Ninefold Fragrance

[Highlight: These are short stories I wrote as a clueless teenager over ten years ago, back in middle and high school. I dug them out of some dusty corner, brushed them off, and put them here for myself. Extremely old-fashioned and ridiculously melodramatic, they all have bad endings and no logic whatsoever. They are just lovesick moaning about love: I love him, he loves her, she loves him. Don't read them.] If you were nothing more than an inanimate object, have you ever wondered what it would be like to drift through the world just like a person, tasting every sweetness and bitterness, every love and hate, and having thoughts and actions of your own? The ancient secret art of Ninefold Incense can turn objects into human beings: a flower lantern, a jade pendant, a spear, a paper umbrella, an antique mirror, a copper lock... They can all become people of flesh and blood, and meet the one destined for them in this mortal world... The only price is a terrible death. A red-clad woman who has lived for thousands of years grants their wishes time and again, witnessing one parting between life and death after another and repeatedly gathering incense ingredients. Is it all for the obsession she cannot erase from her heart? A wisp of Ninefold Incense, a play of life and death. Premise: Loving and losing, remembering youth.