The Hogwarts Library was a silent, sacred ocean.
Sunlight streamed through the towering Gothic arched windows, split by stained glass into countless colorful beams that cast a quiet dance of dust motes across the air.
The towering bookshelves stood like rows of silent giants, guarding the wisdom accumulated over a thousand years.
The air was filled with the delicate scent of ancient parchment, mingled with old wood and ink, forming a unique fragrance known as "knowledge."
[Analysis Project One: A False History Under Wizarding Hegemony—History of Magic]
Lin Yuan casually pulled a History of Magic book so heavy it could be used as a weapon from the shelf.
He found a secluded spot by the window and sat down. The sunlight beside him gilded his dark hair with a pale sheen.
Then he began turning pages.
His actions drew curious glances from several Ravenclaw students nearby.
That was because he wasn't turning the pages at anything like a reading pace.
His fingers moved steadily and forcefully, one page after another, with hardly a pause. It looked more like a mechanical, pointless repetition.
"What's he doing? Is he trying to see who can turn pages the fastest?" a girl whispered.
"Maybe it's some kind of Eastern meditation?" her companion guessed.
The lines of History of Magic were filled with the victors' arrogance and prejudice.
"1612: The Goblin Rebellions. Owing to their greedy nature, the goblins broke their peace treaty with the Ministry of Magic..."
Lin Yuan's gaze rested for a second on this epic written by the victors. Then his divine sense spread like a vast net cast into the deep, instantly catching countless scattered fragments of related information from every corner of the library.
An Examination of Goblin Currency, Medieval Wizarding Trade Laws, A History of Gringotts, On Futures Trading in Alchemical Materials, A History of Dragon Blood Price Fluctuations, Gringotts Interest Rates and the Rise and Fall of Wizarding Families...
Seemingly unrelated streams of information collided, connected, modeled, and extrapolated within his consciousness, driven by an invisible analytical engine beyond all the wisdom of this world. A true picture, buried beneath the dust of history and steeped in the stench of capital, slowly unfolded.
[Analysis Conclusion]:
This was neither a revolt by the oppressed nor a righteous campaign against greed.
It was a long-planned financial war between two races, fought over economic hegemony and ultimately settled through the most primitive, bloodiest form of violence.
On one side stood the financiers, shrewd to their very bones—the goblins.
The core tradition that "the maker is the eternal owner of an object" had long since become more than a cultural belief.
Over centuries, the goblins had honed it into the sharpest, most unassailable financial weapon.
Through this "rule," the goblins had successfully built a perfect financial loop: what wizards "bought" with their hard-earned gold was never ownership of an object, but merely the "right to use it." Every sword forged by goblins, every splendid ornament, was essentially a "long-term lease." When a wizard died, these "assets," carrying immense value, would naturally flow back into the goblins' vaults under the rules of "inheritance."
This led to a terrifying outcome: the wealth of the wizarding world was steadily flowing, in one direction, into Gringotts, like a frog slowly boiling in water. Wizards basked in the vanity of owning powerful magical objects, never realizing that their entire economic system had long since been parasitized, or that the goblins had already slipped a financial noose woven from culture around their necks.
The supposed "greed" wasn't a fabrication.
But it wasn't greed for one or two objects. It was the devouring of the wizarding world's entire economic lifeline.
On the other side stood the debtors, too arrogant to see the truth until it was too late—the Ministry of Magic.
By the time discerning wizards finally discovered the economic black hole, terrified by their ledgers and the ever-depreciating Galleons, the damage was already beyond repair.
They had tried negotiations and protests, and attempted to apply legal pressure, but against the goblins' "sacrosanct" cultural traditions, all their efforts were powerless.
They had lost the financial game.
So, driven by the deep-seated arrogance of Pure-blood wizards, who couldn't bear to be outsmarted by "inferior creatures," the Ministry of Magic chose the stupidest, most direct solution—and the one most in keeping with their nature: flipping the table.
The 1612 law declaring that "ownership of goblin-made objects permanently belongs to the wizard who purchases them" was no ignorant cultural affront.
It was a "declaration of debt default," backed by the credibility of wizarding society as a whole.
It struck at the very foundations of the goblin financial empire, with the aim of forcibly cutting off the outflow of wealth.
Thus, the so-called "rebellion" was simply the inevitable result of this financial war moving from behind the scenes into the open.
It was a bloody dog-eat-dog struggle.
One side sought to defend the carefully constructed, parasitic economic hegemony it had built; the other wanted to escape its debts and seize back control, and was willing to wage war to wriggle out of a bet it had lost.
The brief mention of "greed" in the history books had cleverly concealed the ugliness shared by both sides.
