Jinling. An apartment.
Li Dong muttered indignantly to himself.
"Plus or minus 1.3 months."
"Who do they take me for?"
In reality, by international standards, this was already an astonishingly tight confidence interval.
But for Li Dong—it wasn’t good enough.
It wasn’t rigorous enough.
Li Dong rubbed his throbbing temples, pushed the stack of scratch paper on his desk aside, and pulled out a fresh stack of blank sheets.
He was going to squeeze this error bar down even further.
In the following days, Li Dong barely left his apartment.
He didn’t even attend the Wukong Team’s celebration banquet.
He took the eleven true signals from the Wukong Satellite’s eight years of full data and broke them down again and again by energy band, arrival direction, and time window, trying to see if he could extract even half a frequency component from a finer granularity.
Finally, he had to admit it was impossible. He was missing data!
"Just as I thought! Research is never a clean fight; it’s all about politics and connections!"
Li Dong pulled out his phone and made calls to Principal Gong and Principal Li.
...
Meanwhile, on the international scene.
What happened with Mayer in G?ttingen was not an isolated incident.
Over the past while, a growing number of PhD students and postdocs working on space weather and solar particle detection began noticing strange little peaks on their own teams’ workstations.
They plotted these small peaks from the energy spectra on the same timeline.
And the resulting line... started to look interesting.
It was an ascending curve.
And so, things on arXiv started to get exciting.
"Statistical Analysis of Anomalous Background in the GOES-18 High-Energy Channel Within 2026," "A Preliminary Attempt to Identify Microstructures in Solar Precursor Energy Bands Using Neural Networks..."
These assorted papers popped up one after another, most authored by little-known PhD students or postdocs.
The vast majority of these papers were just as Richter had told Mayer.
To concoct a nice-looking curve, the authors either set the signal-to-noise ratio too low, forced the background difference before and after an instrument upgrade to be a "signal," or simply extrapolated from a parent distribution with only two real samples all the way to the TeV energy band.
They were just grandstanding.
None of it held up to the slightest scrutiny.
Among them, however, one paper caught the attention of a select few.
The paper’s title was:
"On the Possibility of a Major Solar Activity Event Occurring Within the Next Decade."
Affiliation: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich).
The argument in this preprint was essentially built on two points.
First, the curve of solar magnetic reconnection frequency over the past thirty years showed a very distinct non-linear increase in the last five years.
Second, since the beginning of the 21st century, the amplitude distributions of several extreme solar particle events have all shown systematic deviations in their tails.
Based on this, Klara speculated that the probability of a major solar activity event occurring in the next decade was considerably higher than the normal background rate.
As for the specific event class or the precise time window...
She didn’t provide one, because she couldn’t.
As soon as this preprint was posted, the first to notice it were several mid-career researchers in the European space weather community.
After reading it, they all left some relatively polite short reviews in the comments section.
The questions they raised were more or less the same.
What’s the statistical significance of this non-linear growth curve?
Could the tail deviation be from a change in background due to an instrument upgrade?
For a prediction of this scale, can you provide a time resolution?
Their tone was still quite mild.
Because everyone asking the questions had heard the name Klara Cadwell.
A prodigy who became famous at a young age.
An International Physics Olympiad gold medalist.
She did her undergraduate studies at E?tv?s Loránd University in Hungary.
For her master’s, she followed her advisor, Marcus Bruner, to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Bruner himself was the deputy director of the Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, a big name in the field.
And Klara’s own history was legendary.
During her undergrad, she had published a paper as the first author in *Solar Physics*.
Many people may not have heard of *Solar Physics*.
It is one of the oldest and most authoritative specialized journals in the international solar physics community, published by Springer.
Many professors could supervise students for their entire careers and have their own name appear as first author on *Solar Physics* fewer than two times in total.
And Klara had one as an undergraduate.
In her first year of grad school, she also had a paper as second author in *Astrophysical Journal Letters*.
Furthermore, there was another rumor in the community that Klara herself was also very... beautiful.
With a resume like that, no one dared to dismiss her preprint with a single, simple sentence.
But...
As the preprint was shared by more and more people, the crowd joining the discussion became increasingly mixed.
A colleague in Europe was the first to share it on Twitter, saying only half of what he meant and leaving a few suggestive hooks.
"Klara’s up to her old tricks again."
The discussion below immediately flooded in.
Someone dug up old grievances about the "overly optimistic" conclusions in Klara’s previous two papers, quoting them line by line underneath.
Someone clipped a video segment from her presentation at an international conference last year, saying she was dressed too revealingly and "at a glance, doesn’t look like a real academic."
Someone else even added a snide cheap shot, implying the author order on her two papers was "obtained through improper means."
In just two days.

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