the curse, since he doesn't seem to want to charge admission to the cave or anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if we discovered he was a mook working for someone else. Even then, the ultimate motivation of the person responsible is just as mysterious as why the only modern "spontaneous combustion" case mentioned by the good doctor was the one in which the coroner seems to have been tripping balls. (Well, okay, that isn't so mysterious—most other cases have been investigated and found to boil down to "cigarette or other obvious ignition source + drugged, drunk, disabled or predeceased victim who couldn't escape the fire".)

Poor RX-8-kun deserved better!