The marks still looked fresh. Of course, that couldn't be taken as a reliable measure, since all the rooms were brand-new and showed no signs of anyone having lived in them.
After looking around the room, Xu Huo picked up a shard from the teapot that had been smashed into the corner.
As he continued onward, he gradually worked out some patterns. After entering through the main gate, the first courtyard was a dead end as soon as he opened a door; elsewhere, he could pass through three courtyards before reaching another point where he couldn't turn back. He took a flowerpot from the first room where he couldn't go back, a teacup from the second, and a teapot from the third... In the rooms after that, he took objects from different spots as markers.
After two or three cycles in which turning back was impossible, the furnishings in the rooms changed. The tea room became a bedroom, then the bedroom became a dining room, and the dining room became a living room. Though the room types varied, the farther he went, the more objects there were in each room.
He also found marks left by others in different rooms: a notch beneath a wicker basket, and in other rooms, marks on the inside of a bed leg, underneath a chair, or on the stand holding a flowerpot. At first, he hadn't thought the "horizontal lines" counted as marks, since later carvings included the numbers "3" and "4."
If someone had come through here and left marks as they went, they should normally have numbered them in the order they passed through. Since some numbers were skipped, Xu Huo's route must have differed from the route taken by whoever carved the numbers. And the rooms with carvings weren't the ones