Chapter 4
The security door shut with a dull "thud," completely blocking the view from the hallway.
Steven's body seemed to lose all its bones in an instant as he collapsed into the sofa. He clutched his left chest tightly, his heart pounding at a frequency that felt like it would shatter his ribs.
Something was seriously wrong.
Those were definitely not human eyes. Even being stared down by the most vicious, bloodthirsty beast wouldn't create the same suffocating sensation as that brief moment just now.
Steven gasped for air, his eyes darting around the dim living room. He couldn't help but doubt himself.
You have to understand—after all the crap he went through as a kid, plus over two years of intense "training" and severe mental torture at the medical examiner's office, his personality had completely transformed.
He was the kind of person who could dismember a maggot-infested giant's corpse at the autopsy table while chatting and laughing, all while wolfing down spaghetti with meat sauce! When his mental issues flared up, his mind would even spawn disgusting, twisted impulses. If he hadn't been forcibly suppressing them with extreme "pressure transfer methods," he would've already become a serial killer on the wanted list.
How could such a lunatic teetering on the edge of the abyss be scared out of his wits by one look from a shriveled old man?
"Uncle Andrew..." Steven swallowed hard, his Adam's apple rolling with difficulty. "Are you... still human?"
Even lunatics have to follow basic rules.
Steven took a deep breath and suddenly raised his hand—
"Smack! Smack!"
Two sharp, solid slaps landed hard on his own face. The burning pain instantly cleared his head somewhat.
"Stop scaring yourself, damn it!" Steven growled through gritted teeth. "Get a grip. This is just an ordinary parallel world with technology! Where the hell would monsters and ghosts come from!"
He struggled up from the sofa, walked to the kitchen, grabbed a cold sandwich and stuffed it roughly into his mouth, swallowing it in a few bites, forcibly suppressing the spasms in his stomach.
Six o'clock in the evening.
Steven carried a freshly brewed bowl of dark herbal medicine to the balcony.
Down below on the community path, several neighbors were walking their dogs and chatting. Steven looked down at them coldly, feeling something was off. These people's movements were polite and their smiles just right, yet they had a stiff, mechanical quality—like a group of clumsy imitators wearing human skin.
Looking up, the sky's strangeness was even more obvious. No sunset glow, no clouds—just a hazy, gloomy feeling like being shrouded in thick dust, so oppressive it was hard to breathe.
Steven tilted his head back and downed the bitter medicine in one gulp. As soon as the liquid hit his stomach, a strange heat rapidly spread through his body along his stomach walls.
Just waiting around wasn't going to work. He needed to figure this out.
Steven turned back to the living room, sat at the computer, and skillfully tapped the keyboard, pulling up the hidden surveillance camera installed at his door.
He rewound the footage, staring intently at the progress bar as Uncle Andrew appeared in the hallway. It didn't take careful observation to notice that when Andrew reached the door, he made no exploratory movements at all—he just raised his hand and knocked.
"He knew I was home," Steven sneered. "He's been watching me."
But the logic didn't add up. The family had eyes everywhere—they didn't need him, a fringe person who'd just quit his job. Why would Uncle Andrew waste energy on him?
Steven leaned back in his chair, rapidly organizing the timeline in his mind.
When he was working at the medical examiner's office, Uncle Andrew had been all smiles, like a caring elder looking after his junior. But ever since he quit, everything changed. When his adoptive parents fell seriously ill and desperately needed money, he'd humbled himself to ask for help, only to be met with cold stares and closed doors. In the end, it was his cousin who secretly slipped him some money.
"Old fox..." Steven's eyes turned cold. What family affection? Uncle Andrew clearly wanted to use that debt as shackles to lock around his neck!
Steven gripped the mouse again, slowing down the surveillance footage to carefully observe every subtle movement Andrew made after entering.
The footage played at 0.5x speed.
When Andrew casually suggested watching the blood moon together tonight, Steven heard his own dismissive response in the recording: "I have a side job tonight."
The instant that line fell—
"Wait!"
Steven slammed the pause button, cold sweat instantly soaking his back.
He dragged the progress bar back two seconds and switched to 0.2x speed.
In the footage, when Andrew heard Steven would miss the moon viewing, his body actually expanded outward by a third within a fraction of a second, like a balloon being inflated! His tight suit was even stretched into a grotesque outline. Then, in the blink of an eye, it deflated back to the shriveled old man's appearance.
"What the hell is that thing?!"
Steven shoved the keyboard away, and he and his chair slid back half a meter.
This wasn't an illusion! Surveillance footage doesn't lie!
Combined with Andrew's completely inhuman eyes when he left, Steven felt his scalp crawl as his entire worldview came crashing down.
He glanced toward the bed, mentally calculating the few packages of homemade explosives he'd secretly prepared.
"With that little yield, could it even kill a monster that can casually alter its bone and muscle structure?"
His brain felt like it had a buzzer stuffed inside, humming loudly. Steven rubbed his temples, muttering, "Damn it, my CPU's about to fry."
He rushed into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and frantically splashed cold water on his face.
The ice water dripped down his cheeks. Steven braced his hands on the marble counter, staring hard at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror.
"Stay calm. Think logically." He talked to himself in the mirror.
Uncle Andrew's surface purpose for coming today was to verify some secret about him.
But his actual purpose was to ensure he'd be on time to watch the moon tonight.
The reasoning formula was simple: moon viewing = secret = family greatness restored.
The question was: what deadly secret was hidden in tonight's blood moon phenomenon?
"Side job? Screw the side job. I'm not going anywhere tonight." Steven wiped the cold water from his face, his eyes turning vicious.
......
Eleven o'clock at night. The balcony.
The city's neon lights created serious pollution, leaving only a few scattered stars in the sky. Steven yawned widely, leaning on the railing, staring at that perfectly normal silver-gray moon.
For tonight, he'd specifically searched the dark web that afternoon for records about "blood moons," but most of what came up was news about extreme cults using celestial phenomena to commit serial murders—completely useless.
Eleven fifty. The moon was still silver.
"Is that old lunatic messing with me?" Steven frowned.
Just as the clock hand was about to cross midnight—
"Oh my God! The moon's turning red! Lord, it's incredible!"
From a distant high-rise, a neighbor's piercing cry suddenly rang out.
Steven jerked his head up.
Without warning, a thick, coagulated blood-red color abruptly seeped out from the moon's edge. The blood color spread at a terrifying speed—in just a few breaths, it completely devoured the original silvery-gray brilliance.
The temperature seemed to drop to freezing in an instant.
The entire community, the entire city, was dragged into a massive horror at this moment. The night sky was no longer a night sky, but an inverted blood-colored coffin. An indescribable evil oppressive force descended from above, violently crushing Steven's nerves.
As if Satan himself had descended.
Steven gripped the balcony railing tightly, his knuckles white. In the reflection deep in his pupils, that cascading blood-red moonlight wasn't just empty light.
It was more like thick iron chains, like wriggling crimson tentacles, slowly descending from the dead-silent night sky toward the heads of the humans on the ground!
