It had been some time since the national competition began.
The night Wang Hao’s group submitted their papers, they went back to their dorm, crashed into bed, and slept straight through to the next afternoon.
Li Dong hadn’t been idle during this time either.
During the day, he went up the mountain to monitor the inversion process. In the afternoon, he’d head to a small classroom at Jinling University’s School of Physics to sit in on a class. At night, he’d return to his apartment to continue the silent period with that pitch-black shadow, Xiaohai.
As the days slowly passed, the regional competition committee finally finished the first stage of judging.
The lists for the first and second provincial prizes were announced one after another.
The papers from the first-prize winners that were recommended for a national award were packaged up and sent to several national-level review experts, according to their pre-assigned groups.
Li Dong received his notification during the last week of September.
Zhang Wenping had messaged him personally.
"The centralized review in Jinling will start next Tuesday afternoon."
Li Dong replied with a single word: "Okay."
For the next few days, he stuck to his routine of heading up the mountain.
「Tuesday morning.」
When Li Dong pushed open the door to the Collaborative Innovation Center, Shen Che wasn’t there.
He had gone to Shanghai a day earlier to review a new interface document with the engineering team at the Microsystem Institute.
Zhang Wenping, however, had come in early today.
He was currently standing in front of the main screen.
The left half of the screen displayed a newly refreshed energy band histogram.
The right half was an auxiliary monitoring panel, where the curves from several readout channels ran smoothly along the bottom.
Standing behind him were a postdoc and a research assistant who had recently joined the team.
The two of them were huddled next to Zhang Wenping, speaking in low voices.
"Teacher Zhang... the shape of this section is really a bit strange."
Zhang Wenping just grunted in acknowledgment, saying nothing.
Just then, he saw Li Dong at the door.
He beckoned to Li Dong.
"Li Dong, come over here."
"You take a look at this, too."
Li Dong walked over in a few steps.
On the main screen’s energy band histogram, the horizontal axis represented the energy bands and the vertical axis, the event count. Normally, the high-energy end of the graph should have been completely empty.
But this time...
In the section starting from over ten TeV and up, several bars stood out.
Normally, an Illusion Peak is a spike generated by the inversion operator itself in a statistically sparse region. Its amplitude tends to shoot up abruptly and then fall just as sharply, making it look like a solitary needle.
But this section was different.
None of the bars’ heights were particularly abrupt. Instead, they were staggered at small intervals along the energy bands, with each bar slightly shorter than the one before it. Viewed together, they looked like a small, gently descending staircase.
"Teacher Zhang... look at the decay rate of these bars."
The research assistant said, gesturing at the screen with his hand.
"If we try to explain this decay according to the usual Illusion Peak model, each of these bars should be independent of the others."
"But this looks like a family of signals."
The postdoc added.
"I just ran a full check on all the hardware-side readout channels."
"High voltage, temperature, silicon microstrips, calorimeter energy leakage—everything’s fine."
"The condition number for the inversion operator in this section is also within the permissible range."
"Logically, this shouldn’t be an artifact generated by the inversion process itself."
He looked up at Zhang Wenping.
"But if it’s not an Illusion Peak, then this section..."
He trailed off.
No one in the room finished his sentence.
Only then did Li Dong reach out and zoom in on the histogram on the main screen.
He stared at the small staircase for several seconds.
At first glance, he couldn’t see anything specifically wrong.
But on the second look, for some reason, a jolt went through him.
The feeling was familiar.
The last time he’d felt this way was when he was reading that paper by Engelhardt.
Every line was correct.
But the entire paper was wrong.
And this time...
The feeling was even more intense than the last.
’Is it because my Logic attribute went up by another 0.1?’
Li Dong wondered to himself.
He didn’t state his opinion immediately.
Just then, the door to the room was pushed open again.
Researcher Zheng walked in.
Seeing Li Dong was also there, he first nodded at him.
Then he walked to the screen and spoke to Li Dong.
"Li Dong, this section on the screen is from an event package I received a while ago when I was on night duty."
"I flagged it for review at the time."
"Today, Academician Zhang told me to have you take another look at it."
Li Dong nodded back at him.
"I understand."
He dragged the mouse back and forth across the main screen, zooming in on the subdivided bars of those few energy bands.
The more he looked, the stronger that feeling in his gut became.
Zhang Wenping stood beside him, not rushing him.
After a while, Li Dong finally spoke.
"Teacher Zheng."
"I’ll take this event package back with me and run it through the Li Criterion."
"You guys can process the rest of the data as usual."
Researcher Zheng grunted in agreement.
He turned and waved at Lu Bohou and Research Assistant Yang.
"You two go ahead and put today’s new data batches into the standard processing pipeline."
"Li Dong and I will talk more about this."
The two younger researchers picked up their laptops and left.
Only Zhang Wenping, Researcher Zheng, and Li Dong remained in the room.
Researcher Zheng then spoke again.
"Li Dong, I’ve seen this kind of thing two or three times over the past couple of years. The amplitudes were all smaller than this, and the shape never looked so much like a coherent feature."
"Back then, we ended up dismissing them as Illusion Peaks."
"Because our inversion framework is what it is. Once you cross that threshold into the statistically sparse region, ninety-nine percent of the spikes it spits out are basically false."

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