Nightmare Onslaught - Chapter 9 - Under the Bed

Xie Yu hadn’t expected he’d get to sleep in the bed.

Yesterday, in the master bedroom, even with the double bed, he hadn’t enjoyed such a privilege.

“Not happy with the arrangement?”

“No, no,” Xie Yu said, a little flustered. “Thank you.”

“Then where am I supposed to sleep?” Fatty asked, looking directly at Jiang Cheng.

Jiang Cheng couldn’t help but feel annoyed. Fatty never called him Hao Shuai or even “handsome guy.” But still, he replied, “You’ll take the sofa. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Fatty stood by the bed, staring moodily at Xie Yu, who was lying stiffly on the bed, his gaze full of grievance.

Then he turned to Jiang Cheng and said, “I think I should sleep in the bed.”

Jiang Cheng spread a blanket on the floor and laid down. Twisting his body to get comfortable, he replied, “No, you can’t.”

Keeping watch overnight was left to Jiang Cheng and Fatty. No one trusted the guy in the bed.

Jiang Cheng decided Xie Yu’s watch was pointless, so he took it away.

He and Fatty agreed on shifts-Fatty would take the first three hours, then Jiang Cheng would take over after that.

“What do I need to do?” Xie Yu asked, curling himself up in the blanket with only his head exposed.

“You need to sleep.”

Embarrassed by his failed attempt to contribute, Xie Yu withdrew back into the blanket, this time fully hiding his head, wrapping himself up tightly like a cocoon.

Even though the villa had electricity, the voltage at night was unreliable. The overhead incandescent bulb flickered incessantly, sometimes emitting sharp buzzing sounds.

Combined with the eerie setting, the flickering lighting and sound effects made the scene feel straight out of a horror film.

Helpless, Jiang Cheng decided to turn off the light.

Thanks to the moonlight filtering in through the window, they could barely make out the interior of the room.

Fatty leaned back on the sofa. The first hour wasn’t too bad, but soon his eyelids began to feel heavy. Despite knowing how dangerous it was, he found himself unable to fight it. Eventually, his head tilted to one side, and he fell deeply asleep.

It was a heavy slumber, but it probably hadn’t lasted very long. When he groggily woke up, the room was still shrouded in darkness.

Rubbing his eyes, he felt a pang of fear.

Jiang Cheng lay nearby on the floor, and on the bed, Xie Yu was curled tightly into a cocoon-like shape.

For now, everything seemed normal.

Though Fatty was still drowsy, he dared not drift off again. What caught him off guard, though, was the urge to use the bathroom after drinking so much water.

This bedroom had an adjoining bathroom about five meters away. It was small and framed with semi-transparent glass walls.

But ever since the middle-aged man had died inexplicably in that bathroom, Fatty had developed an intense psychological-and almost physical-aversion to it. He refused to go near it.

He avoided it entirely. Even approaching it was unthinkable.

He suddenly recalled Jiang Cheng’s method of handling things before.

The mineral water bottle!

But soon he fell into another round of despair.

Before going to bed, Jiang Cheng threw the water bottle into the garbage bin, and the garbage bin…

Fatty gulped nervously; the garbage bin was silently standing in front of the bathroom door.

Fatty had to shuffle his body slowly toward the bathroom, each step feeling like a cautious test on the edge of danger.

He finally approached the garbage bin and quickly succeeded in retrieving the empty mineral water bottle.

But before he could feel joy, something unusual caught his peripheral vision. He mechanically turned his head and saw an arm suddenly protruding from behind the glass door of the bathroom.

Second Floor, Master Bedroom.

Fan Li suddenly sat up from the sofa and quickly walked to the door, pressing his ear against it.

“What’s happening?”

Nuan-Jie and Chen Xiaomeng, who were lying in bed, also sat up. They hadn’t even taken off their clothes in case of any potential danger; they dared not sleep too deeply.

Fan Li placed a finger to his lips, making a shushing gesture.

Seeing this, Nuan-Jie and Chen Xiaomeng immediately fell silent, the air seemingly frozen.

About a minute later, they heard an extremely faint creaking sound.

It sounded like a door, suddenly opening.

A few seconds later, slow footsteps echoed in the corridor outside.

Thud, thud.

Each step sounded as if it were splashing through water.

Accompanied by a strange dragging noise, it felt like someone was dragging a heavy object across the corridor floor.

The footsteps moved away in one direction, gradually fading until they disappeared.

The expressions of Fan Li and the two women were icy, their faces pale. The direction the sound vanished was toward the end of the corridor, where there was nothing but a locked room.

Something went wrong!

Something must have happened!

Who was it this time?

That timid clerk, Fatty who can cook, named Xie Yu, or that strange Hao Shuai?

In another room, inside the cramped bathroom.

Fatty stared wide-eyed in terror, shaking uncontrollably.

He didn’t make a single sound.

A hand was tightly covering his mouth.

Jiang Cheng was crouched beside Fatty, their bodies close together, the hand covering Fatty’s mouth was Jiang Cheng’s.

Both of them fixed their gaze on the door outside.

The door was ajar, moonlight streaming in through the window.

The bed was already empty, not even a quilt remained. Just thinking of what they had just seen made Fatty’s teeth chatter in fear.

A shadow near the floor by the bed wobbled and stood up, moving oddly, with a distorted figure and an unusually large shape, clearly not Jiang Cheng.

It definitely wasn’t.

Because Jiang Cheng was hiding behind the bathroom door, pulling Fatty in and tightly covering his mouth at the same time.

The two of them crouched on the ground, barely daring to breathe, staring outside through the semi-transparent glass door.

A bloated shadow crawled along the edge of the blanket, wriggling onto the bed. Xie Yu, who was lying inside the blanket, didn’t seem to notice anything. Whether he was asleep or something else entirely, it wasn’t clear. The shadow moved around wildly, causing the entire bed to creak under its weight, yet he remained oblivious.

Then, there was a subtle shake of the blanket, and the room suddenly fell dead silent.

Neither Jiang Cheng nor Fatty dared to move an inch.

The shadow slithered out from under the blanket and began slowly stepping toward the door. A faint sound of water droplets accompanied it, the noise piercingly sharp in the stillness of the night.

By the faint light of the moon, Jiang Cheng noticed that the shadow dragged a blanket behind it. And inside the blanket…

Jiang Cheng turned to look at the bed. It was completely empty.

Fatty was terrified. His massive frame began to tremble uncontrollably. Jiang Cheng, unable to calm him down otherwise, resorted to pinching him hard with his fingertips.

Fatty’s face turned bright red, but at least he stopped shaking.

The sound of dripping water, combined with the heavy dragging noises, faded into the distance outside the door. Even after the noise disappeared entirely, Jiang Cheng and Fatty didn’t dare move.

They held their position for what felt like an eternity until the sound of a door opening broke the silence.

The first to appear was Fan Li, followed closely by Nuan-Jie and Chen Xiaomeng. The three of them kept close to the wall, moving cautiously as they entered the room.

Only then did Jiang Cheng release Fatty, and the two finally stepped out of the bathroom.

Fatty’s lips were trembling so violently that he couldn’t even speak. So it fell to Jiang Cheng to recount what had just happened.

He explained that he had been sleeping when an eerie chill woke him suddenly. In his blurry state, he immediately noticed a pitch-black shadow beneath Xie Yu’s bed.

The shadow was on all fours, its joints grotesquely twisted and bent in the wrong directions. It was slowly crawling out.