This story begins with the death of a soldier in his old age (the protagonist), then his soul gets captured by a cultivator who makes puppet-like monsters for his revenge or so. The evil cultivator fails and the protagonist manages to escape somehow in his soul form. He then replaces the soul of a newborn to get reincarnated? Then he grows up in that village as his new life, though his family thinks that he is weird cause he is quite mature for his age. His slice of life story comes to an end when his village is again destroyed and all most all villagers massacred by cultivators from some sect. Those cultivators see the anomaly in his soul and bring him to their sect for one of the masters there might be interested in his abnormal soul. So, he works there as a disciple or a servant (I am not sure). His work includes working with corpses. He dissects them to learn about the meridians in their bodies in a somewhat modern scientific away. Thus he gains faster cultivation speed. when the sect is attacked he escapes with his fellow companions of corpse dissecting club. He forms a wandering group that is escaping from the control of the sect. They eventually get on an island with many tribes with problems with drinking water that causes some kind of problem with their bodies. I remember till here. The protagonist is an American, I am not sure though.