The Lantern Keeper of the Vigil Hall

In the Qingwu Sect, there are ninety-nine eternal lamps. On Shouzhuo Peak, when someone dies, their lamp goes out. This task falls to Yu Jin. He has tended the lamps for four years, earning thirty wen a month. Everyone in the sect calls him a waste—his heart is missing a窍, and he cannot even draw in qi at the first layer of Qi Refinement. But no one knows he has been hiding for two years. On the night the night watchman died, the ninety-ninth lamp went out by itself. He pried open the hand and found half a white jade hairpin clutched in the palm, its broken end embedded with an iron filing. It was cut by a blade. Then he heard a voice resounding in the gap in his heart. "Help me return the hairpin to her." When a cultivator dies with unfinished business, their lingering thought does not disperse but attaches to a relic and condenses into a speck of ash called Nian Jin. The very gap Yu Jin is missing happens to be the path through which Nian Jin enters. Refining one grants him a fragment of the deceased's cultivation, a glimpse of their experiences, and a residual move. The cost is to complete their unfinished task within ten days; if he fails, the ash will burn inside his chest. He only wants to tend the lamps quietly and save enough money to leave the mountain. But that senior brother from the outer sect is stepping on the relics of the dead and demanding a hundred wen "vigil fee" from him. He paid. And he made a mental note. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The Lantern Keeper of the Vigil Hall — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