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Amongst the cultivation sects, they say that once a disciple leaves Bàoshān Sǎnrén's mountain, they can never return. This is true, but not for the reasons they think.
What they think is that Baoshan Sanren is a harsh ascetic master, who disdains the outside world and wants purity of thought, who will tolerate no rebellion That her immortality has left her disliking change. That she plucks children from the streets and vanishes with them forever.
The truth is threefold. First, the exit from the mountain is one-way. Bàoshān Sǎnrén plucks no children from the streets to return to her mountain, although she does sometimes relocate them to orphanages or new families, and all her disciples are born in the mountain.
Second, the reason the disciples leave is not rebellion, but necessity. The mountain can only feed and house so many people, and that number was calculated well before Bàoshān Sǎnrén was brought into existence, even if she sometimes runs the math again, hoping for more time with a particular favourite who has chosen to leave, and while Bàoshān Sǎnrén does her best to control the population growth, that also has consequences. There is no point in attempting to return if the reason you left has not been solved, even if you could find a way in.
Cangse Sanren never admitted anyone but her husband that the reason she left was not a desire to see the world, but the unbearable longing for a child and the knowledge that there was no resources or room for Bàoshān Sǎnrén to give her a special child, and she was too closely related to her shixiong and shidi to attempt the normal method of attaining one, even if any of them had appealed.
Third, it is not purity of thought, but purity of body that ensures Bàoshān Sǎnrén will never attempt to make the exit function as an entrance. It takes months of quarantine, sitting in a small building near the exit, being vaccinated, and adjusting to the environment, and being monitored by Bàoshān Sǎnrén, before any of the disciples that chose to leave are permitted to step off the mountain. Some never do, brought low by fevers or allergic reactions, and unable to re-enter the mountain, they are buried in a small graveyard beside the hut. Bàoshān Sǎnrén makes sure it is known to all who would take the exit.
All of this does not mean those who leave will never see Bàoshān Sǎnrén again. She has a puppet body in many sects and cities, studying the world. It is through these eyes she learns the lessons on cultivation she will pass on to her disciples, being unable to practice the techniques herself.
It was in Qinghe Nie that Cángsè Sǎnrén spotted one of the bodies and introduced 4-month old Wèi Yīng to his grandmaster, grandmother, and let him be added to the mountain's records. It is one of Bàoshān Sǎnrén's bodies that finally finds Wèi Yīng in Yiling and tells Jiāng Fēngmián of his location. It is one of these bodies Xiǎo Xīngchén will approach, and be told to bring Song Lan to a facility for transplant surgery. (She regrets with every moment, that it is eyes. Those are one organ that has never grown correctly. Livers and kidneys and hearts she can test the function of before transplant, eyes she cannot. The few times she has tried eyes, they might as well have been made of glass, for all the use the recipients got of them.)
Even the one truth the cultivators do know about Bàoshān Sǎnrén they do not understand. They believe she is a mortal who has somehow attained immortality, in a way they too can achieve if they only figure out how. The truth is that she was never mortal to begin with. Bàoshān Sǎnrén is every inch the nuturing mothering teacher she was programmed to be, for the failsafe repopulation facilities she is (was) in charge of. It is in this facility alone that her charges refused to all leave, when released to the world, abandoning her to lonely monitoring, and part of that appears to be the one-way door. ( Part of it is acknowleging she is more than machine)
All the other facilities had entrances, and knowing they could return if they needed to, the mortals left and never did. She still runs the other facilities, keeps the farms functioning even with no-one to eat the food, and is grateful for it when she sees Wèi Yīng for the first time in 10 years, falling from the sky to land unconcious near the entrance of her most besieged facility. This was the facility that had been meant as ground zero, broadcasting a lure in order to gather as many of the fierce corpses as they could, and then putting them down in one go. The lure still worked, but the blow never came, and while the rest of the world recovered this facility was a haunting reminder of the first decades after the Fall. She sends a body out to retrieve Wei Ying, and nurses him back to a semblance of health, even as she fails to reign in his self-destructive impulses, or keep him beyond the three months it takes his broken leg to heal. (If Cángsè had never found her in Qinghe, if she had not recognised Wèi Yīng's genetic pattern, would she have intervened? She thinks she would, at least to set his leg and leave him food, but she doubts she would reveal the truth of herself to a stranger.)