Nightmare Onslaught - Chapter 10 - The Size

Jiang Cheng didn’t make a sound. Quietly, he got up and slipped into the bathroom.

When Fatty woke up and saw the figure “sleeping” on the floor beside the bed, it wasn’t Jiang Cheng-it was a shadow that had just crawled out from nowhere.

In other words, it was a ghost.

The real Jiang Cheng was hiding behind the bathroom door. While Fatty stood in front of the bathroom, frozen in shock, Jiang Cheng quickly pulled him inside.

Chen Xiaomeng fumbled around to turn on the light in the bedroom.

Once the light came on, everyone could see the chaos on the bed and the puddles of water left on the floor.

The trail of water started at the bed and continued all the way to the door.

The group walked over to the door and looked outside, only to find that the water trail extended into the corridor.

The water trail stretched all the way to the end of the corridor, stopping in front of a locked room.

Xie Yu had been wrapped in a blanket and dragged away by the ghost. Just the thought of it sent chills down everyone’s spine.

No one still entertained the hope that he could be alive.

Fan Li suppressed the dread growing in his heart and turned to Jiang Cheng. “What did that ghost look like? Did you get a good look at it?”

Fatty shook his head vigorously, saying that the room had been too dark at the time-and that he had been too…

Everyone understood what he meant: he had been too terrified.

After all, he was a newcomer, and it was understandable.

Just as Nuan-Jie opened her mouth to say something, Jiang Cheng suddenly spoke up. “It was the girl.”

“What?”

“The ghost was that girl from the family of four!”

Fan Li asked in shock, “How do you know?”

Ever since they arrived, no one had seen any photos of that family, so they couldn’t possibly know what the girl looked like.

Of course, this excluded the middle-aged man and Xie Yu.

Jiang Cheng looked up and stared at the locked room at the end of the corridor. After a moment, he said, “The ghost was wearing a pair of women’s casual shoes. I’ve seen them in the shoe cabinet.”

Chen Xiaomeng’s face went pale. “It seems our earlier speculation was correct. This villa’s other family members abused the girl and eventually killed her, and now she’s back for revenge.”

“What does that have to do with us?” Fatty was still trembling at the memory of what had just happened. “Why is she coming after us?”

Nuan-Jie let out a cold laugh. “Do you plan on reasoning with a ghost?”

“Alright,” Fan Li interjected. “Let’s all just say less!” He paused before continuing, “I’m planning to go over there and check it out. Who’s coming with me?”

He was, of course, referring to the locked room at the end of the corridor-the one where the ghost had vanished with Xie Yu.

This was a crucial lead.

In the end, they all decided to go together. After all, splitting up would only make things more dangerous.

Besides, as Fan Li and Nuan-Jie had pointed out, ghosts in the Dream Realm rarely strike twice in a short period of time.

This time was different from before. Fan Li just lightly pushed, and the door opened.

The lock had been unlocked.

Behind the door was a small room, and because there were no windows, they could only see a bit thanks to the light reflecting from the corridor.

The area was probably only two-thirds the size of a boy’s bedroom.

It was quite dark inside; for a moment, no one dared to step in.

Until Jiang Cheng took a few steps forward and reached out to feel along the wall near the door. With a crisp sound of a switch being flipped, the lights in the room came on.

Although they were somewhat prepared, when they saw the room clearly, everyone couldn’t help but gasp.

In the center of the room lay a rolled-up quilt, with a pair of shoes dangling helplessly from its edge, touching the floor.

After a few seconds of calm, Nuan-Jie stepped forward and slowly lifted the quilt.

“Ah!” Chen Xiaomeng couldn’t help but cover her mouth.

Xie Yu lay curled up in the quilt, his eyes bulging, pupils dilated, his face pale. The muscles on his face and neck were twisted; it was clear he was already dead.

His arms were stiff, curled protectively over his chest, as if defending against something, veins bulged prominently on the back of his hands.

Jiang Cheng stepped closer and pulled open a corner of Xie Yu’s shirt.

His body was covered in bruises, looking as if he had been whipped, with several wounds from sharp objects, and his hands were tightly handcuffed together.

Nuan-Jie held a backpack she had found nearby. Inside were a whip, a dagger, some rope, handcuffs, and several candles of varying thickness.

After comparing, they found that the rope in the backpack was the same as that found earlier in the storage room.

Fatty stared at the bloody tools, his voice trembling with fear, “Did the ghost literally torture Xie Yu to death?”

“No,” Jiang Cheng stood up. “The wounds on his body are very orderly; there are no signs of struggle, which means he was unconscious while being tortured.”

“I think he was scared to death first, and then dragged here to be tortured by the ghost.”

“Whipping the corpse?”

Jiang Cheng nodded, “I think so.”

“Bro, how can you be so calm about this!” Fatty said with a mournful face. “If I weren’t with you, I’d start to doubt that you did this!”

Jiang Cheng looked serious, “Don’t talk nonsense. Such things do happen in our KTV, but they are all based on mutual consent, and usually not this extreme.”

Seeing the conversation veering off course again, Fan Li quickly stepped in to stop it, saying they should set aside small talk for later and focus on finding clues now.

Unexpectedly, Jiang Cheng pointed at the sneakers on Xie Yu’s corpse and said, “These shoes are wrong; they’re not the pair he was wearing before.”

Prompted by Jiang Cheng, everyone shifted their gaze from his face to the shoes.

They were a pair of sneakers, quite ordinary and somewhat worn, indeed not matching Xie Yu’s otherwise neat office attire, and these shoes looked unusually bulky.

Fan Li took a dagger from the backpack Nuan-Jie had found and crouched on the floor, painstakingly picking open the tightly tied shoelaces with the blade’s edge and then taking the shoes off.

What happened next took everyone by surprise.

Inside the sneakers, there was another pair of shoes wrapped around!

It was a pair of leather shoes, deformed from being squeezed, with Xie Yu’s foot arch bizarrely twisted inside, as if all the bones had been crushed and then forcefully stuffed into them.

Clearly, these were Xie Yu’s own shoes.

“Are these the shoes of the boy in the family of four?” Chen Xiaomeng looked down at the pair of sneakers and wondered, “But aren’t these the sneakers we found in the shoe cabinet in the living room on the first floor?”

Jiang Cheng knew what she was puzzled about; although the two pairs of sneakers looked similar in style, their sizes were quite different, unlikely to belong to the same person.

“Could it be that the pair in the shoe cabinet were worn by the boy during his growth, and these are from when he grew up?”

Jiang Cheng thought for a moment and replied, “It’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely. We’ve searched the entire villa; has anyone else seen similar-sized shoes?”

Everyone was silent, then after a while, Nuan-Jie spoke with a slightly strange expression, “So, you mean there are three men in this villa, a male homeowner and his two sons?”