The next morning.
When Li Dong closed his laptop, the sky outside was already starting to brighten.
Scraps of draft paper were scattered all over the floor. He rubbed his throbbing temples and glanced at the bottom-right corner of his screen.
The progress bar above Xiaohai’s head had reached [0.18].
[Master, one million, nine hundred and sixty thousand entries, all devoured. *Hiccup*...]
Li Dong chuckled and typed on his keyboard.
[How many were real signals?]
[Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and ninety-two. The rest were all Illusion Peaks.]
Li Dong nodded.
[Xiaohai, load yesterday’s script. Apply the second-layer filter.]
[In the dozen or so TeV energy bands, find events with a shape matching the AD 774/5 extrapolation, and keep the χ2/d.o.f. under 1.1.]
Without another word, Xiaohai started hopping and bouncing again.
Twenty seconds later, a line of text popped up.
[Master, I’ve picked them out. Eleven events in total.]
Li Dong’s mouth twitched.
Eleven events.
It was exactly the same number he had extrapolated last night from the thirty-seven "pending review" events!
If last night’s result was weak evidence, then this—a result run on the full eight years of data from the Wukong Satellite—was strong evidence.
Taking a deep breath, Li Dong knew he had passed the first hurdle.
Now came the truly difficult part.
He needed to confirm if the eighteen-month, Carrington Level event window was correct. He even wanted to deduce the timing for a Miyake Level event as well.
He pulled out a stack of blank draft paper from under his desk.
Li Dong didn’t even bother waiting for the approval from Jinling University’s Supercomputing Center.
The path he was taking had little to do with computing power.
He laid out the time nodes of the eleven real signals again.
But the sample size was still too small. A traditional Fourier transform couldn’t achieve the necessary frequency resolution.
So he quickly scribbled a line on the paper.
[Lomb-Scargle Periodogram]
The Lomb-Scargle periodogram.
It was an old trick of the trade in the astronomy community, specifically for dealing with "unevenly sampled time series," independently proposed by two different astronomers fifty years ago.
It doesn’t require evenly spaced data points; instead, it performs a direct least-squares fit in the frequency domain.
Small sample sizes, uneven intervals, and signals buried in noise—these three things were an astronomer’s worst nightmare.
And the Lomb-Scargle periodogram was tailor-made for these three problems.
Li Dong picked up his pen and began to reverse-calculate the frequency.
T?≈ 73.4 days.
In other words, if there was a clock hidden behind these eleven events, it ticked once every seventy-three days.
This corresponded to the frequency at which external high-energy particles struck the potential barrier within a single pendulum period, deep inside the sun’s immense magnetic potential well.
It couldn’t directly tell him when the main peak would erupt.
But by layering on one more thing, the "excitation probability" of the main peak itself could be reverse-engineered.
And that thing was...
Gamov’s quantum tunneling decay framework.
It needed a few modifications, though...
The intranuclear potential well became the "solar magnetic potential well," alpha particles became "high-energy flare outflow flux"... Li Dong was on his draft paper, modding the differential equations.
The amplitude-increase curve of the eleven events was plugged into the equation, and the MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) algorithm instantly completed fifty thousand sampling steps.
The mean of the posterior distribution was finally pinned down to a single coordinate.
[Main Peak Arrival Window: T? + 18.3 months (± 2.4 months)]
[Magnitude: Carrington Level]
[Posterior Confidence: 78.6%]
It was almost identical to last night’s result, but this time, it was far more credible.
Just then, his phone, which was on the desk, suddenly buzzed. It was an unknown number.
"Is this Teacher Li Dong? I’m from the Jinling University Supercomputing Center. Your application for the large-scale backtesting node has been approved. It’s a full-spec A100. When would you like to come and set up the account?"
Li Dong paused, glancing at Xiaohai in the bottom-right corner of his screen, who was letting out a satisfied burp.
"There’s no need, sir," Li Dong said with a smile.
"The plan has changed. You can give the node to the next person in line. I’m already done."
The other end of the line fell strangely silent.
’Two million entries of full data, and you finished in less than a day? What did you run it on? An abacus?’
Before the person on the other end could snap out of it, Li Dong hung up.
Draft paper began to scatter to every corner of the room—the desk, the floor...
Li Dong had to narrow down that ±2.4-month window even further!
He started incorporating the "pending review" anomaly emails from the Yangbajing Observatory from the past three years.
Three codirectional events were added to the MCMC!
The confidence level shot up to 83.4%! The window narrowed to ±1.9 months!
Then he incorporated the monthly reports on TeV-level cosmic rays from the LHAASO observatory.
The confidence level was pushed to 86.7%! The window was locked down to ±1.5 months!
Li Dong maxed out all his Basic Attributes, entering a state of complete Concentration, a state of "piercing through to the truth."
Day turned to night and back to day. He blocked out every sound and movement from the outside world.
In his world, only the "clock" that had been ticking above the Earth for eight years remained.
Piece by piece, he was forcibly clawing the countdown to Death’s knock out of the universe’s noise.
「Two days later.」
A high-rise apartment in Jinling.
CLICK. A spare key turned in the lock of the security door.
Shen Che and Zhang Wenping walked in, their brows furrowed.
The room smelled a little musty.
In front of the desk, a figure was buried in a pile of draft paper that nearly engulfed him.
"Li Dong?"
Li Dong didn’t respond.
The two walked over to him, and Shen Che patted his shoulder.
Li Dong flinched violently, then slowly raised his head.
"Teacher Shen... Teacher Zhang..."
His voice was raspy.
"You haven’t even answered your phone for two days, just to calculate this?"
Zhang Wenping looked at the draft paper covering the floor, not knowing whether to be angry or amused.
GROWL...
Li Dong’s stomach suddenly rumbled, and he said, a little embarrassed.

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