Mr. Shen was a little afraid to admit it, but of course he didn't want to admit it more.
"This is...it's your hand," Baomu pointed to Mr. Shen's empty sleeve, "You should be able to recognize it."
How do you identify it? How do you identify it?
"No...no..." Mr. Shen shook his shoulders from side to side, "How is this possible?"
Baomu expressed regret with a tilt of his head, "But they do belong to you."
"But how could my hands attack me? How could they...how could they move?"
"I think they may have been affected by some kind of force," the fool said, "just like the man who committed suicide, he was possessed by something in the mountains... Do you still remember what the man looked like when he committed suicide?"
The last words were directed at Baomu.
Baomu nodded slowly, lowering his head and thinking about something.
"I suspect that they were affected by the same force," the fool continued, "This knife is the key. The man committed suicide with this knife. Your hand is also afraid of this knife."
The knife that passed across the two skeletons was the Swiss Army knife the man used when he committed suicide.
"When did you get this knife?" Mr. Shen shrank back, still a little hesitant.
"Ah, I took it while you weren't paying attention...otherwise you would be scared when you saw it."
When Mr. Shen saw that his thoughts were revealed, he straightened his neck and pretended to be fearless.
"Anyway, your hand is back." The fool took off the skeleton hand from the blade of the saber and handed it to Mr. Shen, "Put it away."
"I...this..." Mr. Shen had no intention of accepting the pile of bones.
"What's wrong?"
"I thought about it, but I still feel that they no longer belong to me," Mr. Shen sighed. "What I want to find are my hands that know how to play the piano, not hands that want to kill people."
"Then you are really overthinking," the fool withdrew his skeleton hand, "You have always been the one who knows the piano, it is your own heart and brain, what do your hands know?"
Mr. Shen stared blankly at the fool's face, as if he had been hit by something.
"Myself..."
"Really, Baomu... Baomu? What are you doing?" The fool turned his head and happened to see Baomu's weird state.
Baomu raised his head slightly, as if thinking, but the fool noticed Baomu's twitching nose.
"What do you smell?" He stood up quickly.
Baomu closed his eyes and pointed at random, "That direction."
"What is it?"
"It's a bit strange..." Baomu rubbed his nose, "A bit familiar, but not completely familiar..."
What is that?
The two of them were confused by what Bao Mu said. At this moment, a rustling sound suddenly came from the tent behind them.
"Ouch!"
A faint beam of light emerged from between the tent zippers, and accompanied by the rustling sound of his little paws on the grass, the child of light excitedly ran to his owner's side, scratching Baomu's trouser legs with his two front paws.
"Xiaoguang?" Baomu bent down and took the child of light into his arms, "You smelled it too, right?"
The Son of Light wiped his eyes. Apparently he had just woken up. He licked the treasure tree and then barked twice in that direction.
"It seems that it also recognizes that smell," the fool helped Mr. Shen up and protected him behind him, "Is it one person? Or a group of people?"
"Actually, it doesn't look like a human being..." Baomu frowned, and his eyes fell on the Son of Light. Seeing its happy expression wagging its tail, the answer to the question suddenly appeared, "I remembered it! Gecko!"
"gecko?"
"Yes! It's the smell of that gecko!" Baomu looked sideways, "It's the dead gecko that was brought back by the Son of Light."
Not long after, a tiny golden light shone from afar in the dark jungle. The golden light, carrying the scent of the mother's body, was moving rapidly towards them.
***
The Taoist priest and Luo Jiutian stared blankly at the ashes on the ground, not knowing what to say.
"These dusts..." Luo Jiutian said, his voice a little hoarse, "Is it left by the mountain fire, or was he just..."
"It's the ashes from before," the Taoist leader said resolutely. "It was on the ground when we came in. The village chief burned it cleanly, leaving nothing behind."
"Does normal fire do this?"
"Of course not," the Taoist priest squatted down and picked up his two charms from the ashes. "This fire can't burn anything else. It's a strange fire."
"I was wondering," Luo Jiutian swallowed, "is the little boy at the foot of the mountain also...otherwise, how could he suddenly disappear?"
The Taoist priest nodded heavily, "It's possible."
He shook off the dust on the charm and carefully put it back into his pocket, looking a little happy.
Luo Jiutian sighed helplessly. It seemed that no matter how much yellow talisman and cinnabar his father gave to the Taoist priest, he could not cure his poverty.
"The clues here are also broken," the Taoist priest turned around and put on his serious look again, "It's almost dawn, Jiutian, let's go directly to the ancestral hall."
After walking around the village road for a few times, the Taoist leader finally pointed to a chimney not far away that was slightly higher than other houses, "That's it."
"That's the Fire Lotus, right?" Luo Jiutian immediately understood the true identity of the chimney, "The crematorium?"
"That's right."
Unlike other buildings in the village, the ancestral hall is almost all made of wood. The gate and pillars have long since collapsed and turned into charcoal leaning among the weeds. The main structure of the ancestral hall has also become a ruin.
The corpse furnace is now the only surviving part of the entire ancestral hall.
The two bypassed the charcoal at the door and entered the territory belonging to the ancestral hall.
"Which way should we go around?" Luo Jiutian looked at the paths on both sides.
"No, we won't go around." The Taoist priest stared straight at the dark ruins. "We will enter the ancestral hall and pass through it."
"Want to go in? It looks like it might collapse."
Although Luo Jiutian was worried about the crumbling roof and beams, he still followed the Taoist priest's footsteps.
"It won't collapse. There is a bronze statue enshrined in the ancestral hall and it is supported by the bronze statue."
"You didn't tell me about the bronze statue."
"I didn't think it was that important before," the Taoist priest bent down and stepped over the wood at the door, "but when I saw the statue of the prophet enshrined in the village chief's house just now, I suddenly felt that... it might not be that simple."
"Are the two statues the same?"
"I don't remember exactly," the Taoist priest said, "but I remember that when we first saw the bronze statue, we felt something was wrong, but there were too many things that happened later that delayed it."
The two were walking in the half-collapsed temple. The ground was covered with debris left by burning wood. The roof and walls were in tatters. It seemed that there was a danger of a second collapse at any time.