As he spoke, Lord Xu pointed to the bed again: "The one lying on the bed is Hao-ge'er's wet nurse. She looks like she's fast asleep, her expression is very calm, and her hands are folded over her stomach. She was covered with a quilt at the time. At the foot of the bed is another maid. I saw her; she was sitting against the edge of the bed. She must have been about to light incense to repel insects when she somehow fainted. There are unlit incense sticks and a tinderbox on the floor in front of her, and there's a small incense burner in the corner over there."
Gu Xin went over to take a look and, sure enough, the incense and tinder on the ground had not been moved by anyone, and the small incense burner was also quietly there.
Gu Xin squatted down, picked up the incense, and smelled it. It was indeed an insect-repelling incense.
She opened the lid of the small incense burner again. It was clean inside, with no incense ash. Perhaps the maid of the Wang family was using her own incense burner, or perhaps she had borrowed a new one from the temple. In any case, there was no incense burner in the room next door.
Gu Xin examined the items the four people had brought. They were all normal items, and there were obvious signs of use, so they didn't look like they had been rummaged through.
"Don't they have any fatal wounds?" Gu Xin asked.
"No." Lord Xu nodded heavily.
The reason he insisted on reporting the case to the capital and waiting for someone from the capital to investigate was because the deaths of the victims in this case were too bizarre.
He dared not move anything rashly, for fear of destroying the evidence or losing the clues by carelessly touching something.
"Let's go to the next room," Gu Xin said, pursing her lips.
The next room was the room of two old women who served the old lady. They lived in a small room on the other side of the main hall.
On the other side of the main hall, there are four rooms in total. Lord Wang and his wife live in one room, the old lady lives in another, young mistress Wang and Hao-ge live in another, and the remaining small room is where the two old women live.
Because the old lady was old and might need someone to take care of her at any time, the old woman's room was right next to the old lady's, and a door was even built in the wall between the two rooms. This was specially built by Hongyuan Temple to make it convenient for those who needed care.
Gu Xin entered through the small room where the two old women lived.
In this small room, there are two small beds, separated by a small square wooden cabinet that is the same height as the beds.
The room smells; it smells like insect repellent.
The small bed in this room is a canopy bed. Gu Xin squatted down and could see the insects that had been killed by the incense under the bed.
There was no smell of blood in the room, but there were bloodstains on the bed. Perhaps the scent of the insect repellent masked the smell of blood, or perhaps the window was too big and the smell had dissipated after a day.
"Lord Xu, was the incense still burning when you arrived?" Gu Xin asked.
"It was burning. I didn't pay much attention at the time. It was only when someone came to move the body that I noticed smoke coming from the incense burner. I didn't take the liberty of extinguishing it and just let it burn," said Lord Xu.
"No," Gu Xin said, shaking her head as she picked up the small incense burner from the bedside table.
"Did I do something wrong?" Lord Xu asked guiltily.
"No. This small incense burner is exactly the same as the one in the maid's room. Moreover, there's too much ash inside; it doesn't look like what you'd expect from burnt insect repellent incense," Gu Xin said in a deep voice.
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