The Everlasting Wood Art is a method to draw mana of the wood element from the environment, store it into his body, refine this energy, and use it to transform his life force too.
Those are the four steps involved in the cultivation technique. Most cultivation techniques only do three of these steps, not four. They don't refine life force too.
It is abnormal that the Everlasting Wood Art refines internal energy and transforms life force. But not only does it do the two of them, it does each one better than most techniques that only refine one thing.
The Everlasting Wood Art is top-grade cultivation. That means it has a higher efficiency.
When using the Everlasting Wood Art, more of the mana taken from the environment is used for refining than other techniques. The exact number is based on the technique itself and the grade of the life essence used to break through to the second mortal coil.
The Everlasting Wood Art itself has a 50% efficiency. This is regardless of what rank of blood essence is used to transcend the first mortal coil.
This will remain so as long as the blood essence is of the wood element. Any other type of blood essence will reduce the efficiency. The stronger the type of blood essence is, the higher the reduction in efficiency.
A rank 5 blood essence of the wood element will increase the efficiency to 70%. A rank 6 blood essence will raise the efficiency to 90%.
Most techniques can only achieve 20%. Poor techniques achieve 10%. Only top-grade cultivation techniques can achieve more than 40% efficiency of energy conversion. So it is a big deal that he can reach 90% efficiency.
Unfortunately, the quality of the cultivation technique is not the only thing that determines the efficiency of cultivation. Talent and mana affinity also affect the efficiency of cultivation.
In general, the realistic efficiency of cultivation is the multiplication of the efficiency of the cultivation technique and the talent divided by 100. So it is (Technique efficiency × Talent) / 100.
In the case of someone with a wood element affinity of 50%, their total efficiency will be (90×50)/100. So they will have a realistic efficiency of 45%.
In his situation, he doesn't have any mana affinity with wood, but he has attribute-less mana that will count for him. So his total efficiency is (90×23)/100%, which is 20.7%.
If he pulls in 5 units of spiritual energy within him, only one unit of it will be used to cultivate. The rest will be wasted because of his poor talent.
This result made him sigh.
Talent is very important in choosing cultivation techniques. Talent can enhance cultivation speed or bring it down.
He doesn't have any talent for the wood element. He can only use the Everlasting Wood Art because his affinity is attributeless. Unfortunately, the fact that he can use the technique of any element doesn't mean that he can use it to its full potential.
This poor talent means that in each cycle of cultivation, he must bring in at least five units of mana for him to gain anything significant. This requirement means he will have to do more work to gain the same amount of benefit as more talented people.
Fortunately, that is just the efficiency of work done. There is still the matter of how fast this work is done and how fast his life seed actually refines mana.
His life seed can only produce one unit of internal energy with each five units of mana he pulls from the environment. But if he can pull mana quickly from his environment, that might make up for his poor efficiency.
This is where the strength of the mind and the mastery of the cultivation technique come into play. A powerful mind will be able to pull mana faster, and better mastery will lead to faster mana cycles in the life seed.
Each five units of mana equals one cycle of refining for him. This is important because it determines how much work he has to do to achieve one cycle.
Others might only need three or two units of mana for one cycle of refining, so they will have to do less work for each unit of internal energy that they refine. But he has a mind that is three times stronger than those of his peers, so he will be able to pull mana three times as fast compared to others in the first transformation of the second mortal coil.
Usually, the power of the mind of those in the second mortal coil is equal to the level of transformation of their internal energy. So as their internal energy gets stronger, their minds gets stronger in equal amount.
This phenomenon is why those at the second mortal coil rarely gain any advantage over their peers in terms of the power of their mind. Only someone like Arthur will be able to use his mind to increase the speed at which he refines energy by three times.
So if he and someone with an efficiency of 60% both have a mind power of 2 units at the first transformation. That means they both refine 2 units of mana at once in a period of 100 seconds.
Normally, he will require 250 seconds to pull 5 units of mana and complete one cycle of cultivation. The person with an efficiency of 60% will only need 150 seconds to pull 3 units of mana and complete one cycle of refining despite having the same mind power as him.
So normally, he will have a rate of 0.004 per second, while the other person with an effective refinement efficiency of 60% will have a rate of refining that is 0.00666 per second.
Because of the boost of Mountain Karma, his rate of refinement becomes (0.004 × 3), which is 0.012 per second. So he can complete one cycle of refinement in 83.3 seconds instead of 250 seconds.