It was the goblins' greed for wealth, and the wizards' greed for power and racial dignity.
When those two kinds of greed collided, bloodshed became the only possible end.
"1722: The centaurs refused to come under the Ministry of Magic's jurisdiction and chose self-exile in the Forbidden Forest. Their aloof, proud nature makes them difficult to communicate with..."
Lin Yuan's consciousness searched through the information again, at astonishing speed.
[Analysis Conclusion]: During the century before this, wizards had violated their territorial agreements with the centaurs three times, steadily encroaching on the Forbidden Forest to make room for the Quidditch Pitch and expand their villages. The centaurs' eventual "self-exile" wasn't "pride," but a protective severance born of their complete disillusionment with "those who broke their word."
As for House-elves...
The Study of House-elves' Innate Servility was even more riddled with absurd sophistry designed to rationalize their enslavement.
It had taken the time it took to eat lunch.
While the other students were still struggling to remember the year of a particular Goblin Rebellion, Lin Yuan had already closed the heavy book of false history.
A clear, cold, three-dimensional diagram of the world's power structure, riddled with class and racial conflict, had taken shape in his mind.
"A fragile pyramid of peace built on lies and oppression." He understood. "Voldemort's rise wasn't an accident. He was merely the one tasked with lighting the fuse. Even without him, this world, burdened by a thousand years of resentment, would sooner or later have plunged into civil war over some other spark."
[Analysis Project Two: Lost Fragments of the Laws—Ancient Runes]
If History of Magic had shown Lin Yuan the "skeleton" of this world, then Ancient Runes had allowed him a glimpse of its "soul."
When he opened An Introduction to Ancient Runes and saw the first twisted, complex symbol, his placid mind rippled for the first time.
"This... isn't this just the most basic Rune Path?"
In his world of cultivation, runes were the most direct manifestations of the Great Dao. They were the supreme method by which cultivators communicated with the heavens and earth and drew upon the power of the laws.
Yet in this world, these precious symbols, imbued with the power of the laws, were treated as a "lost language"—a mere archaeological tool for translating ancient texts!
"How ignorant! How laughable!" Lin Yuan couldn't help thinking. "These wizards are like people holding a mountain made of gold and diamonds, yet only knowing how to pick up a few pretty stones to use as decorations. The real treasure is right in front of them, and they're blind to it."
This was a complete dimensional overpowering.
Not far away, Hermione Granger was racking her brains over an Ancient Rune that meant "protection."
Her little face was full of concentration, her brows knitted as she copied, compared, and memorized it over and over on a sheet of parchment.
She felt a small surge of pride at having mastered five variants of the rune in just one day.
At the other end of the library, Lin Yuan hadn't even picked up a quill.
His divine sense had become an invisible scalpel, bypassing the inefficient steps of "learning" and "memorization" and beginning to reverse-engineer the underlying grammar and logic of this "language" from the runes' forms, fluctuations of energy, and inner connections.
"I see... This world's rune system is a branching structure rooted in the Five Elements."
"The core strokes of the 'fire' rune represent the chaotic release of energy. The core structure of the 'water' rune symbolizes energy's capacity to contain and flow. And 'protection' is a branch of the 'earth' runes. In essence, it uses a 'stable' structure to withstand the impact of 'chaos'..."
An afternoon passed.
By the time Hermione had finally written down the "meanings" of twenty runes, exhausted, Lin Yuan had completely grasped the inner workings of the entire Ancient Runes dictionary.
He had even begun to "create."
He reached out, a thread of Spiritual Power so faint it was almost imperceptible coiling around his fingertip, and lightly traced a composite rune on the tabletop.
It was formed by joining the rune for "levitate" with the rune for "accelerate" in an unusual arrangement.
He gently blew on the center of the rune.
"Bzzzt—"
A quill on the tabletop seemed to be lifted by an invisible hand. Defying gravity, it floated into the air, then shot away with a whoosh, a white streak that landed precisely in a trash can in the distance.
The whole process was silent and as fast as lightning.
"The energy conversion rate is still too low. The structure can be optimized further."
Lin Yuan calmly withdrew his finger and summed up his results.
He didn't notice the older Gryffindor student nearby, who had just woken from a nap and was rubbing his eyes in bewilderment as he stared at the quill that had jumped into the trash can. He thought he must still be dreaming.
[Analysis Project Three: A Naturalist's Nightmare]
If books had souls, then the soul of Mr. Newt Scamander's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them would surely be a kind and shy one, speckled with freckles, dressed in a blue coat, with a Bowtruckle in its arms.
