Zijin Mountain.
The wind swept the leaves outside the control hall into the sky. Chang Jin looked up from his screen and rubbed his eyes.
A set of meeting minutes lay on his desk.
The minutes were from Dean Hou.
He had compiled a table of cross-verification time windows for Chen Heng, Gao Jiawei, the Chinese team at IceCube, and LHAASO. Each cell marked available researchers, allocatable machine time, and releasable archived data.
This was the "conventional path" Chang Jin had mentioned to Li Dong in the seminar room at Yan University two days ago.
Going by the book, inching their way up to that 3.5σ figure.
Chang Jin took a pen from his pocket and circled the two time windows in the third and seventh rows of the minutes, planning to double-check them with Dean Hou later.
Just then, his phone rang.
As a rule, he didn’t answer his phone while working.
But this time, it was Li Dong. He got up and walked out of the hall.
He didn’t answer until he was outside the glass door at the end of the hallway.
"Hello, Li Dong."
Chang Jin listened quietly.
After about a minute, his brow began to furrow.
"Hold on a second."
He pulled a small notebook and pen from his pocket.
Flipping to a blank page, he said,
"Go ahead."
"Uh-huh. SDO/HMI, high-cadence Dopplergram, May 2010 to June 2024, full-disk at 720-second cadence, right?"
"Okay."
"SDO/HMI, high-cadence Dopplergram, May 2010 to June 2023, full-disk at 720-second cadence?"
"Anything else?"
His pen scribbled across the notebook.
"Intermediate products from ring-diagram inversion, with the inversion radius locked to R minus 0.01R."
"Got it."
"Hinode/SOT, vector magnetograms, Level-2, May 2010 to June 2023, all active regions of beta-gamma and above?"
A few more words came from the other end of the line.
"NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, SRS (Solar Region Summary) archives, extended magnetic classification."
"And one more thing: for active regions, the daily emergence date, maximum magnetic classification, and latitudinal drift. I need the raw records, not the secondary processed data."
"Mhm."
Chang Jin murmured in agreement as he wrote.
He paused his writing here.
The voice on the other end was still talking.
After about another minute, Li Dong finally stopped.
Chang Jin closed his notebook.
He let out a long breath.
"Li Dong."
"Anything that can be requisitioned domestically, I can get for you, no problem."
"The two Fengyun satellites, Huairou, the Meridian Project, and our own sunspot longitude tables here at Purple Platform—I can get in touch with people about those this afternoon."
He paused abruptly before continuing.
"But some of these..."
"I’m afraid I can’t provide them from my end."
The three sets of foreign data Li Dong wanted were nominally open to the public, but only for ordinary, routine search requests.
A request like his, spanning over a decade and specifically asking for raw, unprocessed low-level products, was far beyond the scope of public interfaces and common FTP nodes.
The high-cadence Doppler intermediate products from SDO/HMI, the Level-2 vector magnetograms from Hinode/SOT, plus the raw extended archives for beta-gamma and higher active regions from the United States’ NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
To reuse this volume of data for research, one had to go through formal data allocation agreements.
Behind it all lay a tangled web of international scientific interests.
The lead for the SDO science team was at Goddard in the United States, while the European secondary line was controlled by the G?ttingen Branch of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS).
As for Hinode’s Level-2 products, that was the private turf of a multi-party consortium including Japan’s JAXA, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), and several space agencies in Europe and the United States.
And for the NOAA SWPC archives, you had to get an institutional endorsement and go through a strict approval process at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in the United States.
Under normal circumstances, you’d submit an application, wait a few months to negotiate, cede corresponding or first-author rights on a few papers, and everyone would divide the spoils. Once the interests were balanced, the path would be smoothed out.
But under the current circumstances, if a Carrington Level solar flare was truly going to happen in 17 months as Li Dong predicted, there wasn’t enough time.
Chang Jin said, feeling a bit helpless.
"I’ll try to think of something on my end."
The call ended.
He leaned against the bay window, standing silently for a long while.
Outside, the leaves that had been blown into the sky drifted back down.
Li Dong, too, hung up the phone with a sense of helplessness.
’I’ll have to think of another way...’
...
「The next day.」
Since Engelhardt had replied to Clara’s comment, the discussion below Li Dong’s short communication on the precursor warning had gone quiet.
