After sailing for roughly four hours through the Candel Empire's southern waters, the Guard Fleet stopped near an island covering about five or six square kilometers.
The island had no mineral resources or any other resources worth mentioning, so it had not originally been among the Guard Fleet's targets.
Two months earlier, however, Xu Yi had changed the Xinfei Merchant Guild's maritime strategy. He intended to establish a chain of islands across the Endless Sea, linking all the resource-rich islands and bringing them firmly under the guild's control. Islands like this one, which lacked resources but had terrain and an area well suited to building a base, had therefore been included in their surveys.
There were countless such islands scattered across the Candel Empire's vast southern waters. Building bases on every one of them was naturally impossible.
After extensive surveys and comparisons, Xu Yi had finally used Leslie's reports to select this island, along with two others roughly one hundred and two hundred kilometers away, as the targets for the first phase of construction.
Although the Xinfei Merchant Guild Guards Fleet had already been extremely active in the Candel Empire's southern waters, strictly speaking, establishing bases on these three islands would mark the Xinfei Merchant Guild's true, official entry into the empire's waters.
The countries on this continent had no particularly clear concept of their own territorial waters. Still, the shortest straight-line distance from here to the Candel Empire's coastline was less than a mere hundred kilometers, which effectively placed it within the Candel Empire navy's sphere of control.
The Xinfei Merchant Guild was establishing bases on these three islands without informing the Candel Empire. There was really no telling how the empire would react.
After stopping near the island, the Guard Fleet did not sit idle. It lowered dozens