230: Chapter 230 Ascertaining the Situation

She no longer blindly pursued maximum distance teleportation, but instead used this border city as a starting point.

Following the direction of the presumed main roads and traces of population clusters, she conducted segmented, stealthy leaps and ground reconnaissance.

Along the way, whenever she encountered sporadic Minotaur patrols, caravans, or villages, she would strike like a true ghost.

Using spatial abilities to instantly imprison them, pull them into the shadows, and interrogate them for information, she would then clean them up before their companions noticed, erasing all traces.

"In which direction is the Royal Court?"

"Where is the largest city?"

"How are the troops distributed?"

The cold questions, coupled with the suffocating pressure brought by the power of space, caused most of the captured Minotaurs to spill everything they knew after a brief moment of terrified struggling.

Through the piecing together of such fragmented information, the map of the Southern Realm gradually became clear in Lin Kong's mind.

After another hour or so of stealth and leaping.

When Lin Kong recovered from the slight dizziness of another ultra-long-distance teleportation and hid behind the shadow of a hill far from the official road.

Even with his calmness as an Ethereal Divine Guard, a hint of solemnity flashed through his eyes.

In the distance, the silhouette of a giant city burst into his field of vision.

Rather than a city, it was more like a black mountain rising abruptly from the ground.

The city walls, estimated to be over twenty meters high, were built entirely of giant black stones shimmering with a metallic cold light; under the faint light of the stars and moon, they looked like the armored back of a giant beast.

Behind the battlements of the city walls, well-equipped Minotaur soldiers, significantly more burly than the border city guards.

They were patrolling back and forth with huge torches, their heavy and orderly steps echoing, with the reflection of their weapons occasionally piercing the darkness.

Atop the city walls, a giant Minotaur totem battle flag fluttered silently in the night wind.

A heavy, murderous, desolate, and powerful aura faintly pressed down even from several kilometers away.

"The Minotaur Royal Court..."

This name, learned from the captives, surfaced in Lin Kong's mind.

This was the true heart of the enemy.

However, what made Lin Kong's gaze narrow even more was that shortly after he had gone into hiding.

The Royal Court's ten-meter-high iron-clad giant gates slowly opened a crack amidst the dull sound of hinges.

A troop of bedraggled Minotaur remnants, their armor broken and many soldiers still bearing unhealed wounds, was silently and rapidly flooding into the city.

And at the very front of that troop of remnants, the tall figure whose aura was withered yet still exuded an unyielding and fierce air was precisely the defeated Minotaur general, Gos!

"He actually just arrived?"

Lin Kong calculated rapidly in his mind. From the battlefield where Gos was defeated to this place, the straight-line distance was nearly ten thousand miles.

Leading the Space Hunters and utilizing spatial teleportation abilities, he had spent nearly six hours scouting, inquiring, and correcting his direction along the way.

While Gos led a defeated army, relying entirely on foot power and possibly even carrying injuries...

"It seems the advantage of spatial power in ultra-long-distance mobility is practically a total crush," Lin Kong thought to himself.

If he had known the exact coordinates of the Royal Court earlier, he could probably have arrived in a few minutes by teleporting with full force.

This kind of strategic mobility was heart-pounding just to think about.

Suppressing the emotions in his heart, Lin Kong focused his attention entirely on the royal city before him.

Like the most patient hunter, he perfectly concealed himself with the help of shadows and the slight distortion of light by space.

After Gos's group completely disappeared inside the city gates and the gates slammed shut, he moved.

He didn't take the gate, nor did he even approach the wall.

His figure blurred, and in the next moment, he appeared in the shadows of a secluded alley inside the royal city.

For him, who had a preliminary grasp of the Space Law, short-distance precision teleportation through this kind of city wall without spatial reinforcement was like passing through a curtain of water.

In the time that followed, Lin Kong transformed into an invisible ghost.

He continuously flickered, lurked, observed, and recorded within the intricate streets and alleys, the tall stone buildings, and even the heavily guarded inner city areas of the royal city.

He saw more elite Minotaur troops resting in the barracks, saw huge smelting workshops working day and night, and saw a cluster of rugged palaces full of tribal style...

"Patrol rotation frequency..."

"Inner city restricted area range..."

"Approximate locations of granaries, armories, and barracks..."

"Auras of the strong..."

Countless pieces of information were efficiently collected and analyzed by him.

What relieved him slightly was that, except for the city walls and certain core areas where he felt the fluctuations of Formations that posed a threat to him.

Within the entire royal city, he did not sense any individual energy reactions that exceeded the diamond rank or reached the Saint-Grade.

The strongest few auras were all concentrated in the palace area, at approximately the high-tier diamond rank; one of them was the most powerful, suspected to have reached 9-star diamond rank, which should be the Minotaur King.

"The intelligence basically matches; the highest combat power is indeed at the diamond rank."

Lin Kong silently evaluated.

To obtain the most accurate and core intelligence, he needed to find a "tongue"—a "tongue" with enough weight.

His gaze finally locked onto an area in the inner city, a stone mansion taller than the surrounding buildings, decorated with more metal and animal bones, and guarded by elite guards at the entrance.

This level of grandeur suggested it was the residence of at least a high-ranking general or a civil official with real power.

Silently, Lin Kong's figure emerged inside the mansion in a spacious bedroom covered with thick fur and filled with the smell of alcohol and a certain musky scent.

On the bed, a bloated Minotaur elder in a silk bathrobe.

Was exercising with a female Minotaur, panting heavily.

Lin Kong's eyes showed no emotion; at the moment he appeared, he lightly flicked his finger.

A layer of invisible spatial film instantly enveloped and isolated the entire room and a small area around it.

Not a single sound, or even an aura, could escape from the inside.

The female Minotaur on the bed seemed to have noticed something; just as she was about to turn her head, a spatial rift as thin as a hair swept across her neck.

Her eyes widened, and before she could even make a sound, she was dead.

The bloated Minotaur elder's movements suddenly froze, and the warmth beneath him rapidly turned cold.

He looked up in horror, meeting Lin Kong's eyes, which shimmered with a cold silver light in the darkness like an abyss.

A silver arrow composed entirely of condensed spatial power, its tip slightly tearing the surrounding space, was silently suspended three inches in front of his forehead.

The deadly sharpness stung his skin.

"Ah! Mmph!"

Just as he was about to scream, he found his throat seemingly constricted, unable to make a sound.

"I ask, you answer. One extra word, death. Hesitation, death."

Lin Kong's voice was ethereal and cold, ringing directly in the elder's mind without a trace of emotion.

The elder's fat was trembling all over, his face was pale, pea-sized beads of sweat rolled down, and his eyes were filled with the most primal fear.

He nodded desperately, no longer possessing even half of his previous prestige.

"The total number of combat-ready troops currently in the Minotaur Kingdom?"

"There are... over eight million left... the standing army in the royal city and various fortresses..."

"Gos took five million elites away."

The elder answered tremblingly and incoherently.