Days passed quickly and Helena had brought back all the Northmen who entered with her. After fishing out all the spies among them, a few came back with news of a Sage Beast they had found.
However, this time Adam decided to change tactics to conquer this realm. Through the time he passed in here, he would often find himself interrupted in his cultivation to go for a Sage Beast, and it felt quite annoying.
Moreover, he intended to take the girl, Helena, with him to train her, and taking her out every five or six days just wasn't going to do it. But the worst thing was for the cultivation of his inner self, to open the 5th Gate. This needed long meditations to understand himself, and Adam could feel he was near that goal, so he couldn't continue interrupting himself every 5 or 6 days.
Thus, he decided to 'stock' the information for some time and only do it all in one fell swoop.
This gave time to Adam to meditate, and think about himself. After all, he not only had to cultivate his Aura/Qi and his Concepts, but also the 5th Gate, which needed him to understand himself before understanding the world.
Through his inner introspection Adam noticed a few things about his cultivation, differences between his two avatars.
First was obviously the difference in power, since one had the Rose Tree Fruits and the other didn't. His Yin half had taken a lead on the Yang half. This presented a problem for the future.
Adam already knew that the point of splitting in two was not to have a body in each realm, but to unite the two bodies in the future and gain never before seen might.
However, for the fusion to happen he would need his two bodies to fuse together, and if one was stronger than the other then he might encounter problems.
A difference in stats from eating fruits could potentially be ignored, but not a difference in cultivation. And Adam didn't want to stagnate the cultivation of one of his bodies to wait for the other, nor did he want to stop consuming treasures that might accelerate his growth.
That left only a single option, find a way to strengthen his Yang half. Until now, it was near impossible for him to find a decent treasure for him to consume for multiple reasons. First the Earth, as a planet where cultivators were a minority and hid, finding treasures was harder.
But more importantly, with the presences of the multiple Golden Idols/Legends on Earth, they had probably hogged the different treasures already and held control over them.
That's why, until now he had no power to fight for the control of those resources and was helpless, but that was no longer the case.
And the other major thing Adam had noticed about himself is related to this, to his growth to be precise. Although he cultivated at the same speed on Earth and in Epoch, the feeling of progression was much more present in Epoch than it was on Earth.
In Epoch, a realm was split in 50 levels, so it was made of a lot of small power ups, making the cultivator feel progress quite often.
On Earth however, realms were split in three levels only, early, middle and peak. Those were major power ups, with quite some difference in between every realm, and in the end the power was the same for both worlds, but on Earth one would often feel they were stuck at a certain realm.
For example, Yang Adam was currently an Early Level Nascent Soul, and he had already been one for more than a month already. This meant he hadn't made any progress in term of strength for an entire month, except for his Concepts.
This also showed why cultivators on Earth were generally at a lower realm, it wasn't just a lack of resources, but also because cultivation was harder on one's mind.
Back to Yang Adam's situation, he felt it was now time for him to hunt for treasures of the world. Unlike his Yin self, who was constantly interrupted in his meditations and had to stop every once in a while, Yang Adam had been able to meditate for long periods of time and had already understood his inner self, and was close to understanding the world around him.
Normally, this would allow Adam to open the 5th Gate, but because he had two bodies he had to understand the inner bodies and outer worlds for both bodies, since they also lived in different worlds.
Nonetheless, this was good progress. Although understanding his inner self didn't directly impact on his combat strength like boosting his stats or his comprehension, it still made him stronger.
And understanding the world didn't need as much meditation as understanding the inner self, so Adam was free to explore the world a bit while continuing to understand the world.
As for his strength, Adam didn't worry. In Epoch, he could be considered as one of the truly strong Heroes and stood near the peak of the realm. What separated him from Legends in Epoch wasn't really pure stats either, but rather the difference in equipment as the boost Legendary Equipment gave was simply incomparable to Adam's own equipment.
But on Earth, even if there were certainly some equipments like the legendary weapons of myths such as Mjollnir, Gungnir or Excalibur, the way equipment worked on Earth was different.
It didn't make much sense for equipments, especially armours to boost one's stats. On Earth, an armor would allow one to resist strikes while a weapon would allow one to strike harder, and that was it.
Considering the 'Gods' of Earth were weak Golden Idols who relied on the power of faith to climb to their position, their stats were most probably near Adam's own stats.
Since they had used the Power of Faith to reach their current state, it also meant it was impossible for them to progress any further, so their understanding of Concepts had been halted, just like the opening of their Gates.
The way the Power of Faith worked was quite simple actually. Everyone was enveloped by the Power of Faith, as everyone had at least one person believing in them.
This power usually didn't have any effect on the person, maybe boosting their luck a little if it was really big, but even that was debatable.
But there existed a ceremony that would allow one to turn the power of faith surrounding them into their own cultivation.
However, this was a one time thing. Once the ceremony is ended, it becomes impossible for the user to ever grow, be it through cultivating Qi, understanding the Concepts or opening the Gates.
From what Adam knew the Golden Idols of today were the ancient humans who struggled to survive in the old world when the different races from Epoch were abducted by Sofia from Epoch.
At that time, if merely a few Golden Idols were able to wipe out all other races without leaving a traces, then the strongest races probably only had a few Nascent Souls among them. And in this old world, before their transformation, humans were struggling to survive.
All of this allowed Adam to conclude that the Golden Idols were most probably Inner Core cultivators, which is the equivalent of Gold Rank, or were even below.
This meant their understanding over the concepts could only be very low, or some of them maybe didn't even start to understand a Concept, so the skills the Legends would be able to use would be very limited in strength.
While Adam could use skills that allowed him to boost his strength by ten or twenty times, they would barely be able to double their strength through their skills.
And it was for all those reasons that Adam felt very confidant against the gods of Earth. If they really had to fight, then he would most definitely win. Even if they tried to fight against him using their whole pantheons.