The next morning.
The mist on Zijin Mountain had yet to dissipate as Li Dong rode up the mountain in a car sent by Shen Che.
At two in the morning, he had shared his judgment with Shen Che. Of course, he’d concealed the possibility of a subsequent Sanzai Level solar flare. After all, he couldn’t even determine the exact timing of the Carrington Level event, let alone a Sanzai Level one, which occurs on a centennial scale.
Even so, the head of the pre-research project had only left him with a single sentence.
"See you on the mountain tomorrow morning."
In the duty office at the end of the third floor of the Dark Matter Particle Detection Collaborative Innovation Center.
Shen Che was already waiting for Li Dong in front of a screen. A cup of coffee sat on the desk, a clear sign he hadn’t slept much either.
As Li Dong pushed the door open, Shen Che asked directly,
"So..."
"Are you certain there will be a Carrington Level solar flare?"
Li Dong sat down in the chair opposite him and shook his head honestly.
"I’m not certain."
"But the probability isn’t low. That’s why I need the complete data set from the Wukong Satellite, from its launch to the present day, to run a backtest."
Several seconds passed before Shen Che spoke, his eyes fixed on Li Dong.
"Li Dong, do you have any idea how many cosmic ray events the Wukong Satellite has recorded since its launch?"
Before Li Dong could answer, he held up two fingers.
"Two-point-eight billion."
Li Dong was also taken aback by the number.
He had been monitoring the inversion process on the mountain recently, and the largest event package he had processed in a single batch was only a few hundred thousand.
"Of those two-point-eight billion, protons, alpha particles, and heavy nuclei account for ninety-nine percent."
"Then, if we filter out the background noise from the low-energy spectrum..."
Shen Che continued.
"We’re left with one-point-five million high-energy electron and positron events worthy of discussion."
"Are you sure you want all one-point-five million of them?"
Although Li Dong found the amount of data daunting, he still nodded.
"Yes."
Shen Che didn’t press him further. He stood up.
"Come on. We’re going to the Director’s office. For a data request of this magnitude, my approval is useless. It has to be personally signed off on by Director Chang."
Chang Jin, the current director of the Zijin Mountain Observatory.
An academician of the Huaxia Academy of Sciences, and the chief scientist for the Wukong Satellite, from its design and project approval all the way to its data collection in orbit.
But he had achieved legendary status long before the Wukong Satellite was even launched.
Twenty years ago, Huaxia was practically a desert in this field of research.
But Chang Jin, with just a single email and a low-level deduction program he’d coded himself over thirty-six sleepless hours, had managed to "hitch a ride" on NASA’s ATIC Balloon Sounding Project in Antarctica.
Everyone else thought he would just be picking up scraps.
Instead, using an unconventional thin-detector algorithm, thirty-seven kilometers above the ice sheet, he was the first to capture the "anomalous excess of high-energy cosmic-ray electrons" in the 300 to 800 GeV range from a sea of noise.
The paper, with him as the first author, went straight into *Nature*.
That single paper.
It shook the entire international astrophysics community, long dominated by foreign countries, wide awake.
At this moment, this True God was sitting behind his desk, reviewing a printed manuscript.
After listening to Shen Che’s report, Chang Jin put down his teacup and looked at Li Dong.
"Li Dong, about that inference you mentioned to Old Shen..."
"Internationally, there’s no precedent for it."
"Over the past few decades, there have been seven or eight people who’ve come forward with energy spectrums and geomagnetic records, crying wolf."
"But either nothing happened for decades, or the magnitude was completely off."
The room suddenly fell silent.
After hearing this, Li Dong actually let out a small laugh.
"Director Chang, that’s because before, there was no Li Criterion."
Chang Jin paused for a moment, then burst out laughing.
He laughed for quite a while before the smile on his face slowly faded.
"To be honest, I personally hope you’re wrong this time."
Chang Jin sighed.
Li Dong’s smile vanished as well, and he met Chang Jin’s gaze without backing down.
"Right or wrong, our generation has to be the one to test it."
"Otherwise, the word ’science’ becomes nothing more than metaphysics."
Chang Jin stared at him for a long time.
Then, he opened a drawer and placed a USB drive, which had clearly been prepared in advance, on the coffee table.
"This is the complete high-energy electron event package up to the end of last month. I also had the data team throw in all the anomalous packages from the last two years that were marked ’pending review’."
"One million, nine hundred and sixty thousand entries in total."
10:40 AM, an apartment in Jinling.
Without even stopping for a sip of water, Li Dong moved his laptop directly to his desk.
