Hello, and thank you for your comments and analysis. Where your criticisms apply, I'll correct my mistakes; where they don't, I'll take them as encouragement to do better. I can offer some explanations for the questions you raised, based only on material that has already appeared as of the latest chapter, without any spoilers.
Also, I think this reader's questions are fairly representative, and other readers may share them, so I'm posting a separate chapter in reply so that more readers with these doubts can see it.
The opposition between the righteous and the demonic.
This was also the point you brought up most often in your review. What needs clarifying is that, in this book, the righteous and the demonic do not have a life-or-death relationship in which one cannot exist alongside the other. This is extremely important. With demons around, those of the Righteous Path can still become immortals; with the Righteous Path around, Demon Fiends can also become immortals. The two are not enemies on the Great Dao, and that needs to be made clear.
Then what distinguishes the righteous from the demonic, and what causes their conflicts? The book defines the Demon Path as follows: those who can indiscriminately kill people for their own cultivation. "People" here includes both mortals and cultivators, and they can use people to cultivate arts and refine artifacts, such as the Blood Shadow Divine Light and the White Bone Soul-Locking Hammer.
If someone indiscriminately kills demons, spirits, ghosts, or monsters without cause to refine artifacts or cultivate arts, that can still be considered outside the demonic sects-at most, it is merely an unorthodox path.
Then what is the Righteous Path? One's own cultivation does not harm other people's lives, and outside of cultivation, one is willing to help mortals and regulate