Borrow a Lamp

In the third hundred and twenty-seventh year of the Gray Year, the light in the sky was extinguished. The spiritual energy is gone, the immortal is gone, but people still have to live. You have to cultivate while you are alive—cultivation is a trick: borrowing the embers of heaven and earth, borrowing the unwillingness of the dead, and borrowing the old nature of objects. Every bit of strength borrowed must be paid for by something on one's body: skin, bones, blood, memory, longevity, and name. Lu Qingyuan is the son of a porter in Xiahewan. When he was eighteen years old, he took up his father's carrying pole. He was born without embers—the most useless thing in the world. But he can see the results. You can see the erosion marks left by borrowing force on others, and you can also see the account in Heaven and Earth that no one can see. In this life, he had worked hard, been sent as a slave, his mother and sister had died, he had been sold and carried on his back. He married three women: the first one cut him open in the heart, the second one took care of his accounts for twenty years, and the third one put her life in his hands. He was always accompanied by a scholar who was coughing up blood, copying letters, managing money, and carving names for the dead. The scholar didn't have any strength in his body and he had to stop after taking two steps. Three hundred years later, in the stone house under the Sky Trace, the scholar was copying names. He copied one hundred and fourteen thousand and sixty-two. ——There is no immortal in this world. Only one porter's son settled the accounts for everyone.