Chapter 22 The Girl

Jiang Cheng didn't make a sound. He got up quietly and slipped into the bathroom.

What Fatty saw "sleeping" on the floor next to the bed after he woke up wasn't Jiang Cheng, but the shadow that had just crawled out.

In other words, it was a ghost.

The real Jiang Cheng was hiding behind the bathroom door. While Fatty was standing in front of the bathroom in a daze, he pulled him inside.

Chen Xiaomeng fumbled and turned on the light in the bedroom.

When the light came on, everyone saw a mess on the bed, and puddles of water on the floor.

The water stains followed the bed all the way to the door.

The group walked to the door and looked outside, noticing that there were also water stains in the corridor.

The water stains stretched to the end of the corridor, stopping in front of the locked door.

Xie Yu being taken away by a ghost wrapped in a quilt was enough to send chills down anyone's spine.

No one expected him to be alive anymore.

Fan Li suppressed the chill in his heart and turned to look at Jiang Cheng, "What did the ghost look like? Did you see it clearly?"

Fatty shook his head violently, saying that it was too dark in the room at the time, and he was too...

The others knew he wanted to say he was too scared.

After all, he was a newbie, so it was understandable.

Just as Nuan Jie opened her mouth to say something, Jiang Cheng suddenly said, "It's that girl."

"What?"

"That ghost is the girl from the family of four!"

Fan Li asked in surprise, "How do you know?"

No one had seen any photos of this family since arriving here, so there was no way to know what they looked like.

Of course, except for the middle-aged man and Xie Yu.

Jiang Cheng raised his head, staring at the locked room door at the end of the corridor. After a moment, he said, "That ghost was wearing a pair of women's casual shoes. I saw them in the shoe cabinet."

Chen Xiaomeng said with a pale face, "It seems that our previous reasoning was correct. The other family members in the villa abused the girl and finally killed her, and now...she's back for revenge."

"Her death has nothing to do with us, why is she looking for us?" Fatty recalled what happened just now and couldn't help but feel lingering fear.

Nuan Jie sneered, "Are you trying to reason with a ghost?"

"Alright," Fan Li interjected, "Everyone, say less! I'm going to go take a look there. Who's coming with me?"

He was naturally referring to the locked room at the end of the corridor. The ghost dragged Xie Yu and disappeared in front of that room's door.

This was a very important clue.

In the end, everyone decided to go together, after all, separating would only be more dangerous.

Moreover, according to Fan Li and Nuan Jie, ghosts in the dream realm rarely kill people in quick succession.

Unlike before, Fan Li just pushed lightly, and the door opened.

The lock…was opened.

Behind the door was a small room. Because there was no window, only the light from the corridor could be used to see a little bit.

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

It was dark inside, and no one dared to enter for the time being.

Until Jiang Cheng took a few steps forward, stretched out a hand and groped on the wall near the door. With a crisp sound of a switch being flipped, the light in the room turned on.

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

In the center of the room was a rolled-up quilt, with a pair of shoes sticking out, drooping powerlessly on the floor.

After calming down for a few seconds, Nuan Jie walked forward and slowly lifted the quilt.

"Ah...!" Chen Xiaomeng couldn't help but cover her mouth.

Xie Yu was curled up in the quilt, his eyes bulging, pupils dilated, face blue, and the muscles in his face and neck twisted. He was obviously dead.

His two arms were stiff, claw-like, guarding his chest, as if defending against something, and the veins on the back of his hands were bulging high.

Jiang Cheng stepped forward and pulled open a corner of Xie Yu's shirt.

His body was covered with bloodstains, as if he had been whipped with something like a whip, and there were also wounds left by sharp objects. His hands were also tightly handcuffed together.

Nuan Jie was holding a backpack, which was found on the side. The backpack contained things like whips, daggers, hemp rope, handcuffs, and several candles of different thicknesses.

After comparison, the hemp rope in the backpack was the same as the rope found in the warehouse before.

Fatty stared at the bloody tools, his voice trembling with fear, "Was Xie Yu tortured to death by a ghost?"

"No," Jiang Cheng stood up, "The wounds on his body are very regular, and there are no twisted marks left by struggling, which means that he was already unconscious when he was being tortured."

"I think he was scared to death first, and then dragged here by the ghost to be abused."

"Whipped the corpse?"

Jiang Cheng nodded, "I think that's how it is."

"Bro, can you not be so calm!" Fatty said with a mournful face, "If I wasn't with you, based on your reaction, I would have suspected you did it?"

Jiang Cheng looked righteous, "Don't talk nonsense, we have this kind of thing in nightclubs too, but it's all based on mutual consent, and it's generally not this excessive."

Seeing that the topic was about to be led astray by Jiang Cheng again, Fan Li hurriedly stood up to stop it, saying that gossiping could wait, and they should hurry up and look for clues.

Unexpectedly, Jiang Cheng pointed to the shoes on Xie Yu's corpse's feet and said, "These shoes are wrong. They're not the pair he was wearing before."

Reminded by Jiang Cheng, everyone shifted their attention from Jiang Cheng's face to the shoes.

They were a pair of sneakers, very ordinary, and a bit old. They didn't match Xie Yu's relatively refined office worker attire, and the shoes looked very bulky.

Fan Li took out a dagger from the backpack that Nuan Jie found, squatted on the floor, and used the blade to pick open the tightly tied shoelaces and took off the shoes.

A scene that no one expected appeared.

There was actually another pair of shoes wrapped in the sneakers!

They were a pair of leather shoes that had been squeezed out of shape. Inside the shoes, Xie Yu's instep was twisted strangely, as if all the bones had been crushed and stuffed in.

Obviously, these were Xie Yu's own shoes.

"Are these the boy's shoes from the family of four?" Chen Xiaomeng looked down at the sneakers and wondered, "But the sneakers we found in the shoe cabinet in the living room on the first floor..."

Jiang Cheng knew what she couldn't figure out. Although the two pairs of sneakers looked similar in style, the sizes were very different and didn't seem to belong to the same person.

"Could the pair in the shoe cabinet be the shoes that the boy used to wear when he was growing up? And this pair is what he wears now that he's grown up."

Jiang Cheng thought for a while and replied, "It's possible, but I don't think it's very likely. We've searched the entire villa. Has anyone seen shoes of a similar size?"

Everyone was silent. After a long while, Nuan Jie said with a strange expression, "So you mean there are three men in this villa, a male owner, and his two sons."