And also a really interesting reason as to why the truly top-notch Cultivators aren't arrogant assholes that have long since mastered the art of jackassery out of sheer, toxic masculinity/feminity/power-fantasying.
Honestly the simplest explanation for this is one I came across in a WN I started reading pretty recently, and it's just the straightforward "if you're enough of a murderous/annoying jackass for long enough, everyone is going to gang up and kill you". It was specifically put forward as the reason why "demonic" cultivators in the setting usually keep things fairly low-key and don't go full murderhobo, since pasting cities tends to get the righteous cultivators after you for obvious reasons
and other demonic cultivators after you because it makes life harder for them.
I think that the best title translation for that'un is "The Steward Demonic Emperor". It's honestly pretty good, aside from occasional spurts of mild sexism (at least by CN webnovel standards...). I think I first read a bit of it back when only MTL was available and it seemed pretty crappy, but there's a real (or at least competent MTL user) translation floating around now and it turns out that there's a lot of humor that wasn't coming across.
It's a reincarnation-ish type that's handled in a decently interesting way. Fairly high-level demonic cultivator gets betrayed by his only disciple, a bunch of other high-end cultivators trap him to try to steal a thingy, he suicide-bombs them and relies on a secret art that lets his lingering angst possess willing recipients and reconstruct his soul in their body. He wakes up in the body of a bottom-rung servant of a bottom-rung clan all the way down in the mortal world. Fairly standard so far.
It avoids a lot of the usual warning flags: it's just straight up the evil old bastard in the kid's body, no hidden grandpa, no cursed possession, no secret treasure, no young man protagonist or "cheat item" at all, all he's got is his memories of the cultivation methods he knew. That's already a rarity. Without spoiling too much of the plot, he discovers that the clan his new body used to belong to is in the middle of being massacred by their local rivals. He initially intends to just leave, but realizes that when the dead kid made the deal for his body, he was tricky with his wording and basically tricked the protagonist into ensuring the safety of the surviving children of their murdered clan head, the imperative being strong enough that refusing to follow through would cause him to develop a heart demon (which is actually treated seriously -- it's also later explained that demonic cultivators are markedly more vulnerable to that and other sorts of deviations, as their methods tend to be both ethically dubious and prone to taking shortcuts involving lots of self-harm).
What's really miraculous is that the main character not only stays consistent in his characterization rather than devolving into an audience insert, but that he experiences real character development. It's an almost perfect inversion of the usual path: he becomes
less of an abhorrent philandering sociopath as the story goes on and instead starts to develop real relationships and display human emotions.
