Just as Lilis was so frightened by Fat Bear and Handsome Bear that she nearly vomited blood and fainted, Lin Qi was admiring a map in the third-floor meeting room.
Lin Qi had left the Mercenary Guild affairs to Long Cheng, who had likewise altered his appearance with a Phantom God Puppet. Long Cheng, a war maniac to his very bones who delighted in corpses carpeting the fields and in slaughtering cities and destroying nations, was extremely satisfied with this assignment. He swore that he would gather one hundred thousand elite troops and build a formidable military force for the Longshan Family.
Having just returned to the hotel and exchanged a few words with Fat Bear and Handsome Bear, Lin Qi came to the meeting room. Hu Xinzhu, also wearing a Phantom God Puppet and disguised as a gaunt, sickly-green young man, was waiting there with the map in hand.
Spread across the enormous map, three meters long and wide, was a complete territorial map of the Vias Commercial Federation. In the federation's far north-northeast, beneath the boundless mountain ranges, the vast Green Forest Province had been filled in with pale gold. A blood-red seal stood out clearly—the seal of the Duke of Green Forest.
The Green Forest Province produced all kinds of ores and fine timber. It could be called the most important timber-producing region in the south of the continent. Its population was also dense; a single small province held twenty million people, a population on a scale counted among the greatest in the entire Western Continent.
Most importantly, the Green Forest Province occupied an exceptionally vital position. To its northeast lay the Caesar Empire; northwest, beyond a mountain-valley passage several hundred li long, was the Gallic Empire. Directly north of the province, separated only by a mountainous