1888: Memoirs of an Unconfirmed Creature Hunter

Chapter 147: Bitter Beer from Bavaria

The cogwheel train, belching white steam, left that "Puppet Town" behind, a town beautiful on the outside but eroded from within by selfishness and mediocrity.

The magnificent Alpine scenery outside the window now appeared to the Iron Triangle only in cold, ironic shades of gray and white.

The atmosphere inside the train carriage was oppressive and heavy.

William leaned against the window, motionless as a statue.

His eyes stared at the rapidly passing landscape, but his focus was clearly not on the snowy mountains and forests.

This was his way of venting the nausea and indignation in his heart caused by the villagers' ingratitude.

He could face terrifying UMA without batting an eye, and charge fearlessly into a hail of bullets.

But his simple heart struggled to comprehend betrayal and malice from those he protected.

Julian's condition was even worse.

The French scholar, who prided himself on elegance and reason, was curled up in the corner of his seat, his hands covering his face.His signature gold-rimmed glasses were carelessly tossed on the small table.

His normally sapphire-blue eyes, which usually sparkled with intellectual curiosity and cunning, now seemed hollow, revealing the disillusionment of an idealist who had witnessed the ugliness of human nature.

Even Lin Jie, the most resolute of them all, felt a bone-deep weariness.

It wasn't physical exhaustion, but a kind of mental drain.

He felt as if he had just finished a meaningless war.

This contradictory victory felt more powerless and empty than a bloody defeat.

When they returned to Munich, the bustling capital of Bavaria, it was already dusk the next day.

Professor Schmidt bid a hasty farewell, citing the "need to return to Heidelberg immediately to sort through Max's important personal effects."

Lin Jie knew this respectable old professor needed time and space alone to process the impact of this experience.

After saying goodbye to Professor Schmidt, Julian finally spoke his first words since leaving Oberammergau.

"I need... a drink."

His voice was dry, revealing a craving to numb his mind with alcohol.

So that night, in the tavern named "Royal Brew" in the heart of Munich's old town, the Iron Triangle team held their first, and most somber, post-mission psychological debriefing session.

This place was different from London's public houses.

Beneath a ceiling vaulted like a church dome, hundreds of long tables and benches made of thick, raw timber were arranged.

Thousands of Bavarian locals, disregarding class, and tourists from around the world gathered here.

They raised liter-sized ceramic beer steins, shouting, arguing, and singing in various languages.

The air was thick with the greasy aroma of roasted pork knuckle, the wheaty scent of pretzels, and the unique roasted, burnt aroma of Bavarian dark beer.

A brass band played tirelessly on the central stage, performing cheerful traditional folk tunes.

The entire beer hall was like a crucible brimming with rough Bavarian vitality, where individual sorrows seemed insignificant.

But this joyful atmosphere failed to infect the small wooden table in the corner belonging to Lin Jie's team.

Julian chugged icy dark beer like a drunkard, one stein after another.

Two unnatural patches of red had already bloomed on his cheeks.

William remained silent, simply drinking quietly alongside his friend.

After downing at least three liters of dark beer, Julian's thread of rationality and elegance finally snapped.

"Bang!"

He slammed the heavy stein onto the wooden table with force.

The mug shattered from the impact, sending beer foam splattering in all directions.

The loud noise made the boisterous patrons nearby fall silent.

They turned looks of surprise and hostility toward this foreigner who dared to cause trouble in their "sanctuary."

William's gray eyes lifted.

He didn't speak, just returned their gazes with an icy stare.

The burly Bavarian men who had initially wanted to come over and start trouble involuntarily shivered upon meeting his corpse-like gaze.

Then they wisely turned their heads away, returning to their beer and tall tales.

Julian, however, was oblivious to the tense atmosphere around him.

His reddened eyes glared at Lin Jie and William as he roared in a trembling voice.

"Why?!"

"Can anyone tell me why?! I've read Rousseau's *The Social Contract*, I've read Voltaire's *Philosophical Letters*! I firmly believe reason and education are the sparks that dispel ignorance from the human heart! I believe people of sound mind, liberated from a tyrant's grasp, should understand gratitude and freedom!"

His voice grew unusually sharp. "But what did we see in Oberammergau?! We saw a group of slaves who willingly put on shackles! A bunch of fools who would rather embrace the devil that brought them fear than accept the truth we brought! Even if the truth has uncertainty, it's at least built upon humanity!"

"They cursed us! They called us 'jinxes'! They hated us, their saviors who pulled them from hell, for the sake of that monster who makes art from bones!"

"This is the most absurd black comedy joke I've ever heard in my life!"

Pain and confusion twisted his face. "We fight tooth and nail to maintain world order, to protect these so-called ordinary people."

"But if ordinary people themselves are hopelessly ignorant material, even willing to ally with devils, then what is the value of our protection?!"

Julian finally uttered the most subversive words of anger. "Perhaps the Eternal Serpent's 'Human Purification Theory' is correct! Such hopeless material isn't worth saving at all!"

These words tightened Lin Jie's heart.

He knew Julian was truly heartbroken this time.

His idealistic scholar's heart had been smashed to pieces against the wall of mediocrity's evil built in Oberammergau.

