[Micah]

You also have to factor in the option of a manual search...if you can find half the paths in a province with a 0-gem local search with your nationals then all of a sudden your refund time has doubled. It depends on the nation you have though...Shinuyama's bakemono mages have something like 10 magic paths they can manually search for, while it'd take Ulm a small army worth of mages to find a level-0 site.

You also need to have conj 5 researched and a really large pile of pearls to make this feasible, since even if all of those sites you're finding with the search produced pearls you'd still need about 150 stockpiled to cast acashic every turn until you were making the 25/turn it's costing you.

-Micah