Lord of Tree

Ah Cheng wrote two things into one man and called him the Tree King.

There is the tree — a hundred years of growth, bark fermenting into resin, red myrrh and Japanese cypress deep in the trunk. And there is the keeper who won't let anyone cut it: thick scarred hands, an axe handled like a fine blade, plain-spoken and quick to anger.

The bright green belongs to him. Yunnan lime, Chinese orange leaves, the cold camphor snap of Hong Kong borneol, carnation like something pinned to a work shirt. The bitterness belongs to the tree. Tibetan wormwood, Austrian hops, fir bark well past its prime. Neither of them wins.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.