Yeah as a general rule most things don't actually consume the pearls, although there isn't much uses in this pack as Automagy has none afaik. So your three uses are the advanced furnace which doesn't consume it, the primal crusher which does consume it, and primal node manipulation which does consume it, the crusher is the shovel of the earthmover+pickaxe of the core super tool and node manipulation consists of pegging the pearl at a node to improve it, capable of doing things like changing nodes to bright or giving more primal aspects to them. See
this post on reddit for details, also includes some nifty other info relating things like hungry nodes or champion mobs.
On a different note I was poking around and discovered that you can power magic absorbers with centivis, you need a
lot of centivis to max them for the higher tier generators but it seems viable if you're willing to spam nodes. Anything after MV is basically useless thanks to HV and EV needing neutronium to make which needs a T3 fusion reactor which kind of obsoletes your lower tier power needs, for MV though to achieve max power of 128 EU/t you'd need 45 centivis of a single aspect I believe, the formula is exponential though so 97 centivis of a single aspect is enough for 2048 EU/t from what I can tell, of course that needs neutronium and 97 is a rather absurd amount of centivis and hooking it up to a network renders any nodes it's connected to useless as it will drain every bit of centivis it can get. Well technically it will only drain up to 1000 centivis of each aspect but if you've got that much you've escalated far past sanity, I mean in theory if it wasn't for efficiency loss and capping out due to voltage tiers 1000 centivis would be worth 40mil EU/t so with your EV generator hooked up to the network you're only losing 99.995% of your potential power. Dragon eggs are still the most powerful though as they produce the 2048 EU/t before efficiency loss, dragon isn't that hard to kill either although the generators are a horrible pain to make.
On another note lava is actually decent power, best method I've found for it so far is via GT lava boilers which makes it slightly better then ethanol per bucket for power, easy to acquire but not easily renewable however. The only way seems to be phosphor which is bees only afaik, an option worth considering though for early game power with conduit + drum + thirsty tank to easily provide tons of lava.
