Since the village was nearby, it wouldn't have taken him long to reach it if he was riding on Hi.
However, Lin Fan deliberately slowed Hi down so that he wouldn't reach the village as soon as possible.
He knew that there was a barricade created by the Mercenary Guild around this village, so he couldn't just rush in. Even if he was a Special A Rank Mercenary, that still didn't mean that they would just let him pass for no reason.
So the only thing that he could do was sneak past this barricade.
This was what he needed the information from the owner of the bar for.
He wanted information on the surrounding area to see if there was an easy place for him to break through and as he had expected, there were many spots that were considered observation blind spots. All he had to do was pick one of these spots and break through the blockade that the Mercenary Guild had set up.
Of course, the reason why they had been considered observation blind spots was because of the special terrain in these places.
These special terrains made it hard for normal people, even normal cultivators to pass through. Unless they were high grade cultivators, it was almost impossible to pass through these places.
Even for a high grade cultivator like Lin Fan, it would be hard to pass.
That was if Lin Fan didn't have several cheat skills with him.
The path that Lin Fan chose was a cliff that was over a kilometer wide.
It was a cliff that was almost impossible for normal people to build a bridge over and unless they had the help of cultivators, it would be impossible to build a bridge. Even if they had the help of cultivators, they would need high grade cultivators that would be able to fly to help them span the distance to build the bridge.
But this was a cliff in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing special about this place, so there was no one that was willing to build a bridge like that here.
So that was why this was considered a natural blockade that no one could cross and why the Mercenary Guild didn't post anyone to watch this place.
It was just too bad that Lin Fan could cross here.
Well, if it was the past Lin Fan, perhaps he wouldn't be able to cross either since he couldn't fly yet.
Other cultivators at the same level of cultivation as him would be able to fly with tools given to them by their masters, but he wasn't since he didn't have this background. Even Mu Bao Bao didn't actually have a flying tool since the Love Sect wasn't a sect that was really based on artifacts, so even she couldn't fly even though she was in the Golden Core Realm.
After all, cultivators would only be able to fly using their cultivation alone when they reached the Nascent Soul Realm.
But with the new broken skill that he received from the god of magic, Weiss, he was able to create a cheat.
He had been playing around with wind magic in his spare time and he found that wind magic could be used for other things than just to create breezes or wind blades. He found that as long as he concentrated hard enough and had enough power, he could even create winds that could lift people up.
With his self made flying spell, it made it easy for him to cross over this cliff.
Of course, there was another consideration.
He had Hi deliberately slow down so he would arrive at night when visibility was lower.
He only assumed that the Mercenary Guild wouldn't post people to watch over this cliff, but that wasn't certain. So he wanted to make sure that visibility was low so that even if there was someone watching, he would be able to slip by.
As expected, he was able to easily make his way through to the other side and was able to smoothly reach Clear Water Village.
But once he arrived, he didn't immediately head into the village. After all, there was still a chance that the Mercenary Guild had placed guards inside of the village.
So Lin Fan just stopped outside and sent his puppet scouts in to check the place out.
To his surprise, there wasn't anyone from the Mercenary Guild inside this village, there wasn't even a single cultivator in this village. All the people here were people without cultivation, including his two subordinates that were trapped here.
He didn't even see anyone that was dressed remotely like the people from the Mercenary Guild. It was almost as if the Mercenary Guild didn't dare about this village at all.
Feeling that something was off, Lin Fan decided to increase his search range to include the area around the village.
As he had expected, there were indeed guards outside of the village that were watching the village, but there was also something that he didn't expect. What he didn't expect was that the guards outside the village completely surrounded the village in a circle, not creating a single gap in the line.
It was almost as if they were preventing these people from leaving the village at all costs.
But why would the Mercenary Guild be doing this?
What did they want with this village?
After thinking about it, Lin Fan decided that it wasn't a method to keep staying here, so he decided that he would sneak into the village and find his subordinates to get more information from them. Not to mention that he should get his subordinates out as soon as possible since it clearly wasn't safe for them to stay in this village much longer.
So with his mind made up, Lin Fan wrapped himself up in magic and started moving towards the village.
The reason why his scouts hadn't detected all these guards previously was because they had only been focused on getting to the village. The reason why the guards didn't detect his scouts was because they were too small for them to detect since he had sent in the mosquito scouts.
But now, Lin Fan himself was much too big to sneak past these guards unnoticed without some help.
He could have used the moles to dig underground to reach the village, but he didn't want to leave any traces behind.
So he tested out his other new spell against these people.
Lin Fan walked right into the line of view of these guards up in the tree, but not a single one of them noticed him. Even when he walked right in front of their eyes, they didn't seem to react at all.
This was his new spell, it was an illusion spell.
Right now, there was a layer of illusion magic around him that made him blend into the background. So instead of seeing him, all they saw was whatever was behind him.
Even if they looked right at him, they wouldn't be able to see anything other than the surrounding forests.
Lin Fan knew that he had a very big weakness, which was his lack of support abilities.
With the Loving is Sharing, he received many different attack and defense skills from his pets. However, other than the Parasite Seed and Share Senses skills that he received from Greeny, he really didn't have any other support skills.
So during his free time, Lin Fan had been focusing on learning more support abilities rather than strengthening his attack and defense abilities.
The wind flying spell was one of them and this illusion spell was another one of those support abilities.
He knew that while he could fight enemies face on, his problem was that he didn't have a single stealth ability. He had already seen how strong stealth abilities were back in the dungeon when he almost lost Tian Tian to that ambush, so he knew that he should also get some.
After his hard work, he was able to figure out this illusion spell which allowed him to freely move undetected.
But while it seemed like the Magic Manipulation skill was broken because it gave him access to almost every single magic spell, there was a proper price that he had to pay for that.
Hard work, that was the price that he had to pay.
Instead of having a skill that just gave you the ability to use these spells, he had to figure out how to control the magic energy to create the effects of these spells. So it took a lot of hard work and practice before he was able to use these spells.
Over close to half a month, he had only learned a total of four different spells.
While he had an advantage as an otherworlder since he had greater creativity than people of this world since he had learned all about these spells in animes, novels, and mangas, it was still hard for him to learn how to control the magic energy to mimic these spells.
Lin Fan used this illusion spell to move right past the guards and he reached the gates of the village.
These were only the gates of a village and couldn't compare to the gates of a city, let alone Brilliant Light City, so it only took a single jump for Lin Fan to jump over these gates.
After landing without a sound, Lin Fan moved silently through the streets of the village until he arrived at the inn.
With the illusion spell still in place, he was able to make his way to the second floor and then he sneaked into one of the guest rooms.
In this room, there were two girls currently sitting at a table lit by a candle, just silently sitting there as if they were considering something.
What they didn't expect was Lin Fan suddenly appearing right in front of them.