Elena first asked the merchants about the country where they wanted to start their business. And all three of them replied that Riplanica Republic would be their optimal choice. This was a nation primarily run by a council of elders. There was no King to rule this nation. Some even call this country a mercantile nation as merchants really had very high authority there. Elena could easily guess why they chose this nation.

The Republic was situated at the northern border of the kingdom but Elena didn't have any contacts there. So she asked for Theodor's help. She didn't like to take help from someone for free so she made an exchange with him.

...

The next morning, Elena wanted to send all the needed materials to the merchant guild. She went there alone to ensure the safety of the materials. She had left the security of the group in the hands of Ariana as she was one of her rare summons of Elena with a somewhat small size. Others are just too big and couldn't be used in this situation.

When she left the inn she immediately felt eyes on her. But she calmly left the inn without showing any reaction and then after some time she hid her presence and got rid of her observers. Then she was able to visit the merchants guild without any problem and the final transaction was completed. After that Elena and the caravan had no more obligation to protect the goods.

This was one of the main objectives for today and it was done. The next objective was to get the merchants close to the northern border without any harm.

Today Elena went normally out from the main gate of the inn as she wanted to bait some of the culprit. If not for that she could have just teleported close to the guild. So she was sure some trouble would definitely go to the inn and she wanted Ariana to capture and interrogate them. They could give them a good report about how the higher up of the Ion family wanted to deal with the merchants group.

Returning to the inn, just as expected, she found seven captured individuals. Among them four of them were only low life thugs and were of no importance but the other three were definitely trained individuals. The thugs had already given up so Elena used the Downfall of Minds and Countries to again get all the info from the thugs and as expected they were just hired individuals with no significant information.

On the other hand, the trained persons had not given up their hostility toward Elena so she was able to know all the thoughts in their minds even more easily. And just as she expected they were part of a secret group specially trained by the Ion family. As for their objective, they wanted to secure all the personnel who were responsible for transportation of the materials when they lost the presence of Elena.

According to all the information she gathered from the captured persons, the merchants guesses were right. The Ion family was very well known to be ruthless and would definitely not let them off. So Elena had no more choice but to help them in crossing the border. After interrogating the captives, Elena became busy gathering all the family members of the groups in a safe location.

While doing all those works Elena was really thinking that this mission was way more troublesome than she expected it to be. Her irritation for the Ion family and for the merchants guild was rising continuously. Soon, she got a reply from the Margrave and went to Rin to get a special letter of permission from him.

It was a good thing that most of the guards didn't have a family behind and were mostly independent. As for the three guild personnel who came along, they all decided to stay inside the country and requested Elena to send them to the city of Rin without alerting anyone. Elena accepted their request and sent them to Rin as she thought that they should not face any trouble inside the city.

Next she sent all the remaining members of the caravan to the place where their families were waiting. After giving them some time to  talk among themselves and sorting things out she sent all of them to a town that was close to the northern border.

Shuri was an intelligent girl and she somewhat understood that the situation was serious, so she went along with Elena without any complaints and even helped some of the nervous family members to calm down.

Elena let the whole group to rest for the night and asked them to make up their minds. Then in the next morning, she finally took them to cross the border.

For merchants it wasn't very hard to cross the border and unlike Elena's home world this world didn't have any particular system to give someone a nationality. So, it was supposed to be easy for a group of merchants to cross the border and to reach the Republic.

But as Elena expected, the Ion family had blacklisted those merchants and a strict order was given to the border guards that none of them should be able to leave the country.

Obviously the order didn't reach all the places inside the kingdom but as this place was one of the borders that had the highest chance for them to cross, it was given a priority. So, Elena used the Trump Card she had for this situation and that was Theodor's letter.

The Ion family might have a large network, but that didn't mean they were all powerful. Most of their influence was concentrated in the central area of the kingdom, so the border area was only following their order to give them some face.

If a conflicting order was given by the Margrave family who had immense influence in the borders, then the Margrave family's order would be given more importance and by using that to her advantage and asking for Theodor's permission she was able to let the merchants legally leave the country.

This whole situation became a mess and Elena had to put a lot of effort to have a good ending for everyone and she was annoyed but after she was done with all these she didn't really feel that bad. But she was still irritated with the Merchants Guild and the Ion family. The merchants guild really gave Elena a very bad impression after this incident. It might look like they didn't do anything particularly bad but after doing some investigation on them while she was in Rin she found out that they hid the information that the Ion family was targeting them. Not only that, the merchant guild's actual plan was to let the Ion family take the material and then catch them and ask them for compensation. That means basically the whole caravan was kinda like a bait. If they could deliver the goods then fine but even if they failed the guild had a hand ready.

They didn't know about Elena's strength, even the false one that she showed to the adventurer guild and they still believed that she was weaker than other A ranks of the city. The adventurer guild did a good job of hiding it and only announcing about her rank up.

She would definitely deal with them but that is for later. Now she was going to enjoy the capital and to take a good rest.

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