I'm doing a run where you force Luciela to be unable to  apply mental changes to you by blocking off the entrance to the mind palace, which needs 4 corruption for her to enter. Since corruption goes up every 2 days, and blessed water is a limited resource, it's very time sensitive - however, getting into the demon worshipper city, no matter what you do, always gives at least 5 days worth of corruption (3 days +1 corr for lewd scene) and it takes even more corruption to be able to gain enough trust to learn spells. Perhaps in some ways the time spent can be worth it, since access to drugs is very useful even if you just use it on your slime, but I still think there should be a harder way that allows you to access the worshipper city without using so much corruption. One way I thought of is gaining trust after breaking in and defeating James, since Liliana said she'd like to take over if you just kill James, so when she does she'll make 'Mary' more popular and give you some trust. This way, it doesn't compromise on the idea of easily getting to James through infiltrating demon worshippers but also allows you to take advantage of the city later even when you are doing a time-sensitive run.