Did all the routes, I think the evolution pathway should be harder considering the payout. I was able to complete it with 120 seconds left on the clock before the King's army came (I made a mistake and got 5 crystals more than needed, wasting 3.2 seconds). My favorite path was definitely the King's Location one because by that point you would've been strong enough for either one of the 2 endings, and it felt more like an actual race against the clock. Overall, still looking forward to the next chapters.
Yeah I did see that I had about 14 wasted power by the end, but I'm honestly not entirely sure what time I could've saved because I specifically banned myself from using any essence to see if it would've been possible for someone on their first go if they somehow knew everything that they needed to do and in what order.
Now that's impressive. I ended up relying on the mana -> essence conversion because I was flying a bit blind up until that point. I figured out that the key was to touch the stone and learn magic after I read the requirement was Holy Resistance. I'm not sure why that action has a cap of 20 when there's no benefit to getting more than 10 resistance and it doesn't lead to anything else after.