[x] Oublie, the Eternal Deeps; a strange place dominated by thousands of pocket spirit realms
There are many ways to have horrible things happen to you if you're a mortal in a xianxia world.
If you're near someone who's decided to go with "eat all the mortals" cultivation, though, it's pretty much guaranteed.
The righteous sects are better than the demonic sects because if you go to work for the righteous sects, you might live.
Black-and-Grey morality, and all that.
In very broad terms I think you get the following result:
-Righteous - This is mainly a PR term, but the thing with keeping a positive reputation is that most of your members would behave in line with what is publicly considered a boon by others, and so your general Sect level direction is to behave in righteous ways and take righteous stances.
-Demonic - This is ALSO mainly a PR term, albeit one that few would choose to embrace due to a lack of social benefits. So most Demonic sects are mostly going to be those sects where their core cultivation means that everyone would see them as enemies regardless(i.e. you actually HAVE to eat or torture people, so you might as well get good at it)...or Sects that pissed off the local power enough to be declared demonic/in rebellion, and might as well go for the forbidden powerups since their reputation is toast anyway.
-Orthodox - This is a culture term. Orthodox just means you follow normal culture trappings of status and social norms. You have, or at least pretend to have heritage, pedigree and probably sponsorship or alliance from one of the other orthodox sects.
-Unorthodox - This is for those that don't bother to even pretend to follow the culture norms. Nudist cultivators, poison cultivators, masochist cultivators, etc. They generally have a poor reputation or none at all, but nobody actually thinks they are evil, just weird.
-Heretical/Deviant - This is really only in relation to another sect, where they take the core practices of the parent sect and changed them in ways the parent doesn't like. Very often demonic or unorthodox, mostly coz the more influential parent sect is going to shit on them wherever possible.
-Mercenary/Mercantile - These guys provide essential services like drugs, transport, and raw materials, but nobody respects them because they only want to grow their fiscal portfolio rather than go for cosmic power.
