"I'm absolutely terrified!"
Lei Lin declared with perfect self-righteousness: "After all, we've just destroyed one of the Chaos Sovereign's ports and slaughtered an entire branch of the Eye of Judgment! Great Supreme Mother Sovereign above! Let's hope we don't end up wanted by both of them, because then we'd really be famous!"
Lei Lin's performance was remarkably convincing — even the faint hint of bitterness on his face immediately drew mockery from Belinda.
"Hmph! One port? In reality, that Iyas Port was nothing more than an illegal private port that the brat Iyas set up on his own initiative out in the open seas. It never received any official authorization from the Heier Continent, and even the high priests of the Filthy Bird barely acknowledged it... As for colonies like these, they were always nothing more than experiments for the Filthy Bird's forces. Success would be ideal, but failure wouldn't mean much of a loss..."
"Besides, this is still the Mother Sovereign's continent — an ally of the Eye of Judgment! And the Chaos Sovereign and the Eye of Judgment are mortal enemies, so at most they'll put out a covert wanted notice on us, but they won't make any major moves... The only thing I'm truly worried about is the Eye of Judgment's forces!"
Belinda looked deeply troubled: "I've already checked the notices posted at the port. Unfortunately, it seems I've been officially placed on the Eye of Judgment's wanted list, and that news will spread very quickly..."
She glanced at Lei Lin, her eyes dark and unfathomable: "However, it appears that because you wiped out every last person at the branch office, not a single piece of information about you has gotten out. So if you want to leave now, there's still time!"
Lei Lin fell silent. He knew perfectly well that it wasn't just his own elimination of witnesses — the shroud of Chaos power had most likely reduced his trail to practically nothing.
But looking at Belinda, who seemed somewhat nervous, Lei Lin offered a faint smile: "Did you really think I'd abandon you and leave for the sake of my own safety?"
"And why wouldn't you? With the alliance between our factions, the Eye of Judgment's wanted notice will spread across the entire Heier Continent in no time!"
Belinda let out a cold laugh: "When that happens, you'll be stuck with me, facing an overwhelming manhunt together!"
"Oh? That sounds rather interesting, doesn't it?"
Lei Lin stroked his chin nonchalantly.
"You!" Belinda flushed with exasperation, her whole body trembling, though beneath the anger there flickered a hint of something stirred.
Lei Lin caught every one of these complex emotional shifts with keen precision.
He smiled inwardly, though his face maintained its mask of perfect composure: "So where do we go from here? Can the Holy City at the center of the Heier Continent still tolerate our presence?"
"You... really are an idiot!" Belinda's eyes were now filled with nothing but warmth.
"Don't worry! The Holy City is the sacred ground of all Mother Sovereign's bloodline descendants. With the connections I built before, it shouldn't be a major problem..."
After gazing deeply at Lei Lin, Belinda offered her explanation.
"That's a relief!" Lei Lin patted his chest, looking as though he'd just narrowly escaped disaster.
"You..." Belinda laughed despite her exasperation, momentarily speechless, while Lei Lin unfurled the parchment scroll in his hand.
"This map... is quite bare-bones! Are we currently at the Andisas Alliance port?"
The yellowed-edged map was remarkably crude, with only a handful of locations labeled, and it seemed to cover only this particular region.
Lei Lin found this perfectly understandable — after all, in this era, a complete, high-precision continental map represented a fortune that could bankrupt even an ordinary Wizard. The fact that Belinda had managed to get her hands on this scroll was thanks to this being a trade port.
As Lei Lin had the Chip record the data, he recalled the information he had previously gathered, and the appearance of the entire Hail Continent gradually took shape in his mind.
The Hail Continent! It was one of the seven continents of the Purgatory World, under the dominion of the Mother of Ten Thousand Snakes. Its territory was extraordinarily vast, with large swaths of uncivilized regions where savage, primitive peoples still lived, alongside prehistoric giant beasts and the like.
And on the Hail Continent, the most dominant group was the bloodline descendants of the Mother of Ten Thousand Snakes!
Various pure-blooded giant serpents, hybrid half-snake people, and snake-like races that bore minor serpentine traits but were actually quite distant in bloodline — these groups accounted for roughly twenty to thirty percent of the Hail Continent's total population.
The remainder consisted of numerous otherworldly races — evil eyes, Purgatory dwarves, energy beings, elemental beings, and even humans — all of which had populations scattered across the Hail Continent.
Of course, compared to the bloodline descendants of the Ten Thousand Snakes, these races were vastly inferior in power, typically existing as tribes or clans eking out a living in the gaps between two great cities or major powers.
What was even more noteworthy was that the most widespread systems of governance on the Hail Continent were the city-state system and the clan system. Battles of all kinds broke out frequently between different city-states, different races, and even within the same race.
The so-called Sacred City was established through the collective election of the Mother of Ten Thousand Snakes' bloodline descendants. In theory, it served as the ruling center of the entire Hail Continent, and rumor had it that it was also where the Mother of Ten Thousand Snakes' divine grace resided.
In theory, the entire Hail Continent was supposed to obey the Sacred City's commands, but in practice, how things actually played out depended on the lords of each individual city-state.