My Incense Spirit Can Communicate with the Gods

I can smell the “illness” in people.

Anxiety smells sour, desire is cloying, and despair has the scent of rotting wood.

But the fragrance clinging to my grandmother, the one keeping her asleep and unable to wake, is a cold sweetness.

My name is Su Hezhen. I'm a hapless soul who runs a shabby incense shop and scrimps and saves to try to save my grandmother.

Then one day, a man reeking of the “scent of the dead” collapsed at my door.

Right after that, the authorities' Night Watchers kicked in my door.

They pointed to my family's battered old incense burner and said it housed a spirit capable of purifying evil, and that I was the only one who could awaken it.

An ancient organization called the Fragrance Pursuit Pavilion emerged from the shadows. They wield incense as blades and weave dreams into cages, dragging the entire city into a nightmare.

For my grandmother's sake, I had no choice but to open the difficult-to-understand Fragrant Manual of Subtlety.

For the first time, I used my blood as a catalyst to burn incense and commune with spirits.

The cloying nightmare dissolved in the crisp fragrance, and the spirit sleeping in the burner answered me.

Jiang Tingyun, the Night Watch captain who always wore a cold expression, looked utterly stunned for the first time in front of me.

“Who are you, really?”

I looked at the wound on my palm, still oozing blood, and the warm, docile light inside the burner.

“I guess... I'm just an incense seller?”

Later, when the Fragrance Pursuit Pavilion's shadow spread across the city and countless people became puppets amid the incense,

I stood at the city's highest point. Behind me, the incense of world-purification I had lit shrouded heaven and earth.

Jiang Tingyun wielded a long agarwood sword, cleaved through the last patch of filth, and came to stand beside me. He declared to the hidden enemy, “She guards the day with her incense. I guard her through the incense-scented night.”

[Mystery + Intangible Cultural Heritage + Urban Supernatural Tales + Comeback from Desperate Odds]