With the current system of
"each head adds it immortality level squared in mortalis"
it is always better to feed Immortals to each other until you have an Apex ready for harvest.

Some basic numbers:
20% is the quickening conversion.
Assuming we filter all corpses through a warm room we get atleast Level1 immortals.

So we need 5*9 or 45 immos to get a 46th to 10/10 Apex.
That adds 100 Mortalis and uses at most 506 Immortals.
At 5% immortal chance that a good 10k pawns.

We need to do that 11 times to get 10k powder from the keg which gives us 2 Immortals.
This is completely monotonous busywork.

Alternatively we could eat the Apex heads directly.
Same busywork but 11 Immortals instead of 2 and no 60 day waiting.

Or we dont do the busywork and eat the lesser heads directly.
Even at a basechance of 2% thats gives an average of 10 immortals
and we can use the Quickenings for skills and passions instead of letting them go to waste.

The mortalis extractor sounds like a good idea but with these numbers
i do not see it making much sense.

Maybe get rid of the scaling Mortalis and bring the numbers down
by removing the small Volume tag.
The 2 drugs should not cost more than one unit per dose,
the Extractor can simply give 2 units per Level
and the Crystal costs say 100.
That would be 100 unknown, 50 freshly awoken or 5 Apex.


Personal wish:
Embedding the Crystal in a normal bodypart should be an interaction
not a surgery. Right now you need 2 pawns to use it at all.
Jamming the thing into your arm to get stunted should be
the tradeoff for being on you own.