Xu Yi quickly dismissed his own suspicions.
First, the Salank Merchant Guild had been established for nearly a century. It had grown from an insignificant little merchant guild in Bunta City into one of the city's leading guilds, and even held a place of some importance in the Lampari Kingdom as a whole. A guild like that had no reason to risk betraying the Lampari Kingdom by selling the Xinfei Merchant Guild's secrets to the Sark Kingdom. It would gain nothing from doing so.
Second, even if the Salank Merchant Guild had such intentions, it lacked the means.
Ever since the incident with Rem, the Xinfei Merchant Guild had imposed extremely strict safeguards on its technical documents. Anyone who had not been tested and earned genuine trust could not access them at all.
Rather than believe the Salank Merchant Guild could plant a spy in the Xinfei Merchant Guild to steal those documents, it would be more plausible to believe that one of the guild's core researchers had betrayed it.
At present, the people in the Xinfei Merchant Guild who could freely access those research documents could be counted on one hand: Avita, director of the Magic Research Institute; Great Mage Camilla, a Senior Researcher; Canby, the dwarf who headed the Magic Machine Tool Research Center; and Xu Yi himself.
Xu Yi absolutely refused to believe that Avita, Great Mage Camilla, or Canby would betray the guild. The most likely explanation for the Sark Kingdom's ability to build a Magic-Powered Stone Thrower was that it had obtained some information about it through other channels and used that information to make a copy.
As for those channels... Xu Yi had not voiced his suspicions in front of Major Maikongli, but he actually suspected someone within the Northern Garrison, or even the