Life
Zhongli Quan is a legend with a literature attached. In the tales he is a Han general who took to the mountains after a defeat, received instruction from an immortal, and eventually became one — the stout, bare-bellied figure with the fan who turns up in every set of the Eight Immortals.
What matters here is the corpus written as his instruction to Lü Dongbin. The Zhong-Lü material lays out the internal work as a sequence with stages, timings and warnings, and it is the source of the figures this archive quotes constantly: the hundred days of foundation, the ten months, the three years of suckling, the nine years facing the wall.
Whether either man existed is beside the point for the reconstruction: the texts exist, they are Tang and Song, and they describe the territory Mo Pai's upper levels claim without describing.
