The Perfumer of the Tongyou Fragrance Shop

First comes the incense marrow, second the incense skin, third the incense flesh and fourth the incense soul…

Fifth, greed; sixth, wrath; seventh, delusion; eighth, gratitude…

Ninth, burning away… the anguish of reincarnation…

The tenth incense… is the void she wrenched from her own soul…

My name is Shen Heng, and I run an incense shop on an old street in Yingkou.

I sell incense by day and ferry souls by night. Nine kinds of incense, exchanged for nine kinds of obsession.

Greed, anger, delusion, love, hate, passion, vengeance, life, and death: as long as you can pay the price, I can give them to you.

I don’t take money, only “interest.” You’ll spend your whole life paying it back.

I’ve seen too many people weigh and auction off their conscience while alive, then turn into ghosts who suddenly know how to follow the rules.

The Black Impermanence’s chains come with QR codes, the City God’s Temple has become an office building, and new ghosts still bow and say, “I haven’t paid off my loan yet.”

She asked the King of Hell: Why can’t we tell humans and ghosts apart?

The King of Hell pointed outside the window. There, the living were colder than the dead.

Then one day, a criminal investigator pushed open the door, carrying an old wound from four hundred years ago.

He asked, “Do you owe me, or do I owe you?”

I held my candied hawthorn skewer and smiled, tilting my head.

“First, tell me: what are you willing to offer as payment?”

Before he could answer, the five immortals in my inner temple started fighting.

And things got even more complicated: the snake immortal who had guarded me for twenty years seemed to be… jealous.