As much as I love this game, there's a lot to be desired with the tutorials and explanation of certain mechanics. I was stumbling around confused almost a week ago, but I've gotten a handle on the game going through various resources from the community. The most common walls will likely be in the Immortal/Divine realms, and to me, it wasn't very clear what to do, so I wanted to provide a few insights I had that helped me push through.

There are much better explanations in some of the other guides and on the discussion forums that give better explanations to the mechanics, so I would in no way take this as law, and just my experience figuring some of these things out.

If you have any feedback or additional info, feel free to post! I may update with information about the Divine Kingdom at some point.

The sect is pretty overwhelming at first glance. In reality, it's pretty straightfoward as most of the management will be done automatically, and for the most part, you can just leave it and forget about it. However, this is a crucial mechanic to progressing through the midgame. I won't explain the whole thing, as this guide explains it more in depth (I'm going to assume you read it), but in general, you want to start recruiting as early as possible, and I typically only recruited red core disciples, although this will take quite a long time, so you can start off with purple.
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In terms of management you should focus on collecting resources, at first, as you'll find yourself hitting walls very quickly if you focus realm. Don't worry, you'll be able to ascend your core disciples at a very quick rate soon enough.
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In terms of construction, I would focus first on the Construction Office a little to raise your population and construction speed up, and then Foreign Affairs, Hunting Hall, and Beast Hall. You'll eventually want to raise other things as well, but these, especially the Hunting and Beast Hall are probably the most immediately important. Note that the amount of disciples you have available is dictated by your Construction Office level, and allocating more disciples to buildings increases the modifier. You should also have a core disciple in each slot. It increases the multiplier for the building.
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Now, while that does it's thing in the background, you should focus on raising your taming level. The most effective way of doing this is leveling up higher level beasts. After a certain amount of levels, they consume a higher tier of spirit core. The higher the tier of spirit core they're consuming, the more taming XP you'll get. This is the only reason we really care about what level the beast is, or else we'd just constantly spam a beast with the 1x multiplier. You should go and catch any beast at your current level, and start feeding them cores. Make sure the material multiplier as at x1, as you'll be getting the same amount of XP no matter what the multiplier is. Additionally, if you've already invested in the beast pen abodes, or your taming level is already high, you'll see an overflow of XP points, so it's pointless to go above 1x until the XP has caught up anyways. Note, you should also definitely be using skill talismans to expedite your taming leveling.
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Keep leveling. At a certain point, the 1x multiplier will start to be very ineffective to leveling up the beast. That's when you can start upping the multiplier. You'll probably need to farm a few beast cores for this, but don't go crazy on it. I just farmed as many cores as I could justify to farm enlightenment as well, usually. The reason for this is that leveling is just far too ineffective. You'll notice at a certain point, that even feeding it 100000x multiplier cores, (which honestly, you shouldn't even farm that much), you'll barely make a dent in the XP bar. That's where the sect comes in.

When you click the guardian tab, you can put a beast in there as a guard, and it will be slowly leveled as long as you have beast cores under your 'sect resources' tab. That is why I recommended upgrading the Hunting and Beast Hall a little bit. Note that the Beast Hall is what gives the sect XP, it should be the main focus. The Hunting Hall simply supplies the Beast Hall with cores. As long as your beast core consumption is not higher than your production, you're fine. My Hunting Hall is currently about half the level of my Beast Hall. Again, don't worry too heavily about having it super highly leveled, I would say just say to focus on the Beast Hall until you start eating into your production. Again, these levels don't really matter that much, but they're good to keep in mind. Construction Office is probably the most important thing to keep leveled.
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Once you put your beast in there, you can idle for a while, do other things while it levels. I'd recommend doing this at the beginning of a rebirth. If you put it in, and it's not making meaningful progress, or at least more progress than you would have made it manually leveling, then it's not worth waiting for, and that's about as high as you're gonna get it.

Hopefully, it leveled up enough to get up a core tier or two. Keep leveling until your taming hits about 60 for the Immortal Realm and 75 for the Divine Realm. If you cannot stand to level that long to hit these points, around that level will be fine.

Now, it's time to search. Try to search for the highest beast in you can tame in your realm. This game unfortunately does not tell you what level is required to tame each beast until you encounter it, so you'll have to trial and error it. Also, very important, make sure that beast is from the same sub-realm as you, or you will not be able to equip it. You can find that when you hover over your body in the Tribulation screen. When you find it, DO NOT TAME IT. Click the auto-search button on the side, and change it to holy. Then, search. It will auto-search until it finds a holy version of that beast. Then you can tame it. This might take a long time, so be ready to do anything else. Like, it can take a really long time. Keep in mind that this takes an action while auto-searching, so you can't go and read a manual or anything like that. Most likely you'll just have to walk away from the game.
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Once you have a holy version of that beast, you can throw it in the sect for a little bit to level it, but don't worry about that too much. As soon as it starts taking up too much time, take it out and don't bother with it.

