Quite the deduction, not only is it well reasoned, it’s also taking information the reader knows and flipping it on its head by revealing information we didn’t know but he did about it. From there the deduction he made was beyond obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to us initially due to the lacking information we had.
However considering the only two Elves we’ve met have a very particular situation, and given how it was being abused by a nation which profited off of the cause of their situation in both accounts. It all adds up, to the point that with just a little bit of new information being revealed, all of this becomes something the average reader would be able to deduce themselves.
Now he’s acting just as slyly as he always does, keeping his lack of information a secret in this exchange of information, whilst pretending to know more than he does so they don’t feel as if they’re giving him anything valuable in exchange for basically nothing, both of them are traders after all so it makes a whole lot of sense. Now all that’s left is for him to wring them dry if their value before accepting any deals, I just don’t expect this to be as easy as he might hope it would be. It’s obvious they have something up their sleeves and are holding it back until the time is right.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t become an even bigger problem… but knowing his luck, it almost certainly will. What’ll it be this time? A large scale war with the Church Nation, while he’s busy off dealing with the increasing threat of stampedes in the Elven nation, and maybe even some home grown issue will pop up while he’s gone leaving the others to try and either resolve it themselves, or hold out until he gets back?
I mean if he leaves to go to the Elven Nation, then it will essentially, in the eyes of the Church Nation, be leaving the Empire unguarded allowing them to swoop in and cause problems. Or maybe his classmates will leave instead, causing the same issue, just to a slightly lesser extent. Ether way I can’t see this ending well.