"Brother, don't blame yourself. None of us expected Penguin to be so ruthless, or their retaliation to be so decisive."
Jiaren looked at Prince Higashifushimi Yorihito, whose face was filled with sorrow and whose eyes brimmed with tears. Rather than showing anger, he comforted him.
Yet upon hearing Jiaren's consolation, Prince Higashifushimi Yorihito's tears began streaming down uncontrollably.
"Actually, it was my fault too. I grew greedy for the Penguin Merchant Guild's supplies and ambushed them, but I never expected their intelligence network to be so far beyond imagination. They may have joined forces with the missing Yuan Shijia or Sun Wu and killed Qingchuan and all the others."
"I'm already very glad that you were able to return alive, Brother."
Jiaren's words were not entirely consolation. He truly did feel somewhat relieved.
When Qingchuan and the others had returned one after another after dying, Jiaren had been utterly shocked.
He naturally knew the strength of his junior brother. After the several helpers assigned to him had fallen one after another, his junior brother himself had also died not long afterward.
An opponent of that strength must have had someone at Yuan Shijia's level watching from the shadows, seizing the moment after his junior brother used his lifesaving ability to deliver a fatal blow!
So when his junior brother returned, he had immediately sensed that something was wrong.
But he had never expected the Penguin Merchant Guild's retaliation to be so decisive, so swift!
With virtually no pause at all, they had struck directly at his sworn elder brother!
And they had even gone so far as to use high-priority authority to directly destroy the items he needed to purchase!
As for how they had obtained the intelligence, Jiaren did not dwell on it too much.
Penguin's commercial capabilities were