As Li Dong finished the article, the keyword "775 AD" immediately triggered two other papers in his mind.
One was a study by Sukhodolov, published in *Scientific Reports* in 2017, which described the devastating damage the anomalous event of 775 AD inflicted upon the Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere.
The other was a report published by Usoiskin in 2021, which specifically compiled statistics on the frequency and energy distribution of such extreme solar particle events.
Li Dong’s intuition told him there was an undeniable, hidden thread connecting these three papers.
Yet for the moment, he just couldn’t find the key that would tie all the clues together.
He paced slowly within his Memory Palace.
The outline of the Empty Book was still emitting a white glow.
Li Dong walked up to it. Suddenly, his gaze shifted to a paper beside the Empty Book.
Published in 2015 in *Nature Communications*.
The first author was Mekaridi from Lund University.
Title: *Multiradionuclide evidence for the solar origin of the cosmic-ray events of AD 774/5 and 993/4*.
Li Dong yanked it from the index and rapidly flipped it open in his mind.
From the first line of the abstract to the bottom of the first page, his eyes grew wider and wider.
This paper had put an end to a great, three-year-long debate that had shaken the international astronomy community.
Ever since Miyake Fumi announced the phenomenon of a carbon-14 spike in 774 AD back in 2012, scholars around the world had descended into chaos.
Some said it was radiation from a nearby supernova explosion.
Others said an ancient gamma-ray burst had swept past the Earth.
And another faction firmly insisted it was an extreme particle storm from the Sun (an SEP).
The three factions each stuck to their own theory, and none could convince the others.
That is, until Mekaridi’s team stepped in. They didn’t get bogged down with just carbon-14.
In the same dated sample, they simultaneously extracted and measured three isotopes.
Carbon-14 (1?C), Beryllium-10 (1?Be), and Chlorine-36 (3?Cl).
This "tri-isotope cross-validation" technique was nothing short of a checkmate.
This was just like a bizarre murder case.
If only a set of footprints were left at the scene, you couldn’t convict a suspect.
But if you simultaneously collected the criminal’s footprints, fingerprints, and a strand of hair from the crime scene...
With these three pieces of ironclad evidence combined, there would only be one perpetrator in the entire world who perfectly matched them all.
The relative proportions of Carbon-14, Beryllium-10, and Chlorine-36 left in the 774 AD sample were the footprints, fingerprints, and hair that the cosmic catastrophe had left on Earth.
If it were a supernova explosion, the ratio of these three would present a specific "supernova fingerprint." If it were a gamma-ray burst, it would show a "gamma-ray burst fingerprint."
And the spectral results measured by Mekaridi’s team...
...were a perfect match for the theoretical fingerprint of an "extreme solar particle event."
The mystery that had been debated for three years was finally solved: the cataclysm of 774 AD had come from the Sun.
Not only that, but while they were at it, they ran another tree-ring anomaly from 993-994 AD through the same process.
The conclusion was identical.
From that day on, these two historical events came to be known in the academic world by a common, awe-inspiring name: the Miyake Event.
Li Dong sat in the center of the Memory Palace, his mind buzzing.
From an astrophysical perspective, it was a beautiful, top-tier paper.
It used the most rigorous data to end the chaos.
But what truly sent a chill down Li Dong’s spine wasn’t what it proved.
It was what the fact it proved would mean when applied to the reality of human society.
Li Dong closed his eyes and turned the axis of history back to September 1859.
That year, the British astronomer Carrington witnessed a violent solar flare eruption through his telescope.
That furious energy broke free from the Sun’s grasp and viciously lunged at the Earth.
Within the next few hours, the global telegraph network suffered widespread paralysis.
Operators watched helplessly as their equipment sparked and even burst into flames.
The aurora from the Arctic Circle was pushed all the way down to tropical Cuba. Locals could even read the words in a newspaper in their courtyards late at night by the light of the aurora overhead.
This was the "Carrington Event," the strongest solar particle storm in recorded human history.
Li Dong knew all too well.
In 1859, human technology had just barely learned how to send telegraphs.
There were no large power plants, no transnational power grids, no satellites, no GPS, and certainly no submarine fiber-optic cables or internet.
So, the most severe consequence of the Carrington Event was merely a few burnt-out telegraph machines.
But what if a Carrington-level event of the same magnitude were to happen again today?
NASA and the European Space Agency had already conducted damage assessments.
A conservative estimate placed the economic losses at over two trillion US Dollars.
More than half of the world’s satellites would be instantly destroyed. GPS and Beidou navigation would be completely paralyzed. The repeaters in transoceanic fiber-optic cables would be burned out directly.
And the deadliest part is that the high-voltage power grids of North America and Europe would have a large number of critical, large-scale transformers burned out by induced currents within one or two hours.
You have to understand, manufacturing, transporting, and installing a single large-scale, transoceanic-grade transformer takes at least a full year.
And this was merely the power of a Carrington Event.
What about the "Miyake Event" of 774 AD, confirmed in Mekaridi’s paper?
Its energy flux was ten times, or even more than a hundred times, that of the 1859 Carrington Event!
What did this mean?
It meant that if the "Miyake Event" of 774 were to strike the Earth today, in its exact original form...
...all the fruits of civilization that modern humanity prided itself on, anything related to "electricity" and "signals"...
...power grids, satellites, the internet, communication base stations, bank ATMs, supermarket checkout systems, life-sustaining ventilators in hospitals, subway networks, and even the traffic lights at intersections...
...all of it would be completely wiped out, reset from scratch.
What was even more despairing was the statistical pattern presented in the paper: the "Miyake Event" was not an isolated case.
Every few hundred to a thousand years or so, the Sun would erupt like this, holding nothing back.
The most recent, extremely violent one occurred in 993 AD.
As of today, exactly one thousand and thirty years have passed.
In the Memory Palace, Li Dong stood before the outline of the "Empty Book."
The outline of the Empty Book began to slowly fill with text.
[Mekhaldi, F. et al.]
[Multiradionuclide evidence for the solar origin of the cosmic-ray events of AD 774/5 and 993/4.]
[Nature Communications 6, 8611 (2015).]
’This is it.’
A thread flashed through Li Dong’s mind.
A thread that connected all the seemingly unrelated events.
The curve on the Wukong Satellite that always grazed the edge of the anchoring range.
The bar chart in the event data packets that showed a stepped, anomalous decrease above a dozen or so TeV.
The urgent email from the Yangbajing Observatory, sent from thousands of kilometers away, about a "suspected detection of a cotemporal anomalous event."
And the dozens of similar data points over the past two years that had been dismissed as "measurement Illusion Peaks" and culled by the system’s inversion framework.
’What if none of this is instrumental measurement noise?’
’What if it’s not a systemic error?’
’What if it’s all a real physical signal...’
’Then, these anomalies that the Wukong Satellite has been capturing and accumulating, bit by bit, above the Earth for the past two years... they could all be pointing to a chilling truth.’
’This is a destructive "Miyake Level" solar particle event. These are the high-energy precursor particles, striking us before the main energy peak reaches Earth’s atmosphere.’

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