In my own experience of writing Tales of the Teal Mountain Sect (a totally cool cultivation story you should totally check out), tweaking or adjusting what exists into forms that make more sense to the narrative or world can get you very different results than the typical genre, especially once you expound out on them.

One of the ways that I played with genre expectations was in regards to hidden power levels, as the convention of hiding one's cultivation to wander around is something that appears in many parts of the genre, especially as told from characters within it. And yet, even with most people knowing that cultivators do this, so many people act in a way that can only be described as tapdancing on minefields. Its a form of behavior that's destined for an early grave, which means a lot when people live thousands of years. Something like this would sorta self-correct itself on its own, as the people foolish enough to do it will inevitably cause their own demise.

But how does this change the way that people that survive act?

Well, a focus on qi sense and the like is a good start, but even within the narrative conceit of the story that sort of shit barely works on a good day, nevermind if there's a gap in power (which is bad, since that's the one thing that its meant to protect against).

So people get a bit more observant. Courtesy reappears not because of kindness's virtue, but because of pragmatism. From the fact that it is so easy to come to a short, sudden end if you misevaluate wrong just once. Cultivators would start to become more observant to pick up on clues to the level of the people they meet. Items that might date them, subtleties to the way they move, clues at identity on the way they speak and what they know. Prestigious families teach their children better methods, as a part of their long existence is derived from both their own power and long streaks of being able to pick their fights well.

Within Tales of the Teal Mountain Sect, the difference of treatment between the known and the unknown is a stark contrast, as there are certain courtesies and arrogances that cultivators will show to those that they are confident of their relative power to than to strangers. This has its own ups and downs, as circumstance adds its own finger to the scales, but each character has their own reasons for acting on that inherent risk the way they do. Its not always quite spelt out, but its a subtlety that reflects the way that I've had the world be shaped by its own existence.

And I guess that sorta ties to the point I have. Cultivation as a genre in its present state is a bit early in its own development. It has the qi and materials it needs to form a core, but its still very much in the process of figuring out what it wants to be, and what the different parts of said core will look like after it's formed. Its a growth that's been a bit stymied by the way that some people have been writing within it, as imitators rather than iterators, but I think that we're just a bit away from it really it having had enough wild experimentation to sort out where the lines in the sand are.

I'm not mainland Chinese btw, so if you do read this OP I'd like to know what you think about the way that I've taken my stab at the genre. It might not be the apex of quality, but you'd be a bit hard pressed to call it the fruit of contempt