The arXiv comments section fell completely silent.
The colleagues who had previously dug up Clara’s old baggage didn’t make another sound.
Professor Richter himself said nothing more.
It was as if nothing had ever happened.
But elsewhere...
...on Nature Careers.
This was an academic job board run by the Nature Publishing Group.
It wasn’t huge, but everyone in academia knew about it.
The platform constantly featured all sorts of academic recruitment notices.
The posters included plenty of heavy hitters from the field.
A Nobel laureate’s lab recruiting a postdoc, a veteran figure in some field using their private foundation to staff a long-term project—one or two listings like this would pop up every so often.
The people browsing the site included recent PhD graduates and current postdoctoral fellows.
There were also early- to mid-career scholars who had already accomplished something in their positions and were looking to move to a more prestigious platform.
Even some who had already reached the level of PI (Principal Investigator) or professor would occasionally drop by to see if there were any interesting collaboration opportunities.
In short, it was a place where you could find a PhD student, but also run into a true top-tier heavyweight.
And just the previous night, a new recruitment notice had appeared on the platform.
In the "Posted By" field, the name signed was Li Dong.
The content of the notice was simple. It stated that he was conducting medium- to long-term prediction work related to solar activity and needed collaborators familiar with low-latitude solar circulation observation, vector magnetic field analysis, and long-baseline phase reconstruction. Colleagues with relevant backgrounds were welcome to apply.
After it was posted, it received a huge number of views.
But not a single person applied. Everyone knew what Li Dong was trying to do. Why would they get involved and waste their time?
After posting it, Li Dong paid it no more mind for the time being.
Instead, he went to the elderly Zhang Lufang’s home.
Professor Wu Kai had arranged the meeting.
He wanted to talk to Li Dong about the follow-up for their group’s patent.
After all, it was Zhang Lufang who had introduced Li Dong to Wu Kai’s group, so the matter naturally involved her.
It was just that her health hadn’t been good recently, and she hadn’t been to the university.
So, Wu Kai simply arranged to meet Li Dong directly at her home, saving her the trouble of traveling back and forth.
Li Dong readily agreed, grabbed a jacket, and headed out.
...
He’d been to Zhang Lufang’s old house once before, so he knew the way.
When he entered, Qi Yu was in the kitchen chopping vegetables. With her back to the door, she turned, nodded at him in greeting, and then went back to her chopping.
"Hey," Li Dong replied.
The old lady was sitting on the old sofa in the living room, a thin blanket covering her knees.
Wu Kai sat across from her, a glass of water in his hand.
"There you are, kid," the old lady said with a smile, waving him over.
"Professor Zhang," Li Dong said as he walked over and sat down beside her.
Wu Kai smiled at him but didn’t say much, turning instead to the old woman.
"Sister Zhang."
"How has your health been lately?"
The old lady waved her hand dismissively.
"Same old problems."
"It’s nothing too serious."
Wu Kai nodded, but for a moment, he didn’t know what to say, his face etched with worry.
"Sister Zhang, you must take good care of yourself."
"This thing we’re working on this time..."
He said, somewhat hesitantly.
"It should be able to cure your illness."
The old lady smiled and waved her hand again.
"Oh, Xiaowu."
"Don’t try to comfort me."
"Don’t forget what I used to do for a living."
"Your work is still a long, long way from being a real treatment."
After saying this, she was the first to laugh.
The corner of Wu Kai’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t respond.
When the old lady said it was "a long, long way off," she wasn’t lying.
Her illness, formally called "ischemic cardiomyopathy" by the hospital, fell under the broader category of "coronary heart disease with heart failure."
Her case was even more severe, as it had left behind an area of fibrotic scar tissue.
The single-atom iron nanozyme that Wu Kai’s team was developing could, in theory, save more than half of the vast number of myocardial cells that were about to be destroyed during the first few minutes of the oxidative burst in an ischemia-reperfusion injury.
In theory, it could.
But only within the window of that oxidative burst.
It could save someone having a heart attack.
But it couldn’t reverse a past that had already become scar tissue.
And the large area of fibrosis on the old lady’s ventricular wall, the ongoing adverse remodeling, was far beyond the therapeutic window of a nanozyme.
It was indeed related to her disease, but it couldn’t be applied to her own specific condition.

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