I just bought the game and it's fun, but
wow do the things about breakthrough not make sense... I have someone cultivating a water art, so I try to have them breakthrough in winter. Winter arrives and their season tooltip says "- 1". I'm like "ok, I just need to wait until it's in the middle of winter. Nope. As winter goes on the negatives just get higher and higher. Negative 5 at the end of winter. I'm not crazy, water = winter, right?
Also, I remember that earth cultivator's seasons are best at the end of each season. As I wait for the last few days of the season to be reached, the "+2" turns into a "+1".... why??? It's closer to the end of the season so it should be increasing, if not already 4-5, right?
Pretty sure someone else mentioned this earlier in the thread, but just to re-state it:
If you come across evil cultivators doing evil shit in a town, the option of "pretend to help them" is - if you can believe it - actually MORE evil than just helping them. Instead of just causing regular evil mayhem, your cultivator follows that up by backstabbing the evil sect and stealing their shit.
Evil points galore and hatred from the sect you just screwed over.
In related news, my evil reputation just got high enough to trigger the next achievement: 'Notorious'.
Also, it bears repeating that the entire event is worded like "you see some evil cultivators slaughtering innocent people for power" and one of the options is "help them."
This option means you will help the evil cultivators with their slaughtering.
If I remember correctly it was "bad things are happening because someone might be practicing the dark arts". So you didn't even identify who was the one practicing. Just that there may have been someone. I had to load an autosave because of that vagueness.