After nearly a full day of "slow travel," the steam train finally rolled into Inverness, the capital of the Scottish Highlands, at dusk, accompanied by a long hiss of escaping steam.
This ancient town stood where the River Ness flowed into the Moray Firth. Compared with London's suffocating industrial clamor, it felt quiet and rugged.
Lin Jie and William did not hurry to their ultimate destination, Loch Ness. Instead, they chose to settle in at a lodging house in town, run by the I.A.R.C. and bearing the sign "Highland Exploration and Surveying Company."
This gave them the perfect cover for their investigation.
William was already used to this sort of routine.
As soon as he reached their room, he began inspecting his weapons and equipment, preparing for a fight that could break out at any moment.
Lin Jie, meanwhile, took out the new map of Scotland he had bought and, by the light of the kerosene lamp, clearly marked the objectives he had already planned for the first stage of their operation.
"Sergeant William, our operation tomorrow morning has two parts. I need you to visit the local fishermen's association and a few of the busiest pubs. I want every rumor about the water monster. Don't judge whether they're true. No matter how outlandish the story, write it all down for me."
"As for me"—Lin Jie tapped the map at the town center—"I'll go here: Inverness County Library and Archives, and the old newspaper archives of the Inverness Courier. I need the oldest and most detailed accounts of this legend."
The next morning, the two men split up as planned.
Sergeant William's weather-beaten but approachable veteran's face, along with a few glasses of mellow Scotch whisky, soon won over the hearty, talkative local fishermen.
Meanwhile, armed with a letter of recommendation from the Association identifying him as a "folklore researcher" from the University of Oxford, Lin Jie had no trouble gaining access to the historic county library.
The librarian was an elderly gentleman wearing spectacles who took great pride in the region's history.
When he learned that the young scholar from the East was so deeply interested in the ancient legends of the Scottish Highlands, he grew extremely enthusiastic and personally led Lin Jie into the special collections room, which was usually closed to the public.
Lin Jie knew that the tourist legends found in ordinary guidebooks weren't what he was looking for.
He needed the most original, unpolished, and truth-adjacent firsthand accounts.
He asked the librarian to let him consult every ancient county chronicle and church document concerning the "Loch Ness region," as well as the mythic epics first recited by Celtic bards and later recorded by scholars.
It was an exceedingly tedious and laborious task.
Most of the ancient documents were written in Gaelic or Old English, neither of which was still commonly used. Their handwriting was blurred, and they were full of grammatical errors and subjective conjecture.
But Lin Jie was like the most patient of gold prospectors, sifting through heaps of seemingly worthless sand with his powerful skills of logical analysis and information synthesis, searching for the "gold dust" that might be connected to the UMA.
He thoroughly organized every description of the "Loch Ness Monster" in the documents by date.
He discovered that the earliest clear account of the Loch Ness Monster could be traced back to the sixth century.
In his biography, an Irish missionary named Saint Columba wrote that he had once used the power of the cross to drive away a "water beast" on the banks of the River Ness as it tried to attack the local people.
In the church's account, the "water beast" was a fiend from hell.
Yet in the much older Celtic myths, the creature was portrayed quite differently. The bards wrote of it with reverence, calling it "Loch Nis nan Deur an t-Solais," which translated as "Guardian Deity of the Lake of Tears and Light."
In these legends, it was no evil fiend, but a "spirit of nature" that watched over the peace of the sacred lake.
When good people prayed beside the lake, it brought them good fortune. When greedy invaders tried to defile its waters, it raised waves and swallowed them.
Two starkly different accounts, yet both pointed to the same being.
A clear model of its historical evolution immediately took shape in Lin Jie's mind: after Christianity arrived, the church had deliberately vilified and demonized an ancient UMA that the local people had revered as a "Guardian Deity" and that had meant them no harm. The church had done so to proclaim the strength of its new faith, transforming the creature into a devil that a saint had to drive away.
This discovery gave him a deeper understanding of the mission's true objective.
Perhaps they weren't looking for a ferocious "water monster" at all, but for a "recluse in the lake" whose peace had been disturbed.
Next, Lin Jie went to the offices of the Inverness Courier.
He spent the entire afternoon poring over every old newspaper in the basement, from the early nineteenth century onward.
Amid this sea of yellowed paper and printing ink, he found another astonishing pattern.
Before the nineteenth century, sightings of the "water monster" were extremely rare, with only one or two vague accounts appearing every few decades.
But in the nineteenth century, especially after the 1850s, sightings of the "water monster" began to skyrocket as the Industrial Revolution reached into the Scottish Highlands, steamships began sailing on Loch Ness, and forests along the shore were felled in great numbers to build railways.
Every major sighting coincided with the launch of some "modernization" project in the lake region!
The most recent sighting—the one mentioned in the commission that had drawn the Association's attention—had occurred just a month after a mining company from Manchester began experimental "underwater mineral exploration" near Urquhart Bay!
The truth was now plain to see.
The ancient creature, dormant for many years, was being forced to rise from its home on the lakebed again and again by the heedless encroachment of human industrial civilization.
When Lin Jie returned to the inn, his notebook crammed with dense notes and his body exhausted, William had also finished his day of "pub investigations."
From the fishermen and drunkards, William had gathered countless bizarre rumors. Some said the monster's neck was like a giant serpent's; others said its back resembled an overturned boat. One man swore he had seen its eyes shining like two enormous headlights on a full-moon night.
Though the accounts contradicted one another, they all pointed to one thing: the creature was enormous.
When Lin Jie laid out the results of his day of "document research" in full before William,
the old soldier simply poured him a glass of mellow whisky.
"No wonder Barton said that, at times, you're worth more than an entire field team. You've gone and dug up its whole fifteen-hundred-year 'personal file'..."
Lin Jie raised his glass and gently clinked it against William's. The mellow liquor slid down his throat, kindling a warm fire within.
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