I assure you, a person can identify with the group "people without power" and not care one whit for the wellbeng or safety of those people.
It could well be that Su Ling is aware of how bad it can be because of her experiences, makes perfect sense to me, but that is not enough to motivate a person to try and help people.
My read of your post is that Su Ling is going to transfer her attention from "helping protect people without power" to "other things", due to her identifying with peer group and an us-vs-them mentality.
I am saying that the reasons that she has to prevent the depredations of greater powers upon mortals now, are not going to change because of some tribalism.
Ok, upon reviewing how I wrote my comments, I can see how you got that impression (entirely due to me being bad at explaining). My initial point, that she defended normal people due to her considering part of her in group was, in restrospect wrong.
What I should have argued is that, her considering herself closer to them than to normal cultivator culture is what lead to her initial gesture to help them (helping heal the kid who got sick from the shaman) as she sympathized with how the sect didn't seem to care for the weak. In realizing this she was made aware of the problem, which lead her to pay closer attention to them, which gave some validation to that belief. I doubt that now that she is aware of how her friends become detached from mortals she would allow herself to fall to it, since she reasoned it is wrong already.
Thing is, I got the impression that the things included in a domain are truths that define us. On the mather of things that define her, the motivation for doing things is important, which leads me to question why she protects people. My impression is that the reason that happened is that she noticed the disparity in how cultivators don't seem to care for mortals much, decided she didn't want to be like that and thus acted accordingly. In that sense, her actions comes from Su Ling defining herself in opposition to the common cultivator. In that sense then yes, I do think that her initial acts to protect mortals and her being aware of their issues originally come from her identifying with them but you are right in that now that she is aware of the problem she can define herself beyond such thing as someone who does not want to ignore the plights of mortals due to being too focused on cultivation.
I am still somewhat doubtful though about whether this can be summed as a desire to protect the weak instead of her just remembering that they are people too unlike most cultivators. (Not that cultivators don't think they are people, it is just that they don't think that much about mortals to begin with)
Edit:
...Li Suyin and Su Ling are part of the same group. The only other member one can reasonably count as part of that group is Ling Qi herself.
I think they meant the production track, like that guy who hangs around Li Suyin because they share some projects and has a crush on her. Since the other friend of hers that we know about was Fatty the production track member, that is probably the kind of friends she can make here, people she can talk to about pill production. The alternative is Moon Sempai and scouts from the inner sect since she has her military service still ahead of her and will probably interact with them in the future.