Go to your sect, click array, and go to the beast array in the bottom right, and click manage. You should have 3 slots open. Click on the new beast tab, and put your egg in. Sacrifice, and then boom. You've got a beast.

Now, you'll want to go back to your sect, and click the priority to realm. Check your disciples tag and sort by realm. Keep an eye on the highest one. Try to get one core disciple to breakthrough as high as possible until you hit a resource wall again. Then, once you can no longer breakthrough with that disciple, click stop under management. Go back to the disciples tab and wait until that core disciple finishes whatever they're doing, since they default to resources when they cannot breakthrough. Then, click on them and click results. It should now say they're idle.

Go to the conquest tab. Click the Northern Rift at the bottom. Put that core disciple in the slot there. If you don't see any options, they're either still doing a task, or you haven't confirmed their completed task. Once you get them in there, it's another waiting game. Just AFK for a little bit, 10-20 minutes, and wait for them to bring back crystals and beast stones. The quantity doesn't really matter, due to the low multiplier and low chance you won't be getting that many. It's really only worth it to keep one disciple in there.
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Once you get some crystals and stones, head back to the beast array. Click on your new sacred beast. If they're holy level, congratulations on the rng. If not, use as many quality upgrades as your crystals allow. You'll probably get to only do 1, as the cost scales pretty hard. Then, head to strengthen. Basically, this is the most important one. You'll be spamming this to raise the star quality. Until it hits 16 stars, there's no downside to literally just spamming it with the 1x multiplier. You likely won't have enough to hit 16 stars, but keep spamming until your out of stones. Repeat until you hit 16. Be careful when going from 15>16 if you're spamming clicks or using an autoclicker, as failing after 16 stars takes you back down to a star, so I've had many times where I was spamming a click and just ended up doing another one after 16 on accident-_-

While you're waiting for more stones, head to the beast tide. Click on the sacred tab and drag your beast in. Go ahead and farm as far as you can in there, and then you can just loop the level you fail at. Once you've farmed a good amount of beast crystals, you can go back to the beast array, and under the upgrade tab, level up your beast. (You can hold the button to upgrade faster.) As you level up, you'll notice your sect aura increase exponentially. The amount of sect aura your beast gives depends on how strong it is, and that amount is HEAVILY increased by having more stars. Your sect aura multiplies your resource gain in your sect, so you'll start to see your sect resources skyrocket. You can now virtually breakthrough all your core disciples as far as they can go. Your sect aura also increases your stats.
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Continue to get your beast to 16 stars, raise quality, and level your beast up in the beast array. Once you hit 16 stars, you can repeat the process with making another sacred beast. Your sect aura will continue to increase, and your sect resources will keep skyrocketing. Focus solely on getting your core disciples up in realm. Periodically, go back to the Northern Rift, and swap out that disciple for your highest realm one. This will increase the amount of resources you get, and you'll be able to let that one catch up in breakthroughs. It's not worth it to keep multiple disciples out there, even at higher levels, to my knowledge.

The reason this is so important, is because as your sect aura and resources increase, that includes the beast core EXP output. Go through the painstaking process of catching yet another version of the highest holy beast you can catch, and then throw it in the sect guardian. Ideally, you'd want it to be level 150, but if it takes too long to get there, level it as high as you can. This is really why you want the strongest possible beast you can handle in your realm. Once it finishes leveling, take it out and equip it. Your own personal stats should skyrocket. This is the first hurdle to overcome. You really need a beast equipped in order to pass the stat checks of this realm. Keep in mind that if you put a high level beast in the sect to keep for next rebirth, it will be stuck in there until you can get a high enough taming level to get it out. If you do this and rebirth, you won't be able to put one of your monsters in the sect to get those high exp taming gains from the start. Keep that in mind. This alone should let you be able to, at the very least, breakthrough as a grade 10 through whatever wall you're facing.

The Spirit Formation abode is likely tied with the sect for the most important thing to break through this wall. In combination, there's no wall at all.

Again, I'm going to link another guide that explains souls more in depth, but to put it simply, you want to be upgrading your spirit formation. The more souls you can add, the easier you make the breakthrough. I did waste a fair bit of time grinding souls, I set the auto sell to blue or purple, and I try to get good souls for raising Spirit, Resonance, Strength and Stability. Once you start to get Spirit Formation into the higher levels, you can be less picky with souls as the sheer quantity will get the levels up enough. Spirit Formation is far more important than Cultivation Room and Manual Pavilion towards the mid game, in my opinion. Most of your stats will be coming from your beast, and the souls. Manual boosts are still important though, and hitting the 50 cultivation breakpoints are less important, but can still be relevant.
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It's worth putting a good amount of points into upgrading the spirit field, as it's a decent source of money and Qi sense. Talisman, Dan Cauldron, and Weapon Furnace can be upgraded while the time cost is low, but I wouldn't put too much into it. Not sure how effective Beast Pen is, but I put about 30 points into it early on.

