Agarwood Six Records, Part Two · Volume Eight: The Collector of Dihua Street

Agarwood Six Records, Part Two · Volume Eight: The Collector of Dihua Street

The rain in Taipei is softer than the rain in the Capital, falling on the arcade tiles of Dihua Street almost without a sound.

Liu Zhiqiang raised his phone screen for Wang Wanshu to see. The receipt record on the delivery platform read 3:17 a.m.—"collected on behalf." Two characters; no name, no phone number, only one arcade address: Dihua Street, Section One, a certain number.

"Three seventeen." Wang Wanshu read it aloud. "Couriers don't deliver parcels at three seventeen in the morning." "So it wasn't a courier who collected it." Liu Zhiqiang put the phone away. "Someone was waiting there." He booked the earliest flight of the next day. When he landed at Songshan Airport the rain still had not stopped; holding that black umbrella with its broken rib (Wen Ye had thrust it into his hands before leaving), he counted the door numbers one by one along the arcade of Dihua Street. Dihua Street is an old street: dried goods from north and south, Chinese medicinal herbs, and tea shops crowd beneath Baroque facades, the air mingled with the smells of danggui (Angelica sinensis), star anise, and old wood.

The shop he was looking for had no signboard. Its wooden door stood ajar; inside was an old incense shop, a row of tin boxes on the counter—of exactly the same style as those at the Liuxiangtang in Kyoto.

Behind the counter sat an old man, weighing a small pinch of incense powder on a bronze scale. Seeing Liu Zhiqiang, he did not look up. "Been waiting a long time." "Is the White Ranjatai with you?" "It's with me." The old man tipped the incense powder into a paper packet. "But sit down first. Watch the rain." Liu Zhiqiang did not sit. The old man did not press him either, and went on talking to himself: "In the Daoguang era, there was an incense house in Mengjia called 'Xiehaoji,' dealing only in incense from Tangshan (the mainland across the strait). Its proprietor was surnamed Chen; he had crossed the sea from Quanzhou, bringing with him one of the six pieces of agarwood—the white one. He never sold it, and never offered it in worship; he simply locked it in the bottom of his counter. Some called him a fool—one piece of agarwood could buy half a street." "Did he ever say why?" "He did." The old man finally raised his eyes. "He said: once the incense is sold, only the price remains; once it is offered, only the wish remains. Left in the bottom of the counter, it remains incense." Liu Zhiqiang's fingers tightened where the umbrella's rib was broken.

"Then why do you collect it on someone else's behalf?" he asked. "At three seventeen in the morning, you stand at the door waiting for a piece of agarwood that doesn't belong to you." The old man smiled. "Because it has already traveled once. Nine hundred years ago it scattered out of Bianliang, by sea and by land, until it reached this street. Now it is on the road again—the second time. The three words 'Scatter it clean' do not mean 'scatter it and have done with it'—they mean scatter it until no one remembers it can be gathered. Yet every time it travels, one more person remembers." He brought a tin box out from beneath the counter and pushed it across. The lid was open; inside lay a piece of white wood the color of congealed tallow, its resin lines fine as brushstrokes.

"Your father's book of blood debts," the old man said, "there are words beneath the last page, aren't there?" Liu Zhiqiang's breath stopped for half a beat.

"Three words—'Scatter it clean.' And beneath them another line, scraped off." The old man knocked a knuckle against the counter. "The one who scraped it was not your father. It was your grandfather. He feared your father would see it, so he scraped it away. But paper has memory—ink that has been scraped away still presses out its trace." Liu Zhiqiang thought of that rainy night, of the line at the end of Volume Six: "just three words—'Scatter it clean.'" He had always believed that was the end.

"What did the scraped-off line say?" he asked.

The old man shook his head. "I don't know. The paper is in your hands; I do not read words in others' stead. I only keep incense in others' stead." The rain suddenly grew a little heavier, dripping in a string from the tile-edge of the arcade. Liu Zhiqiang closed the tin box and held it in his arms. As he rose, he drew the delivery slip from his pocket and pressed it onto the counter.

"It still has to travel," he said.

"Where to?" "To a place no one remembers." The old man did not keep him. Liu Zhiqiang walked out from under the arcade; raindrops beat against the umbrella, the broken black rib trembling lightly in the wind. He looked down at what he held in his arms—the tin box was cool, yet the side against his chest had slowly, faintly, grown warm.

Meanwhile, in the Capital.

Wang Wanshu woke with a start in the small hours. The brocade case in her arms gave off a faint warmth in the darkness—the Purple Ranjatai, no fire, warm of itself. She lifted it open the merest sliver; the powdery richness of its floral fragrance poured out, heavier than usual, as if something were turning over inside the incense.

She dialed Liu Zhiqiang's number—off. She dialed Wen Ye's—off; he was still flying toward Nara.

She stared at the rain outside the window and suddenly understood: the six pieces of agarwood were never six. They were six petals split from a single piece of agarwood, nine hundred years apart, each remembering its own name.

And at this moment, a seventh thing was searching for them.

— Part Two, Volume Eight · The End

> This is an original serialized story from *Agarwood Six Records*; characters and plot are fictional. Common knowledge of agarwood and aromatics herein is compiled from public materials and does not constitute investment or medical advice.