Create link to page post belongs to

Hi all –
I’m new to wordpress, but am learning fast and so far found it really flexible (I’m using it as a CMS).
I think this should be relatively easy to accomplish but its had me stumpedfor good few hours. I think I’m possibly coming at it from the wrong angle. Anyway, heres the scenario:

On the homepage of a site I’m developing I’m showing two excerpts with thumbnails from posts that the website admin can choose to put there by allocating them to a category called ‘featured’.

Currently the ‘Read more link’ points to the post in full on a single-slug.php page as you’d expect.

What I want is for the ‘Read more’ link to point to the static page with a loop where the rest of the posts within the posts category reside.

I can make the Read more link through to the category page but this doesn’t work for me as it breaks my Nav. I have to Nav menus both with dynamic current page highlighting. Category pages don’t feature in my nav.

I’m currently playing around with a function I found (incomplete_cat_list) to exclude certain chosen categories from read more links, but obviosuly this still takes me to the category page.

With some careful naming of categories and static pages I’m nearly there.
Current I have:
Excerpt on homepage –> links to –> https://www.example.com/category/category_name/post_name

I need to find a way to:
Excerpt on homepage –> links to –> https://www.example.com/category_name/post_name
(without the /category/ This would work as my category names and page names can be the same.

Any ideas, I’m pretty stuck??

Thanks
Stef