Are there benefits to buying this game besides the most recent version?
Viewing post in Heavenly Peaks Cultivation comments
No. That's correct.
The paid version is a 1 time purchase that allows you to get all future updates at no additional cost.
Currently, the game had a great deal of QOL improvements and technical updates and fixes in the past year. It became impossible to fix those for the public without doing a ton of extra work to "roll back" versions.
So, for now the content is the same in both games. Coming updates will set it back to normal - this is the easiest way for me to do it.