It was a work filled with the author's lifelong passion and devotion, every word brimming with tenderness and respect for magical creatures. It was a love letter to the entire wizarding world, calling for understanding and protection.
But at that moment, this "love letter" was being read by an entirely different pair of eyes.
Lin Yuan turned the page. His cold gaze, unique to a cultivator who saw all things as "resources," acted like a precision scalpel, mercilessly dissecting the lively, adorable creatures described by Newt into Alchemy Formulas, materials, and usable "supernatural abilities."
The first page: Niffler.
Newt's description was full of affection: "These adorable little creatures can't resist anything that glitters. They are gentle and affectionate, though sometimes they cause a little harmless mischief..."
Lin Yuan's gaze swept across the page, and annotations formed automatically in his divine sense:
[Species Name: Treasure Beast (Low-tier)]
[Classification: Earth/Metal dual attributes, auxiliary spirit beast.]
[Natural Ability: Passive treasure-seeking aura. Innate, uncontrollable affinity for metals and minerals with high Spiritual Power content.]
[Application: Can be domesticated to locate Spirit Stone deposits or undiscovered ancient ruins. Large-scale breeding could create a "treasure-aura monitoring network" covering an entire region. Its fur has weak resistance to curses and can be made into coin pouches with an added "anti-theft" effect.]
If Newt could have heard him, he probably would have frowned and muttered anxiously, "No, no, they just like shiny things. They aren't... They're not some kind of 'monitoring network'..."
He turned to the next page: Graphorn.
Newt's words were tinged with reverence and sadness: "...The last remaining pair on Earth, whom I was fortunate enough to save. They are symbols of strength and majesty, their skin more resilient than Dragon Hide, and the horns on their heads contain a deadly poison..."
Lin Yuan's eyes flashed with excitement.
Far away, Newt was brushing his Graphorn when he suddenly shivered.
He seemed to hear a whisper from hell: "Skin it... grind its horns... make an elixir..." He hurriedly hugged his beloved beast, fearfully glancing around.
He turned another page: "Occamy."
Newt's description was full of wonder: "A winged, serpentine creature, beautiful and aggressive. Most remarkable of all, it can shrink or grow to fit the available space, and its eggshells are made of the purest silver..."
For the first time, the corner of Lin Yuan's mouth curled into a genuinely interested smile.
Newt, who was carefully placing an Occamy Egg back in its nest, suddenly shuddered. The egg in his hands almost slipped to the ground. He turned pale, as if he could see a terrifying demon smiling "kindly" at the Occamy hatchlings that hadn't yet emerged, murmuring, "Spatial bombs. Not bad, not bad..."
Finally, he came to the chapter on "Dragons."
Other wizards would treat "Dragon Heartstring" with reverence, considering it one of the finest materials for making "the most powerful wand cores."
But to Lin Yuan, that was the greatest joke in the world.
"What a waste... What a terrible waste."
His divine sense filled with repeated sighs.
"A whole dragon's essence, its lifeblood infused with the laws of life and fire, and the wizards of this world can only use the crudest, most primitive method to extract a negligible trace of energy from it, then seal it inside a stick of wood and make this disposable 'energy amplifier' (wand) with an appallingly low conversion rate?"
"What an outrageous waste of a natural treasure! Burning a zither for firewood would be no worse!"
"If a complete dragon heart vein were placed in the hands of a true master of artifact refinement, it would be enough to forge a genuine, sentient, low-grade 'fire-elemental magical artifact' that could grow alongside its master! It could attack and defend, transform to protect its owner, and had limitless potential! And they... they used it to cast a Disarming Charm?"
If.
If Mr. Newt Scamander could have heard Lin Yuan's thoughts at that moment.
A mere heart attack would probably have been the least of his troubles.
This great wizard, who loved peace and was even somewhat socially anxious, would have instantly become the most ferocious avenging warrior Hogwarts had ever seen.
People would have witnessed the following astonishing scene:
The Hogwarts Library windows suddenly shattered, and Mr. Newt Scamander Apparated in front of Lin Yuan, clutching his battered suitcase, his whole body radiating fury. His hair stood on end with rage, and flames blazed in his blue eyes.
Behind him, the suitcase sprang open with a smack. A Thunderbird roared, summoning storm clouds and lightning;
A swarm of Nifflers, eyes bloodshot, bared their teeth and prepared to lunge and bite, abandoning all shiny trinkets;
Bowtruckle Pickett stood on his shoulder and raised its longest, most insulting branch of a finger.
Then Newt would point at Lin Yuan's nose and, in the loudest voice of his life, unleash a naturalist's deepest, most anguished roar:
"You... You heartless alchemical fiend! Stay away from my babies!!!"
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