The Martial Unity

The simplest and most straightforward method was a direct and head-on approach of manually interrogating the townsfolks, asking them about the men he was pursuing.

Of course, he immediately scratched that course of action out of his mind. It had a low probability of succeeding and a high probability of alerting Faraday Lowminer of his presence. If he realized that someone was in town looking for him, then he would simply vanish like the wind, in all likelihood.

Thus, Rui had to take a more indirect approach to capture.

('First, what would lead me to him in the first place?') He asked himself.

He could either obtain the information directly by extracting the information from someone who did know his exact location or indirectly by following a trail that would lead him to Faraday. No matter how well he hid, as long as he was running an operation of any kind that made him money of any kind, he was inevitably connected to arrows that pointed in his direction.

Even if he distanced himself from everything, he would need people managing his operations on his behalf. These people would most certainly be required to be physically at the site of the base of operations, overseeing inventory, schedule, supplies, processing, and shipments. The base of operations could be tracked via the influx and outflux of funds, and the influx and outflux of goods.

However, this was the avenue of intelligence gathering that the intelligence department of the Martial Union was responsible for.

so far, they had done a good job with

of operations in another state even before he escaped the Kandrian Empire,

a new base of operation but

to dig up was more specific, of course. The man had set up a drug trafficking and selling business. The esoteric kind,

he was once in the esoteric resources-supplying industry, the legitimate one. He had no choice but to delve into the underworld once he was ousted by the

the country. Meaning he couldn't just travel to another state and set up shop and continue with a legitimate business. He would either need to travel extremely far to do that, in nations he had very little exposure to and understanding of. Or choose to remain in

Union had done a good job trying to narrow his location down soon after his escape, meaning his plan had come close to failing. The intelligence department could easily narrow down his location by tracking exchanges in funds and tracking down the movement of the illegal esoteric drugs that he was receiving and

down the general location of his base of operations. It took more time

try and aid the intelligence gathering by following in their footsteps. While analyzing the flow of money and drugs was certainly useful, he wouldn't

be useless, but was it really his most effective and efficient

what they do best, I

the only way he

could easily detect whether a person was a Martial Apprentice or not.