Just as Lin Jie was pondering how to comfort his friend, William's voice sounded.

"We don't fight for their gratitude."

This inarticulate warrior offered an answer with his simplest personal philosophy.

"The Battle of Isandlwana," William's voice was hoarse and distant, as if his thoughts had returned to that blood-and-fire African afternoon. "Everyone only remembers it as the most disgraceful defeat for our 'Redcoats'."

"Eighteen hundred Empire soldiers armed to the teeth were cleanly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Zulu warriors wielding only spears and cowhide shields."

"But in the chaos of that massacre, there were some... small incidents never recorded in any report."

His gaze pierced through time and space, toward that African grassland stained red with blood and littered with corpses.

"My company was tasked with guarding the rear of the camp, a makeshift field hospital."

"After our main line was completely overrun, that place became the last island."

"Behind me weren't logistics personnel or camp followers;

they were all dead in the first wave."

"Behind me," William's tone became calm, but a deep emotion was suppressed beneath that calm, "were only a group of equally terrified Zulu children, maybe twenty or thirty of them, also scared stiff by that sudden war."

Julian's eyes widened.

"They were 'spoils of war' from a nearby village we had already conquered, forcibly brought to our camp to serve as menial laborers."

William spat out this term tinged with colonial bloodshed, a flash of deep self-loathing in his eyes.

"And in the eyes of us civilized men, they weren't even people."

"They were just a kind of talking, dark-skinned property."

"When those blood-mad Zulu warriors broke through our final defenses and surged toward us like a black tide, my commanding officer gave me his last order."

"—Keen! Use those little bastards as human shields! Buy us time for a final retreat!"

"It was a militarily logical command."

William said slowly. "Use the enemy's children to delay the enemy's advance."

"Use worthless lives to buy valuable lives."

"That's the law of war."

"But..."

A bright light burst forth in William's eyes.

"I refused."

"A few other brothers who still retained a shred of humanity and I used our own bodies and that small, rickety medical tent to form a line of defense for those dozens of children who, in our eyes, were scared witless."

"In the end, all my brothers died in that fight."

"I had several spears stuck in me too."

"I just collapsed on that pile of bodies... no, on top of those children's bodies."

"Because in the end, they all instinctively hid behind me, this enemy who was also about to die."

"And those Zulu warriors who charged in," a bitter, sorrowful smile appeared on William's face, "when they saw me, this butcher wearing the red coat they hated most, using my own body to protect the young of their own people, they were stunned."

"They didn't kill me."

"They just took their own children from beside me."

"And left me, this strange creature who perhaps was no longer an enemy in their eyes, to my fate."

Finally, William looked at his stunned scholar friend with profound eyes.

"We are hunters, Julian."

He concluded. "Our duty is to eliminate the UMA that threaten all 'innocent life' in this world."

"That's all."

"As for the lives we protect, whether they are black or white, good or evil, whether they choose to thank us or curse us, that's not for us to judge."

"From the moment we choose to take up arms and stand before them."

"What we protect has never been a specific person or a specific kind of good or evil."

"What we protect is the act of 'protection' itself."

"That foolish duty of choosing to believe in the purest value of 'life' itself, even in the deepest darkness and betrayal."

William's words lacked ornate rhetoric or profound theory.

But the simple sense of responsibility they contained struck Julian's turbulent heart, gradually calming his agitated emotions.

And Lin Jie, the calm observer who had remained silent, finally offered his summary after his two friends had expressed their views.

He did not judge whether Julian's disillusioned elitism or William's steadfast fatalism was right or wrong.

Because he understood that these two seemingly opposite philosophies were both essentially valid, both genuine insights forged from their respective life experiences.

He simply raised his own beer stein.

And said calmly, "You're both right, but it seems you've both overlooked another small variable in that tragedy."

His gaze swept over his two companions. "Do you remember little Hans, hiding in the crowd at the end?"

"We couldn't save Oberammergau, nor could we change a collective built over centuries of vested interest and ignorance. In that grand act of salvation, we were indeed failures."

Lin Jie's tone shifted. "But in that failure, we didn't gain nothing. We saved at least one soul. We let a child who grew up living with discrimination and loneliness see that besides malice and transactional interest, there exists something else in the world. That thing is called hope."

"We cannot be heroes for everyone. But if, in everything we do, there is one soul who sees the light again because of our arrival, then all the misunderstanding we endure is worth it."

He gently drained the dark beer in his cup.

The burnt, bitter liquid slid down his throat, ultimately leaving a long, complex aftertaste in his heart.

Early the next morning, as they prepared to leave Munich to continue their journey, Professor Schmidt, who had returned to Heidelberg, sent someone to deliver a heavy box wrapped in thick leather and secured with three complex copper locks.

In the accompanying letter, the professor wrote: "I will fulfill my promise. This box contains the private diaries and investigation copies from the youth and young adulthood of the great Cartographer, which I retrieved from Herr Karl von Stein's ancestral home."

"They originally belonged to my student Max. Now, I pass them on to you, who are truly qualified to inherit this legacy."

"Perhaps the answer to that final question, the true secret of why Herr Karl himself resolutely embarked on that hunter's path..."

"Is hidden within here."