My Flash-Marriage Husband Is an Eldritch Being - Chapter 2

Come to think of it, Qi Shuo had seemed a little strange ever since we met.

We got to know each other on an obscure paleontology forum.

At the time, my company was working on a museum collaboration, and I was responsible for the preliminary market research. The materials our client gave us were a complete mess.

I could not make head or tail of them, so I had no choice but to post online asking for help.

That was when Qi Shuo appeared.

He replied with extraordinary patience, corrected the material point by point, and even attached links to more than a dozen papers.

I could not understand the papers, but I could certainly appreciate his expertise and kindness.

From then on, whenever I ran into a related question, I went to him.

He was not much of a talker, but he never looked down on me for asking amateurish questions.

Gradually, we began talking about more than work. We talked about meals, the weather, and our lives.

In our third year of knowing each other, I traveled to his city for work and arranged to meet him while I was there.

The first time I saw Qi Shuo, I knew I was attracted to him.

You could say I fell for his looks, but more than that, his face gave me an indescribable sense of familiarity, as if I had seen him somewhere a very long time ago.

That feeling even overrode my natural caution about meeting an online friend. Instinctively, I felt this man would never hurt me.

Qi Shuo liked me too. We quickly fell headlong into love and registered our marriage less than three months later.

Afterward, Qi Shuo treated me wonderfully—almost too wonderfully.

He was clingy and unfailingly attentive to my feelings.

Whatever I did at home, he had to follow. If I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, he would stay right at my heels.

I never needed to say what I wanted to eat. Most of the time, he had already bought it for me.

If work was going badly, the instant irritation surfaced inside me, he would put aside whatever he was doing and come comfort me.

Sometimes I wondered whether he could hear my thoughts.

Maybe he had some kind of cheat ability, like those “systems” in web novels.

Whenever I asked him seriously, Qi Shuo would look at me and answer with a perfectly straight face,

“I’m learning to understand you better.”

It sounded like an intimate declaration of love, so I never thought too much about it.

But gradually, I noticed more things that did not add up.

The first was that he almost never ate of his own accord.

When I cooked for two, he took a few bites at most.

Yet he loved taking whatever I had left over and finishing every last bite without batting an eye.

I asked if he was not hungry. A grown man eating so little could not possibly get enough calories.

After thinking for a moment, he replied,

“I don’t need much food. Things you’ve eaten are easier to swallow.”

My face grew hot. For a moment, I could not decide whether to call him a pervert or just ridiculously clingy.

Still, none of that was a serious problem.

After all, my whirlwind-marriage husband was handsome, highly educated, and perfectly compatible with me. A few personal habits were simply a little bizarre.

To love someone was to accept all of them, and I had always prided myself on being broad-minded.

That night, the moment I stepped out of the shower, Qi Shuo pulled the bedroom curtains tightly shut.

Not only did he turn off the lights, he carefully checked the gap beneath the door to make sure no light could seep inside.

I lay on the bed watching him fuss and could not resist teasing him.

“Anyone who didn’t know better would think light could kill you.”

Qi Shuo paused.

“It can’t.”

“Then why are you so particular about this?”

“You’d be afraid.”

I was about to press him, but he had already switched off the final lamp and bent down to kiss me.

In the darkness, he was far clingier than usual, as though making up for rejecting me during the day.

Yet I vaguely sensed that something was wrong.

A faint dragging noise kept coming from the foot of the bed, like something slowly slithering across the floor.

Several times I meant to turn on the light and look, but his kisses made me forget all about it.

We did not go to sleep until very late that night.

Even as I drifted off, I was still thinking hazily that I absolutely had to check under the bed tomorrow and see whether something had really fallen beneath it.