The life force of the life pill is just in a weakened state and needs a lot of resources to recover. This is where the life essence serum comes in.
The life essence contains a lot of life energy. Unlike food, cells can make full of the energy in life essence directly. There is no need for digestion, a digestive system, or even a circulation system transport the life energy.
Life energy will be directly consumed by cells, be they plant or animal cells, on contact. So it has a very high usage efficiency. However, the process of creating life essence is very complicated and expensive.
Because the life energy had to be purified from corpses, only a small amount of it can be harvested from a corpse. However, the efficiency of harvesting is way higher if the serum is harvested from a living being.
But harvesting from a living being will require a new type of machine to do the job. This machine will also need to keep the source alive for as long as possible. So harvesting the serum is more expensive than harvesting from corpses.
Besides, he didn't have a lot of living beings to harvest life essence from. He had a lot of corpses and the machine to harvest life essence from corpses was cheaper, so he stuck with harvesting from corpses.
By the time the life pill reached the peak of the second mortal coil, it had consumed life essence harvested from ten corpses each at the peak of the second mortal coil.
This made Arthur grumble, "The efficiency here is abysmal. I wonder who came up with such a wasteful alternative?"
The efficiency of the utilization of corpses has dropped to 10%. This is a far cry from the 90% efficiency rate of the initial life pill art.
And this is just the stage of helping the life pill grow up to reach the peak of the second mortal coil. If he had stuck with the initial life pill art, one corpse at the peak of the second mortal coil would have been enough to make a life pill at the peak of the second mortal coil.
He could only grumble about the wastage as he detached the sensors and returned the life pill back to its vat.
As he did so, he caressed the life pill and said, "You left as a soft ball of squishable flesh, but now you return as a ball of tough flesh."
His hands are gloved so he isn't in direct contact with the life pill. This was done to protect the life pill from germs.
His body can handle the germs very well, and he even has an entire system for defending his body. But the life pill isn't so lucky. It can resist some germs with its high life force, but this is just a passive defense that won't work on most germs.
He placed the strengthened life pill back into its vat. Then he began work clearing the feeding platform in preparation for the next stage.
The next stage is the energy infusion stage. This is the stage where mana is fed to the life pill until it recovers the original inner energy cultivation of the source of the flesh.
This stage should be easy because it only requires him to set up a formation. He has never done it before, but he is sure that the formation he set up will work nicely.
His confidence is because of his significant expertise in formation arrays after more than 20 years of study and practice. But he didn't let his confidence blind him.
Before he moved on to the next stage, he first took precautions in case of failure. The first precaution was making a new batch of life pills. That's what he did with the vats that were set aside for three days from now.
After cutting sections from his tibia and using them to start the process of creating more life pills, he then helped the life pills he had prepared before to reach the peak of the second mortal coil in the path of body refining.
It was only after he was sure that he would have more materials to fall back onto in case of failure instead of having to wait for three or more days before another batch of life pills was ready that he began the next stage.
He learned this lesson after the first feeding session with life essence. That first attempt had been with the only life pill that he had on hand. The failure of the feeding and the loss of the only life pill meant that he had to stand around doing nothing for a while.
He doesn't want to repeat that same mistake. So now that he has taken proper precautions, he can boldly attempt the third stage.
He placed a strengthened life pill into another vat. The formations on this vat are far less dense than the previous formations. So they were easier to make and shouldn't fail him.
When he switched on the formation, it began to glow. This was because a lot of energy was being processed through it.
This time he was able to notice the progress of the process with a single glance because the process of energy infusion was fast.
The energy stones at the top of the formation in the energy source groove also shrank faster. All of these caused the life pill to squirm and glow in his mana vision.
The readings from the sensors were going off the charts. Even though the life pill looked fine, he still decided to slow down the formation for fear of overloading the life pill with energy and causing it to explode.
Even though he slowed it down, the life pill became full in less than 5 minutes. The process was still lightning fast compared to the strengthening of the life pill with the serum and the process of transforming his bone into a life pill.