Hearing Ren Ye's warning, Daoist Chu made no rash move. He simply stood where he was, extended his perception, and sniffed carefully. "You're right. There really is a smell of blood...!"
Ren Ye did not answer. He quietly walked over to the wooden cabinet to the left of the bed, bent down, and examined it carefully.
The wooden cabinet looked very much like a Storage Box a woman would use for her underclothes. It was small, roughly the size of a scholar's Bamboo Chest, and stood against the wall. However, there was a gap between the two, about the width of an adult's calf.
Ren Ye reached out with both hands and carefully felt around inside and outside the cabinet, but found nothing unusual. Then, frowning, he tried moving it.
"Creak...!"
The wooden cabinet shifted about half a meter, revealing the slightly moldy white wall behind it. Ren Ye lowered his head and immediately spotted a strangely shaped bloody finger mark on the section of wall the cabinet had concealed, on the side nearest the bed.
The bloody finger mark resembled some special symbol, or perhaps the opening stroke or radical of a character. From Ren Ye's angle, it looked roughly like "丿."
Ren Ye raised his right arm and touched the bloody mark resembling "丿" with a fingertip. After examining it with his perception, he turned back and said, "It's blood. But not a cultivator's. A mortal's."
Daoist Chu paused, then immediately replied, "Lu Zhao's lover was a mortal who hadn't awakened."
Ren Ye returned the cabinet to its place and said tersely, "Let's search separately. We leave in half an incense stick."
"Right!"
Having faced life and death together several times, the two had long since developed a rapport ordinary people lacked. They rarely spoke in situations like