I self funded my relic, took me around a year to buy the 200mill worth of coins then a disgustingly long and boring amount of time to do the magian trials solo. I didn't even bother to do the last trial because they were a)in a dead event and b) empy weapons were still better.
You can get any empy weapon completeled in a couple of weeks and they blow fully upgraded relics out of the water. No justification for that at all. The more work = weaker end result