October 1937, Shanghai. There is also a lamp lit in the Shen family's dressing room during the day - it is the ancestral bronze soul lamp "Lighting the Night".
Sixteen-year-old Shen Chideng is afraid of the dark, ghosts, and hearing dead people talk. But a bombing took away his entire family: his father died on the battlefield, and his sister died protecting him on the first seven nights. Overnight, he became the last line of soul attracters. In the lamp, lived the sister who was reluctant to leave, and the heroic souls of the Sichuan army who were burned out one after another.
The duty of a soul guide is to "require souls", but Deng'er is pushed to the path of "using souls". The hero's soul can appear for a short time, and its fighting power is the same as before life; but once the soul power is burned out, it will be gone and there will be no reincarnation - every time the lamp is lit, it is an invitation to the martyr to die again.
From Songhu to Nanjing, and from Nanjing to Taierzhuang, he carried this lamp and fled westward with the refugees. Heroic souls appeared, fought, and disappeared in front of his eyes. He only left a last wish before leaving: "Look at my mother for me." "I haven't seen it snowing in Peking yet." When he saw that among the resentful souls driven by the enemy, there were actually captured Chinese workers, he took action for the first time - not to kill the enemy, but to let the souls return home.
On the eve of the fall of Nanjing, Hun Leng could have protected him across the river alone. Wang Tieshan, the company commander of the Sichuan Army, made the decision for him: "My child, the lamp is to protect people, not you."
The lights dimmed one by one, and the boy grew up inch by inch. He finally understood: Martyrs can protect us for a journey, but they cannot protect us for the rest of our lives; the real calling of souls is when a living person takes over the gun.
Years later, a child asked what was in the empty lamp. The old man replied - "There is no soul in the lamp. The soul is in the bodies of forty million people."
