Two hours of lecture is a lot to process (...for now, she thinks with a smile), but she does her very best and takes many notes.

Notes on the ten imperial sects and five great ducal sects might describe them as follows:

Of the great imperial sects, the great powers of the empire second only to the three freeborn kings and the imperial family, there are the following, and while every great sect is a society complete in itself, teaching every art worth teaching, they each have their own specialities and secret techniques.

The Shining Knight Sect, who train the nobility of the empire in the arts of virtue, war, and stewardship, famous for esoteric moral tests (and ironclad if strange codes of ethics in general), glorious last stands, and for populating the many chivalric orders of the empire, perhaps the first in the breadth and quality of the armies they deploy and the lands they rule of all the sects.

The Peerless Blade Sect, who train all comers in the art of murder at any cost, famous for brutal simplicity, savage enlightenment, and the killing of gods and men alike, filling out the empire's ranks of warrior-saints, monster-hunters, and wandering adventurers, perhaps the first in the quality of the fighters they produce and the in the quality and the quality of those they kill. 

The Dawnbreaker Sect, who train captain and shipwright alike to set to sea the great navy and trade fleet of the empire, famous for craft that sail the seas and sunbeams with equal facility and for their ancient bloody war against the Empire Of The Dawn in the eastern sea. Theirs are the great sailors and explorers, the greatest ships and the greatest admirals their progeny.

The Crown of Perfection Sect, which is the finishing school of the ideal imperial beauty, school of the arts and the sciences, of beauty and correctness and poise and perfection. The sect which courtiers and courtesans wish they could claim to have been taught at; peerless when it comes to every respectable, noble, art-form, from calligraphy to singing to painting to dance.

The Bloody Heart of Suffering in the Void Before Justice Sect, the Crown's eternal rival, which has changed it's name and ideals a dozen times in the last millennium, the home of counter-culture and transformation, of self-discovery and hidden potential, of rebellion great and small and of art writ raw and messy. Shabby and disreputable, but beloved nonetheless - of the arts deemed common, strange, forbidden, or useless, there is no greater school.

The Bank, which of course needs no introduction, the oldest sect, vault-builders and guardians, strange and ancient and alien in their carefulness, source of bodyguards and warders, first of the sects to be founded and, all agree, the last of them to die.

The Scions of the Market Sect, the Bank's traditional rival - the agile, the quick-thinkers, the horse-traders and herb-dealers, the founders of ten thousand companies, all forming the network of dealers, brokers, and auction-houses which together manage to provide some semblance of liquidity to the impossible unique wonders of the cultivation world. None would argue that their sect is the richest - but the Saint of Nine Stones will note wryly here - none would argue that they're the fastest to get themselves killed or bankrupted by abject foolishness.

The Great Academy Sect is the foremost institution of learning in the entire empire, the place which every bureaucrat and scholar looks to with longing and knowledge-greed, the ones to whose standards the exams throughout the empire are set. Everything worth knowing can be learned there, and is taught with the ferocity expected of a faculty who love their subjects more than their own children.

The Philosophers Guild is, perhaps, the strangest sect, being as much a never-ending maelstrom of discourse on the nature of good and virtue as it is a teaching institution. All virtue is considered there, and thus all evil as well, and all the world, and all matters esoteric. On matters of fact, they are second to the Academy, but the Guild is unequalled on matters of virtue, and on matters of esoteric insight. If one must learn of the nameless and speak of the formless, communicate the incommunicable and comprehend the incomprehensible, there is no better place to go, and it continues to emit saints, monsters, and mad sages in equal proportion to this day.

The final, and youngest, sect is the Iron City Sect, located in the city of the name, itself located partially in the body of the immortal of the same name. They are the engineers, the industrialists, the wonder-workers, programmers and cyberneticists, mad and cutting edge, doing things which nobody has every done before and on scales that seem nigh-heretical to the ancient handcrafted sages. Some call their work unreliable, shoddy even, but if you need all three of fast, innovative, and cheap, there's nobody else you can turn to - and if you're a cripple with no name, no money, and no talent, there's no other sect which can refine that dross into gold with the infusion of capital and steel.

Of the five ducal sects, a tier below those in power but more dominant in the local region:

The Bank, again, has one of it's five great vault-fortresses, right here on this very spot, and keeps only to it's own wisdom, and that of its close allies in the hillfolk Warden-Clans.

The Emerald Guard are brave soldiers and stoic sorcerers, loyal to a fault to the ducal family and based out of the duchy capital to the east.

The Silver Seas Shipwright Company make ships and trade missions, and know the Silver Sea better than any others, and cleave to the old ways of the shore-folk who were here before the empire, and who still stand out by their accent and traditions.

The Violet Blade Sect are monster-hunters and deed-seekers, glory-hounds and heroes of the people, the perfect representatives of what the imperial orthodoxy says a cultivator should be, at least in public.

The Princes of Tin and Copper are a beggar-sect, only an inch better than organised criminals, consisting of outsiders, madmen, fallen nobles, tinkers, lucky fools, and others too disreputable or untrustworthy for a better sect, forming a coalition of the hungry, the desperate, and the greedy who serve only themselves in the end (and also in the middle and the beginning).

Kedri is very glad to have some more grounding in how imperial society works, even if she does wonder how much Bank propaganda is mixed in and how each sect's own descriptions would sound (how--part of her thinks--they would be sounding to her now, if her dice had rolled a little differently).

...not that she would want to get up close and personal with a Prince of Tin and Copper or for that matter a Peerless Blade to ask.

(The importance of impulse control in potential candidates for violence-training is conspicuously absent from the description of the Peerless Blade. Maybe they care about it to a non-zero extent, but they cared about it as much as it deserves it'd be more obvious...

...no, hang on, she's still caught up in lower-competition ways of thinking, isn't she. This is not a society where it's feasible to restrict combat training to those who can be trusted not to misuse it. They're planning to give her some combat training even though she's not at all sure that's a good idea.

Which still makes Peerless Blades more dangerous than a random cultivator. Differences of degree do matter: maybe the math on how concerned one should be by the prospect of meeting them still checks out. But she's going to have to recalibrate.)

...so Crane's ancestors were conquered by the empire, and her people (those of them who remain after evaporative-cooling, anyway) retain a partially independent culture? That sounds concerningly like there might be lingering tensions there, patches of quicksand that Kedri should be careful not to step in.

""At least in public.""

It seems to be for the best that Kedri is in charge of notetaking right now: Jasmine, having more general background knowledge already, would likely have made too few notes to suit Kedri's needs. Kedri's feelings on the matter are still tinged with a little guilt, though.