User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 544: You're the King, Review/@comment-4933386-20170714090726/@comment-7418318-20170714130643

The way I understood it back in the Tenrou arc is that she can link herself with anyone in her line of sight, but to forge a connection between people beyond her line of sight, she needs to use feelings.

That's why I at first assumed she went around the place so she could set this up by directly looking at people and linking with them.

But the idea of having this as a cascade effect, where the link spreads from a person to the one they care for and then from those people to their cherished people and propagates ever onwards until basically the entire country is in the "net" is quite interesting too. It certainly seems more possible than visiting the entire continent on her own.

Maybe it's a combination. She visited as many places as she could to accelerate the start and let the cascade effect do the rest.