"Preliminary note 1": All Dao lineages, palaces, and monasteries mentioned in this chapter are fictional adaptations within an imaginary setting and have no connection to reality. Also, the Quanzhen ancestral court in Yan-Zhao in this book has been renamed from "White Cloud Monastery" to "Everlasting Spring Palace." Earlier text has been revised, and subsequent text will use this name. This note is to clarify the change.
"Preliminary note 2": The latest map of the situation is in the comments on this sentence.
The main text follows.
"Compared with our Eastern Path and Western Xuan, the Northern Path is indeed somewhat weaker."
So said Marshal Yuan.
"Before the Song, Daoist sects North of the Yangtze were not prosperous. Since the Great Virtuous Teacher founded the Way of Great Peace, there followed the northward spread of the Celestial Master Dao, the rise of Louguan Dao, the northward spread of the Cinnabar Cauldron Sect, the rise of the Northern Celestial Master Dao, the northward spread of the Shangqing Sect, the rise of the northern school of internal alchemy, and so on. But it was always a case of one leaving the stage as another took it. People gathered and scattered, and they struggled to take lasting root in the North and establish anything on the scale of an Immortal Sect ancestral court.
"This continued until the end of the Northern Song, when True Lord Kaihua burst onto the scene. He unified and absorbed the finest remnants of the Northern Path, explicitly proposed the doctrine of 'knowing the mind and seeing one's nature, preserving one's true self alone,' promoted the Golden Core path of self-cultivation, and founded the Quanzhen Sect. Only then did it swiftly sweep across the North, practically dividing north and south equally with the Orthodox Unity Dao and becoming an exoteric