Chapter 284: Chapter 280: Stacked Nightmare

Several more days passed in a flash.

The time was three in the afternoon.

That day, the sky over Qishan City was dark and gloomy.

A torrential downpour raged, the endless SPLASH of rain drumming against the eaves and windowpanes with a PITTER-PATTER like rolling marbles.

"Your parents aren’t home today, and the rain’s too heavy. I’m not leaving tonight!"

"Okay, but you’d better not try anything funny."

"Don’t worry, I definitely won’t."

"Like I’d believe you, you big liar—mmph..."

At the entrance of Unit 2, Building 18, in the Happiness Garden District, a young man and woman were locked in a tight embrace.

Lost in the heat of the moment, they began to kiss as if no one else existed.

After a long moment, they finally broke apart. The woman’s face was flushed as she snuggled into the man’s arms.

"You’re awful, I could barely breathe!"

She playfully tapped her fist against the man’s chest.

Strangely, however, the man didn’t reply. Instead, his body twitched involuntarily.

The woman seemed to sense something was wrong and looked up. The next instant, her pupils contracted violently, as if she had just witnessed the most terrifying sight in the world.

A large, broad hand, covered in bulging black veins, was clamped directly around her boyfriend’s head.

Her boyfriend’s face was frozen in a daze, completely powerless to resist.

The woman’s gaze followed the hand. The entrance to the unit was dim due to the heavy rain, and she could just barely make out a figure standing behind her boyfriend—a figure that was at least two meters tall.

The person wore a black raincoat, but it did little to hide his massive, towering frame.

One of his hands held the man, while the other gripped a giant hammer.

The hammer was pitch-black, with faint crimson patterns flowing across its surface like a beating pulse.

Rainwater streamed down the edges of the raincoat, forming a small, murky puddle at his feet.

His face was hidden beneath the raincoat’s hood, impossible to see clearly, revealing only a pair of eyes that glinted with red light.

He seemed to notice the woman’s gaze.

SPLAT!

The next second, a sound like a watermelon bursting echoed out.

Her boyfriend’s head was crushed, and a fountain of blood sprayed out, drenching the woman from head to toe.

"Ugh... you..."

The woman’s face twisted in horror, and she was just about to scream.

The next moment, BAM! Before the woman could react, a black shadow flashed, and the giant hammer smashed directly into her face.

Bizarrely, her entire body began to crack like porcelain, with countless fissures spreading across her skin.

An instant later, she shattered into a pile of bloody chunks of flesh mixed with gore that scattered across the ground.

After finishing, the figure in the raincoat didn’t pause for a second. He stepped over the two mangled corpses, now damaged beyond recognition, and walked toward a door inside the hallway.

Just as he was about to reach the door, his body turned translucent, and he passed straight through the wall into the apartment.

A moment later, the raincoated figure emerged. This time, however, his hammer was covered in even more blood. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

It was as if he knew in advance whether someone was inside the rooms.

He skipped the next apartment and entered another one further down.

The entire building was terrifyingly silent. There wasn’t a single scream or sound of struggle, only the increasingly thick stench of blood.

If one could look down from high above at this moment, they would see a truly horrifying sight.

The building seemed to be tightly wrapped in a layer of gray haze. The entire residential block looked as if it had instantly suffered decades of wind and rain Erosion.

The paint on its walls was peeling, covered in mottled, decaying marks. It looked like a decrepit old man in his final years, radiating an aura of decay.

Strangely, however, a bizarre phenomenon occurred whenever an ordinary person’s gaze fell upon the residential building’s location.

They would automatically overlook it.

It was as if the building didn’t exist at all.

...

「Inside Room 3306.」

Wei Fan, who had been sleeping soundly in his bedroom, suddenly snapped his eyes open. A flash of vigilance sparked in their depths.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. His clothes were still neat—he had been sleeping fully dressed.

He glanced at the time. It was supposed to be evening, but there wasn’t a sliver of light outside the window. A thick, inky-black night had fallen, as if ready to swallow the world.

The surroundings were terrifyingly quiet, without the slightest sound.

This situation was clearly abnormal.

Building 18 of Happiness Garden was close to the main road. Normally, the SPLASH of tires running through puddles and the ROAR of passing motorcycles were incessant. The only way he could get any sleep was by tightly shutting his windows to block out the noise.

Not only that, but around this time, the neighbor’s child downstairs would always be practicing the piano, the simple, clumsy melody echoing through the hallway.

But now, all those sounds had vanished without a trace, as if the entire world had been muted.

He reached for the backpack beside him and, with a grim expression, walked to the front door in the living room.

He reached out, gripped the handle firmly, and tried to open the door. It didn’t budge. It felt as if it had been welded shut; no matter how much strength he used, he couldn’t move it an inch.

He seemed to have anticipated this.

The next moment, he closed his eyes, then snapped them open again.

In his right eye, the black and white pupil instantly transformed into a strange clock face, its blood-red hands emitting a ghastly, cold light.

He looked toward the door. Instantly, two completely different images appeared in his eyes.

The view in his left eye was the same as before, but the perspective in his right eye had undergone a bizarre shift.

In his right eye’s vision, he was facing a solid wall. The real door was actually a meter to the side.

Clearly, only what his right eye saw was the true scene.

The power of the Nightmare was at work, interfering with his perception and vision. No wonder the door wouldn’t open.

’The whole building must be like this,’ he thought.

Seeing this, he walked over.

Just as he was about to reach out and push the door open, he suddenly froze.

He listened intently. In the previously silent hallway, a sound had begun.

THUD... THUD... THUD...

The sound was muffled and rhythmic, like someone bouncing a ball.

"Hm?"

Wei Fan’s pupils contracted!

Within his perception, a second cold, sinister aura had appeared in the building.

"It’s a stacked Nightmare!"

A stacked Nightmare could also be called a multi-layered Nightmare or a nested Nightmare.

The names were different, but the meaning was roughly the same.

Under normal circumstances, only one Nightmare would appear in a single area at any given time.

But this wasn’t an absolute rule.

Some Nightmares would inexplicably align with each other, merging together and becoming much more powerful.

This was a stacked Nightmare.

In his past life, he had heard of a stacked Nightmare formed from the fusion of four separate Nightmares. It had occurred on an island nation and was never resolved. Instead, it only dissipated on its own after every single person on the island was dead.

’Damn it! According to the headquarters’ survey report from my past life, there should have only been one Nightmare here. Where did this second one come from? Could this also be a butterfly effect caused by my presence?’

Wei Fan’s expression flickered between light and dark.