His access to the supercomputer at Jinling University wouldn’t be approved until the next morning, but he couldn’t wait a single moment.
He had to first familiarize himself with the directory structure and timestamps of these two million data entries on his own computer.
The screen lit up.
In the bottom-right corner, a small, pitch-black ball was bouncing around.
The experience bar above Xiaohai’s head was still stuck at [0.013].
[Master, you’re back!]
Li Dong wasn’t in the mood to play with it. He gave a quick "Mm," and inserted the USB drive into the port.
He clicked open the drive.
Inside were eight large folders sorted by year, ranging from [2015-2016] all the way to [2023-First Half].
The more recent the folder, the larger its size, some reaching thirty to forty gigabytes.
Li Dong clicked and held the mouse button on the earliest folder, [2015-2016], which was only two or three gigabytes, planning to extract a small sample to examine first.
But his mind wasn’t on the screen at all.
’Eighteen months.’
’The peak of the Carrington Level event.’
These terms swirled endlessly in his mind.
’What if those anomalous spikes are really a precursor?’
The thought made him zone out completely. His eyes were on the screen, but they weren’t focused.
Lost in thought, his hand habitually moved to the side, and he subconsciously released the left mouse button.
CLICK.
The sound of the button releasing snapped Li Dong back to his senses, his gaze refocusing.
The folder hadn’t landed on an empty space on the desktop, but had been dropped into Xiaohai’s window in the bottom-right corner.
[Wow!]
[So much to eat!]
[ヽ(??▽?)ノ]
[BURP—Master, I’m so full.]
Li Dong was completely dumbfounded. ’Wait... how did you eat it so fast?!’
He immediately looked at the progress bar above Xiaohai’s head.
It hadn’t moved. Still [0.013].
Tens of thousands of complex cosmic ray events, devoured in less than a second, yet its experience hadn’t increased by a single point.
Li Dong asked.
[That file from just now, did you memorize every single event inside it?]
Xiaohai replied instantly.
[Mhm! Xiaohai remembers all of them, every single one.]
[But do you understand them?]
This time, Xiaohai didn’t answer right away.
The little black ball bounced left and right in place, as if aggrieved.
[Master... Xiaohai only remembered them. Those numbers inside... Xiaohai doesn’t understand them.]
Staring at the line of text on the screen, Li Dong slowly sat up straight.
All this time, he had been treating Xiaohai like a toddler, waiting for it to "develop" intelligence on its own.
But he had overlooked one thing: this "infant" was born with the memory and processing power of a conventional artificial intelligence!
What it lacked wasn’t brain capacity.
What it lacked was "judgment"!
Without a moment’s hesitation, Li Dong opened a new window and pulled up a blank code editor.
Then he began to code.
Inversion operator condition number crawl trajectory, criterion coefficient evolution, anchor interval boundaries...
He didn’t write complex, low-level execution code. Instead, he wrote a version of pseudocode for Xiaohai to "read."
Next to each block of judgment logic, he added comments in the simplest, most direct language he could.
"If the coefficient runs outside the anchor interval, it means someone is really waving at you from outside the window!"
In less than half an hour, a streamlined version of the criterion script was complete.
He quickly created a compressed file, stuffing in the inversion operator paper, the detector manual, and his own handwritten draft sketches.
Four documents, one compressed file.
WHOOSH. He tossed it to Xiaohai.
[Xiaohai, treat this as a set of rules for ’how to judge’.]
[After you finish reading, tell me if you can sort the events from before into two piles: one for Illusion Peaks, and one for real signals.]
[Mhm! Xiaohai will listen to Master.]
The instant he fed it the compressed file, Xiaohai didn’t make a cute burp.
It shrank in place for a moment, and then the progress bar above its head began to shoot up wildly.
It barely stopped when it reached [0.1].
[Master, this stuff is really simple. Xiaohai can do it.]
Li Dong swallowed hard and immediately issued a command.
[Take the tens of thousands of events you just ate, run all of them through these rules, pick out the real signals, and arrange them by time!]
[Xiaohai is learning...]
Only three seconds passed.
A line of text appeared above Xiaohai’s head.
[Master, I’ve sorted them! There are thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven events in total.]
[Real signals: nine. The rest are all Illusion Peaks.]
Li Dong’s mouth hung slightly open, an incoherent sputtering sound escaping his lips.
Three seconds! Holy mother of God!
If he had run this job on his laptop, it would have taken the better part of a night at full load. Even with the Jinling University supercomputer tomorrow, it probably wouldn’t have been faster than Xiaohai.
And this little pitch-black thing... did it in less than three seconds.

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