The good news is that his mana stones can be converted into life essence by purchasing body parts with mana stones and refining those body parts into life essence.
The bad news is that he doesn't have an infinite amount of money. He hasn't made money for some time and will run out soon.
The last time he earned money was from the bet that he won after he survived the third mortal coil and advanced to the fourth mortal coil. He also earned some money by fulfilling the request of fighting the Daoist Pale Shadow of the Purple Flower sect.
Since then, he has had to forge many weapons and expand his dojo to every part of the Five Vein region. So he is running out of money.
He can still afford the expenses needed to get life essence now, but at the rate at which he is consuming life force, he will quickly run out of money. By his calculations, he expects to run out of money in a month.
This situation has presented him with two options as attempts to find a solution. The first option is to find a way to earn more money. The second option is to find a cheaper source of life force.
Earning money is both easy and difficult for someone like him. If he wants money urgently, he can always leave the sect and rob someone. With his power, there are very few people that he doesn't dare to hunt in the Five Veins region.
Robbing is the easy option. It is also the most dangerous and fastest way to earn money. The safer, slower, and more difficult method is to earn money legitimately by selling goods and services to others.
He is a big supporter of using public funds to solve private financial needs, so he prefers to take the first option and rob people of their money. It is something that he has done before when he was at the first mortal coil in Agate City and the second mortal coil with Storm Hawk, so he is sure that he can manage to rob someone.
But just in case he can't get the money he needs by robbing, he decided to give finding a cheaper source of life force a chance. Even if he could get money by robbing, it is still a good thing to find a cheaper source of life force for him to spend his easily earned blood money on.
In the matter of getting life force from a cheaper source, his thoughts went to getting a special plant pet that can produce life force easily and cheaply. In order to find such a special plant, he went to meet Pink Ivy for help.
Pink Ivy is at the peak of the fourth mortal coil. She is the second strongest woman in the sect and the second person alive in the sect who has cultivated the Everlasting Wood Art and the Wood Vessel Sigil technique.
She is an expert in the matter of plants. It was she who had helped him create the rank 3 silver pine tree that he used to forge his foundation. So this won't be the first time that she is helping him.
As someone who cultivates the Wood Vessel Sigil technique, she must also have a lot of need for life force. So she was the first one who came to his mind when he thought of who to ask for advice on special plants that can refine life force easily and cheaply.
And indeed, she had a viable solution for him. In fact, she had three viable solutions for him that he could use to solve his problem.
She told him about three types of plants that can refine life force easily and cheaply. The first one is the blood vine plant.
The blood vine feeds on blood and doesn't care about the source of the blood. This plant can even regenerate damage done to it easily. This is because it is full of life force.
She also showed him the blood vine that she is raising. She was raising it on her floating island, and it had become large enough to cover the entire island.
The blood vine was supposed to be a single plant, but it had turned into a forest. It was thick, fat, and red. Just by looking at it, Arthur could tell that it was filled to the brim with life force.
Her solution with this plant is for him to raise the plant with his blood if he must. So if it becomes his pet and he runs out of blood to feed it, it can take his blood and refine it into life force. Because its conversion of blood into life force is very high, there will be very little loss during the conversion.
He can then take the refined life force to cultivate. As for his loss of blood, he can make that up easily by converting environmental mana into more blood.
As a fourth mortal coil cultivator, his blood is essentially a carrier for his internal energy. It is packed full of mana, so it can be easily replenished by his core refining mana from the environment.
So, at the end, what he would be doing is refining mana into life force with the blood vine and using the life force to cultivate. Since it is easy, fast, and cheap for him to refine internal energy, the life force that the blood vine produces for him will also be fast and cheap.
The best part of this deal is that the loss of internal energy in his blood is temporary, while the increase in his cultivation by using life force to cultivate will be permanent. And the stronger he becomes as he cultivates with life, the faster he will be able to refine internal energy, and the cheaper life force will become.
This is just the first of three options that she said she had, but he was already impressed and ready to commit. However, he still listened to the two other options for special plants that she knew.