A nascent soul cultivator should have an advantage in sneaking compared to a golden core cultivator.
So if she considered the difference in their cultivation level when they both sneaked into the Purple Flower sect to be relevant, this would reduce the value of her achievement.
Since she couldn't have that happen, she ignored the difference in their cultivation level.
She even said, "In fact, his weaker cultivation probably made sneaking past their defenses easier since he had a much smaller presence and would be more difficult to notice than a large and powerful nascent soul cultivator like me."
She also didn't consider the fact that she had used someone as a distraction in order to sneak into the Purple Flower sect while Sword Flash had disabled the formations to be relevant.
As a cultivator of the wood element, she knows how to modulate the aura of life and the signature of her presence very well. It is an ability similar to how Thunder Drake could tell when people were lying.
She can use this ability to make herself appear dead or look like an ordinary tree. Even other nascent soul cultivators won't be able to tell the difference if they sense something off.
In order to sneak into the Purple Flower sect, she had copied Arthur's aura and entered the formations at the same time that he did. She picked him because she knew that he was carrying living weapons with him and would be flagged.
So in case she was detected by the formations, Arthur would take the blame. By the looks of things, her plan seemed to have worked.
This achievement filled her with pride. Nothing else could diminish her pride.
She even said to herself, "This is just the beginning. I will sneak into the other sects too. Let's see who is more impressive then."
To be fair, she didn't sneak into the Purple Flower sect just so that she could compete with Sword Flash. She came for more important reasons than personal pride.
She snuck in for two reasons. The first reason is to hide in the Purple Flower sect and monitor them for the plans of the Blood Skull sect.
Of the three of them, Sword Flash is the best at sneaking past security and hiding. But he is not right now, so she has to be the one to take up the job of keeping track of the activities of the Purple Flower sect and making sure that the Blood Skull sect keeps a good grasp of the situation.
They don't want to be caught off guard by anything, such as the Purple Flower sect surrendering to the Red and Blue Fire sect or deciding to combine their two sects. The Blood Skull sect wants to make sure that the two sides fight to the death.
They have their reasons for why they want the Red and Fire sect to fight the Purple Flower sect with everything they've got. That reason is why she must come here and sneak in.
The second reason she had to sneak in is to protect Arthur. This is another important reason why her true body is just outside the territory of the Purple Flower sect, ready to take action at a moment's notice.
This is her job as his caretaker. She can't send him on a potentially dangerous mission without providing appropriate protection.
For many years, several people in the sect have cultivated either the wood or lightning element. Only Arthur has managed to cultivate and fuse both elements. There was no way the curse binding her would let Arthur die so easily.
But aside from these two reasons, there are other more personal and selfish reasons for why she is here. It is rare for her personal motives to align so well with the goals of the Blood Skull sect, so she is going to take advantage of the situation to the limit of what she can reasonably do.
After making sure that no one had noticed her and that the situation was clear, she began sneaking around in her tree form.
Her main target to avoid was the patriarch of the Purple Flower sect. As long as she avoided that woman, no one else in the Purple Flower sect could discover her presence.
The second thing to avoid was surveillance arrays. She isn't like Sword Flash and can't sneak through formations undetected, so she had to be careful about this.
This is why she didn't bother going to the inner sect of the Purple Flower sect. The main body of the patriarch of the Purple Flower sect was sure to be in the inner sect, and it was also certain that there would be formations guarding and protecting the entrance of the inner sect.
So the inner sect of the Purple Flower sect constituted two things that she had to avoid. No matter how curious she was about the inner sect and no matter how much she would like to match Sword Flash's feat of breaking into the inner sect, she had to stick with the outer sect.
She also didn't use her spiritual senses to scan everywhere recklessly. In fact, she didn't use her spiritual sense to check anything at all for fear of it being noticed by the patriarch of the Purple Flower sect.
This meant that she had to rely on her physical senses to gather information. Even though her physical senses were not comparable to her spiritual sense in terms of perception and information acquisition, she would have to be content with them because they were more difficult to detect.
All of these cautionary actions meant that she would be too far from the core of the Purple Flower sect and was unlikely to get any useful information in a short amount of time.
After all, the outer sect is for a few third mortal coil junior elders and mostly second mortal coil disciples. Very little of importance occurs in the outer sect.