So, first week submitting for the tournament ever, and it's a weird metric. My initial impression of this was "costless cost", we've got 1 arm, no area constraint and 1 of each glyph, but the arm can be a piston, 1 track costs the same as infinite track, and the tribonder is free. My mind immediately went to the animismus glyph, as since we probably want to take advantage of the infinite track, animismus is 1 part more compared to vitae + mors inputs being 2, and track could also lead to more fun with the tribonder. So I made my initial solution, which was ~1.2k cycles after refinement, and it felt not great, but about what I expected at my skill level. But at some point, I'd noticed that with a piston, one could have full access to a glyph of division, and as such if you used the mors and vitae inputs, you could actually do a trackless solution also at min. I did so, and first try (after 6Ping for polymer reasons) got... 816 cycles? It turns out track is bad?? It seemed like having to pull 2 inputs per half-output w/ animismus was a severe cost, and track doesn't inherently help with cycles when you're arm-limited, especially given that I really wasn't having to do much weirdness at all with the trackless solution. I thought waste would be a problem when counting access points vs needed waste atoms, but by bonding the waste into pairs, I could squeeze out enough spots to be fine, though I did really need the "free" waste from special-casing the (...) part of the output. This left me kinda at a loss though - my assumption was that 2 ways to make the output meant 1 would be for each metric, and presumably saving the cost of animismus meant sum4 would go with direct input, and unlimited track seemed to directly point the parts metric to animismus, but here I was ignoring animismus entirely, which felt like it was against the design goal of the puzzle. So, idk? I only managed to shave 3 cycles and 2 area from that first attempt, by swapping the vitae and mors and tweaking waste handling, but hit a wall afterwards within the confines I'd set. However, I then had a thought - if I swapped the positions of my debonder and division glyphs (then NW and NE respectively), and moved the debonder further out, I could fit a tribonder. This cost me one of my waste spots, and a lot of the resulting stuff was very awkward (constructing that horrifying structure next to the input), but whenever I got to use the bottom section of the tribonder I saved so much time, giving me the 776 cycles here. It's hard for me to see how much things can vary from here, waste handling feels like the main aspect of wiggle room at the moment, as this layout is even more restrictive than the initial trackless one - only debonder and 1 of vitae/mors can be in the tribonder sector, division needs to be on the same side as the debonder, leaving the other vitae/mors in the corresponding sector on the other side, and input all the way to the left. Given my almost total lack of experience with waste handling however, I don't really have any ideas for improving. Hoping that I'm wrong about some part of this and track is necessary, I'd not be particularly surprised if better players find ways to make it more useful, but animismus is just such suffering that I can't get there myself.