Size

Jiang Cheng made no sound as he carefully got up and hid in the bathroom.

When Fatty woke up, the figure "sleeping" on the floor beside the bed wasn't Jiang Cheng - it was a shadow that had just crawled out.

In other words, a ghost.

The real Jiang Cheng was hiding behind the bathroom door. When Fatty stood dazed in front of the bathroom, he pulled him inside.

Chen Xiaomeng fumbled to turn on the bedroom light.

When the light came on, everyone saw the bed was in chaos, with pools of water on the floor.

The water trails led from the bed all the way to the door.

When they looked out into the hallway, they saw water stains there too.

The trails extended to the end of the hallway, stopping at the locked door.

The thought of Xie Yu being dragged away wrapped in blankets by the ghost sent chills down their spines.

No one dared hope he was still alive.

Fan Li suppressed the cold dread in his heart and turned to Jiang Cheng. "What did the ghost look like? Did you see clearly?"

Fatty shook his head vigorously, saying it was too dark in the room, and he...

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

Being a newcomer, it was understandable.

Just as Sister Nuan was about to say something, Jiang Cheng suddenly spoke: "It was that girl."

"What?"

"The ghost was the girl from the family of four!"

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

No one had seen any photos of the family since arriving here, so they had no idea what they looked like.

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

Jiang Cheng looked up, staring at the locked door at the end of the hallway. After a moment he said: "The ghost was wearing women's casual shoes. I saw them in the shoe cabinet."

Chen Xiaomeng covered her mouth in shock. Xie Yu was curled up in the blanket, his eyes bulging and pupils dilated, his face blue, with facial and neck muscles twisted - he was clearly dead. His arms were rigid, held in a claw-like position against his chest as if defending against something, the veins on the backs of his hands grotesquely raised. Jiang Cheng stepped forward and pulled back a corner of Xie Yu's shirt. His body was covered in bloody marks, as if he had been whipped, along with several wounds from sharp weapons. His hands were tightly bound together with handcuffs. Sister Nuan held a backpack she had found nearby. Inside were items like whips, daggers, rope, handcuffs, and candles of varying thickness. Upon comparison, the rope in the backpack matched what they had found earlier in the storage room. Fatty stared at the blood-stained tools, his voice trembling, "Was Xie Yu tortured to death by the ghost?" "No," Jiang Cheng stood up. "The wounds on his body are too uniform, without any distorted marks from struggling. This means he was already unconscious when the torture occurred." "I think he died from fright first, then the ghost dragged him here and mutilated his body." "Desecration of a corpse?" Jiang Cheng nodded, "I believe so." "Brother, do you have to be so calm about this?!" Fatty's face crumpled. "If I hadn't been with you, just going by your reaction, I'd suspect you did this!" Jiang Cheng maintained a righteous expression, "Don't talk nonsense. While we see this kind of thing in nightclubs, it's always consensual, and never this extreme." Seeing that Jiang Cheng was about to derail the conversation again, Fan Li quickly intervened, saying they could chat later - they needed to focus on finding clues. Unexpectedly, Jiang Cheng pointed at the shoes on Xie Yu's feet: "Those shoes are wrong - they're not what he was wearing before." At Jiang Cheng's prompt, everyone shifted their attention from his face to the shoes. They were a pair of sneakers, ordinary and somewhat worn, which didn't match Xie Yu's otherwise neat office worker attire. Moreover, the shoes looked unusually bulky. Fan Li took the dagger from the backpack Sister Nuan had found, crouched down on the floor, and carefully cut through the tightly tied shoelaces to remove the shoes. What they discovered shocked everyone. There was another pair of shoes inside the sneakers! A pair of leather shoes, crushed out of shape, with Xie Yu's feet grotesquely twisted inside, as if all the bones had been crushed before being forcibly stuffed in. Clearly, these were Xie Yu's own shoes. "Are these the boy's sneakers from the family of four?" Chen Xiaomeng looked down at the sneakers, puzzled. "But the sneakers we found in the shoe cabinet on the first floor..." Jiang Cheng knew what confused her. Although the two pairs of sneakers looked similar in style, they were very different in size, unlikely to belong to the same person. "Could the ones in the shoe cabinet be shoes the boy wore while growing up? And these are from when he was older."

Jiang Cheng thought for a moment before responding: "It's possible, but I think unlikely. We've searched the entire villa - has anyone seen shoes of similar size?" Everyone fell silent. After a while, Sister Nuan spoke with an odd expression: "So you're suggesting there are three men in this villa - the father and his two sons."