In more specific terms, because of Mountain Karma, he can pull 6 units of mana every 100 seconds, not 2 units. So he can surely pull the 5 units that he needs for one cycle in less than 100 seconds.
His cultivation speed of 0.012 cycles per second is 1.818 times larger than that of the cultivation speed of 0.0066 cycles per second.
Even someone with an effective cultivation efficiency of 99% with a mind Power of 2 will only be able to pull 2 units of mana in 100 seconds and have a cultivation speed of 0.01 cycles per second.
0.012 cycles per second is greater than 0.01, so Mountain Karma has given him a cultivation speed that no one else can match.
Only someone with a refinement efficiency of 100% can beat him, but that is impossible to occur because a refinement efficiency of 99% is already impossible to achieve.
This is good, Mountain Karma hasn't improved his talent, though. This is evident in the fact that he will get tired much earlier than the person with a better talent because he is doing more work for each cycle.
He still has just 100 units of mental energy, and it still takes him 5 units of mental energy to complete each cycle, so he will run out of mental energy after 20 cycles.
So after (20 cycles × 83.3 seconds), which is 1,666 seconds or 27.766 minutes of cultivation, he will have to stop and recover his mental energy.
Meanwhile, the person with the effective 60% cultivation efficiency will only expend 3 units of mental energy to complete one cycle of refinement. So they will be able to cultivate for 33 cycles before they get tired.
Since they cultivate one cycle in 150 seconds, it will take them 4,950 seconds or 82.5 minutes to finish cultivating before they need to rest.
So he needs 27.766 minutes to achieve the same thing as what the person with a 60% refinement efficiency will achieve in 82.5 minutes.
The bad thing is that he can only complete 20 cycles with 100 units of mental energy. He will need to recover his mental energy after every 20 cycles, while the more talented person can cultivate 33 cycles before they need to rest.
The good thing is that he can find a way to recover his mental energy faster than them. He will have less need for downtime to recover his mental energy and will be able to take full advantage of his more powerful mind.
Then there is the matter of the mastery of the technique. The more familiar he becomes with the technique, the shorter it will take him to complete the cycles.
Usually, any advantage that cultivators can gain in terms of the mastery of cultivation techniques will be short-lived because there is an upper limit to it.
Once cultivators reach 100%, they can't gain any more advantage in speed. Soon other cultivators will catch up to them, and they will be the same in terms of mastery.
The fourth factor that affects cultivation speed is ambient mana. The higher the concentration of mana is in the environment, the lower the resistance of mana is.
So cultivating in environments with a high concentration of ambient mana will lead to less time needed to pull mana into the body for refinement, less mental energy needed to pull each unit of mana for refinement, and a faster cultivation speed.
All in all, the most important factor that affects cultivation speed is the quality of the cultivation technique and talent. The two of them work together to form the effective efficiency of refinement.
The effective efficiency is the most important thing because talent can't be changed, and it is very difficult to get a higher quality cultivation technique. So if someone has a higher refinement efficiency, it is nearly impossible to catch up to them and make up for the gap.
The second most important factor that determines the speed of cultivation is the mastery of technique. But its effect is temporary and can be caught up to. Compared to the quality of the cultivation technique and talent, it is shallow and secondary.
As for the power of the mind, no one bothers with that because it can't be changed yet. Only someone like Arthur or other special people will have an advantage in the power of the mind over their peers.
What everyone bothers to change is their cultivation environment. It is the easiest to change and also the one factor that provides the biggest boost with each increase in condition.
This fourth factor is one of the major reasons why loose cultivators can never catch up to those in sects.
Loose cultivators might have the same talent as cultivators in sects, but they will never have the same environment for cultivation. So the cultivation speed of both sides widens over time.
The quality of cultivation techniques only widens this gap. It makes loose cultivators fall way behind their counterparts in sects.
This is just the difference in cultivation speed. When the raw power of cultivation techniques is factored in, loose cultivators won't be able to match their counterparts in sects with the same cultivation level in terms of power.
This is why everyone wants to enter sects. It is why many people were willing to risk their lives in the fourth test of the regional sect examination. It is what many of those people died for.
Currently, Arthur is enjoying all of these benefits. His benefits are even better than what many people in the outer sect are enjoying. But he is not satisfied because there is still more he can do to improve his cultivation speed.
He can work hard to achieve mastery of the cultivation technique so as to speed up his cultivation speed, and he can also change his cultivation environment to make cultivation easier.
He wants to do both, but he can only achieve the former at the moment.