Another thing that I really, really overlooked. I know how much the game stresses that breakthrough material is important, but it seemed like a vague mechanic that didn't have exact stats tied to it, so I ignored it.

If you're an idiot like me, then you also probably ignored the grades. I think this is fine early, so you can just get the new mechanics, especially just rushing to sect, but it really can be helpful. In my opinion, as long as you can break through past the last realm, you can always come back and do a full grade 1 run, but breaking through at grade 1 makes the first 7 or so levels of the next realm's breakthrough basically guaranteed to succeed with the amount of stat boosts you get, so it's very important to make things smoother on yourself.

Generally, there's more AFK'ing to do as you move into the mid game. With how much there was to do in the early game, it seems like quite a change, but it is very effective and very viable to AFK the mystic realm in order to get high quality breakthrough material. Usually, I set the auto filter to purple, so I can still get lifestone upgrades, but once you reach a certain point you can filter it to orange. When I say AFK the mystic realm, I really do mean hundreds of levels. Basically, just keep getting breakthrough material, and testing it in the tribulation to see how it affects your chances. In the last stage of the immortal realm and the divine realm especially, I had to go up nearly 400 floors to get the breakthrough material I needed. But I was also getting very good lifestones and was able to min max for cult speed and attribute. Red material of a previous level is always better than orange of the next level, say a level 22 red is better than a level 23 orange. You might only get a grade change every 3 or 4 levels of red. Which is why it really might take a long time, but it's worth it. Eventually, you might get walled off when the mystic level gets too high, and you can't progress any further. At that point, that's as good as it's gonna get, and you can just loop until you get the red material from that floor. If you still aren't grade 1, you probably need to focus on your beast, the abodes, or better manual boosts. You can replace your cultivation ones for the other stats, but I never had to do that. I usually prioritized Attack/Cult and Health/Cult early, but then switched to prioritizing Attack/Cult, and Attack/Def.

The 50 breakpoints on cultivation can still be worth hitting, and getting to the next level. You should always get your highest cultivation as high as possible, until the time starts towards 10 months. It might be worth pushing through if you're hitting a 50 breakpoint or a new unlock soon.

In my opinion, rebirthing more than a couple times was absolutely not worth it. A lot of the little walls in the game can be overcome by grinding, and rebirthing makes you have to redo all that taming, all that RNG for breakthrough materials, and for little gain. I remember rebirthing around the immortal realm for nearly 2000 points twice, and barely making it to the level of breakthrough both times. To be fair, I didn't understand exactly what I needed to be getting past breakthroughs, but I think rebirthing in general isn't super important.

I think it is worth being done a couple times though, since the Qi Sense speed is nice, but it quickly runs its use. I think the best points to rebirth are when you've exhausted every other option. In my experience, most times, I got past walls by just afking more time into the other things I've mentioned in this guide. However, when I did rebirth, I put everything into Qi sense points early, and then grinded the mystic realm for reset tokens so I could reset everything into talent. You can get more tokens, and swap freely. This is very useful since it makes the taming grind faster, so it might be worth to reset if it's taking too long to hit those taming level points, especially since your sect disciples will still be getting stronger in the background. I'm not much of a min maxer, so I couldn't tell you when it's ideal, but I was glad to have at least a couple thousand points. But the farther you go, rebirthing isn't likely to get you past a wall. This holds especially true in the last two realms.

Talismans are very, very useful. Shouldn't be a DLC, but worth buying if you're playing for the long run. Leveling talismans is also pretty easy, since you want to craft so many. I always keep the material multiplier on 1 since the proficiency increases how many you craft, and I end up with more than I need.

Mining and Gathering become more bearable when you reset all your rebirth points into talent, and have some lifestones + talismans. You'll get a ton of resources when you're farming mystics, anyways.

I think Forging and Alchemy are slightly relevant in the early game, fall off super hard mid game, but become relevant again as your arrays in the sect scale off of these levels. For the fun of it, I crafted a ton of divine stuff for myself in the mid game, but it didn't make much of a difference. Medicine honestly was stronger than I expected, but you're better off just buying whatever medicine in the shop periodically than investing a ton of time into it.

Planting is very important early, and late game. Early game, selling the highest fruit you can grow is the best source of money. Late game, you need plants for the Dan array. Either way, it's a passive skill that requires no interaction. Might as well use it. Worth putting some points into the abode early as well.

Once my money flow was stable, I started cultivating Qi sense fruit constantly towards the mid game for a steady stream of the attribute. It's not huge, but again, passive gains.