The Incense Six Records — Part II, Chapter 8: The Proxy Receiver of Dihua Street

English

The Incense Six Records — Part II, Chapter 8: The Proxy Receiver of Dihua Street

The package carrying the *white* incense was signed for in Taipei's Dihua Street at 3:17 a.m. — by "a proxy," with no name, no phone, only a shophouse address under the arcade. Liu Zhijiang takes the first flight and counts door numbers in the rain until he reaches an unnamed old incense shop, where an old man waits as if he had been expecting him.

The old man tells of *Xie Ji Hao*, an incense house in Bangka during the Daoguang era, whose owner carried one of the six incenses across the sea from Quanzhou and locked it in the bottom of his counter. Asked why he never sold it, the owner answered: *"Sold, it becomes only a price; offered, it becomes only a wish. Left in the counter, it is still incense."*

The old man reveals what Liu Zhijiang never suspected: beneath the three words *"scatter it clean"* in his father's blood ledger, there is a scratched-out line — and the one who scratched it was not his father, but his grandfather. *"Paper remembers,"* the old man says. *"Scraped-away ink leaves a mark."*

He returns the tin box of white incense. Liu Zhijiang leaves, pressing the courier slip onto the counter: *"It has to keep moving — towards a place no one remembers."* In Beijing, Wang Guanshu wakes at dawn to find the purple incense warm in its box with no flame — six fragments of one incense, each remembering its own name, and a seventh thing now searching for them.

*To be continued: Chapter 9 — The Scraped Line.*

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