This ritual had a tracking radius of roughly five hundred meters. If Li Wen found nothing beyond that range, she would pretend she had never seen any of this.
But fate seemed determined to drag her into it.
Li Wen had not gone far before making a new discovery.
She had already entered the forest, where towering spruces stood everywhere.
Behind a strange crooked tree lay a fresh corpse, face down.
Judging by the body, the deceased was a woman. A wound deep enough to expose bone ran across her back. On an ordinary person, a wound of that severity would be fatal from blood loss alone.
Yet when Li Wen stepped closer and checked her pulse, she discovered that this person was somehow still breathing.
Li Wen considered it. An ordinary person had suffered such a wound, made it here from the village entrance, and still retained a breath after more than ten hours...
Almost instantly, Li Wen retreated away from the woman and raised her Bone Knife, ready to enchant it at any moment.
Yet one second passed... then ten... then a full minute, and the person on the ground still did not move in the slightest.
Was she being overly cautious?
Just as Li Wen thought that, a shrill, hoarse voice came from above.
"If you wait any longer, she really will die."
Li Wen looked up warily. In the darkness of night, a withered, gaunt figure stood on a tree branch, her dim eyes like two faint candles in the dark. Li Wen was certain that no one had been there just moments ago.
"You helped her?" Li Wen sounded especially puzzled. What puzzled her even more was that she recognized the person in the tree—it was Granny Marsha, the Ghost Fairy from the Fey Market.