Yeah though, my impression here is that we don't have enough cause to follow them--and while they didn't detect anybody here, they smelled a rat, which means that they're probably going to try and bait out a potential pursuer if they can, because that's just common sense in a setting like this. It costs them little to create said bait and potentially lets them catch a rat.
And to be blunt, the outcome of failure here is not likely to be 'Capture', they have no reason to keep us alive, and every reason to want us dead. We'd probably get bailed out by Liao Zhu, but it would come as a major black mark on our record in a time when we really can't afford to be anything but officially immaculate. We're running into political problems just based on our background and current position, giving them something actually concrete to work on would be very bad.
To pursue, we would have to leave our area of operations, which is a black mark to begin with even if we don't actually cross the imperial borders. We can argue that 'But what if we find something valuable', I would argue "Any force capable of using a fully green scout vanguard is going to have a fourth realm commander, who would absolutely detect us on the spot just based on the realm differences." If we're close enough to find something valuable, we're also in the perception range of their own commander, which is pretty much bad end material on the spot barring outside intervention.
So we either find nothing at all, or find ourselves massively out of our league. Ling Qi doesn't understand the language, so she can't even rely on eavesdropping to get her anything useful.
Boldness must be tempered with caution, we have been bold here to separate from our squad here, and we were rewarded with the presence of a Cloud Tribe scouting force of considerable cultivation--we don't have the resources to pay the cost of doubling down now and being wrong. (Again, even the weakest of them matches Ling Qi's cultivation at the peak of Appraisal, the others are between Threshold and Framing--Green 4/5, as strong as that archer who was the boss in Foreshock, and he was beyond us without Renxiang being an OP ducal scion This is basically enough to sack a village with a baron in house, if that baron isn't an OP monster).
We have everything to lose, and very little to gain by advancing further at this point. The correct choice is to kick the intel upstairs and let our superiors decide what to do with it.
[X] One close call was enough, she would just report the activity.