He really couldn't find one.
Jiangnan City's Buddhist atmosphere was truly intense. There was a temple every three streets and a pagoda forest every five, with incense burning strong and devout believers everywhere. Everywhere he looked, there were compassionate images; everywhere he listened, there were pious prayers. Of the four hundred and eighty temples of Jiangnan, every tower and terrace was steeped in Jinling Incense.
But Yan Qing couldn't find anywhere to offer incense.
Even the first temple he encountered could be considered generous. At several of the later temples, the minimum offering was five spirit jades. There wasn't even a cheap one-jade stick of incense.
At first, Yan Qing was somewhat angry and wanted to argue with those money-grubbing monks. But later, he stopped caring. Whenever he saw that a temple only offered expensive incense, he simply turned around and left.
It wasn't that he couldn't afford expensive incense. It was that temples filled with the stench of money weren't worthy of his worship.
To be honest, at Yan Qing's current rate of farming a thousand spirit jades in half an hour, the time he had wasted already far exceeded the price of a stick of incense. But that was the kind of person Yan Qing was. When playing games, he could be utterly merciless and put efficiency above all else. Yet if he thought something was worthwhile, he could also spend dozens or hundreds of times as long pursuing some insignificant result.
For example, in Chinese Paladin 1, there was a rumor that collecting ninety-nine Puppet Worms could save Lin Yueru, so he tried it. In Red Dead Redemption 2, he completed every challenge while exploiting a bug so Arthur could wear the Eastern Legend Outfit. In Black Myth: Wukong, after seeing Fourth Sister get captured, he had