Grumbling aside, Li Dong knew Galileo was okay, so he breathed a sigh of relief and turned his attention to his attribute panel.
Group Leader: Li Dong
Memory: 0.6 (Derived Skill: Memory Palace)
Logic: 0.5
Concentration: 0.5
Concentration had gone from 0.4 to 0.5.
All three core stats were now 0.5 or higher.
He was only 0.1 away from triggering a new Derived Skill.
This made him feel a faint sense of anticipation.
After all, with the Memory Palace, Li Dong basically never had to look up reference materials anymore.
The associative search function inside it saved him a ton of effort.
’If the next Derived Skill is also a tool of this caliber...’
The more Li Dong thought about it, the more excited he became.
Just as he was thinking this,
he heard a strange sound from outside the door.
It sounded like a key in a lock, but much slower than usual.
Then, the dorm room door was slowly pushed open.
Wang Hao seemed to be moving in slow motion.
Every action was drawn out: pushing the door, lifting his leg, looking down at his phone, taking the backpack off his shoulder. This whole series of movements, which should have taken only a second or two, was now incredibly slow.
"Brother Dong."
Wang Hao glanced over at Li Dong.
Seeing that Li Dong had his back to him and was ignoring him, he muttered again.
"Brother Dong’s off cultivating again."
Li Dong’s flow state was not broken.
He was still immersed in that strange state where time seemed to slow down.
And in that instant, an image suddenly flashed through Li Dong’s mind.
It was a concept from Algebraic Geometry that Wang Hao had just muttered about.
Then, a stream of details began pouring into his mind automatically.
The thickness of the book in Wang Hao’s hand, its color, its title, the direction Wang Hao walked after entering...
A thought surfaced in Li Dong’s mind.
’Hmph, Haozi is actually tackling *Algebraic Geometry*.’
’Not bad. Looks like he’s planning to specialize in algebraic geometry.’
The moment he finished this thought,
he froze.
’Wait a minute.’
He hadn’t turned around at all.
How did he know which book Wang Hao was holding?
Just then, a flash of insight struck him.
He knew why he was aware of Wang Hao’s every move despite not looking.
Concentration, Logic, and Memory—all three stats were above 0.5.
It was a new synergy between his stats.
With the three attributes stacked together, they were like three staves holding a barrel together.
What this "barrel" held was no longer a single function, but a comprehensive ability to deduce an entire scene from a few small details.
The academic concept Wang Hao had muttered the moment he entered the room.
Li Dong’s long-standing understanding of Wang Hao as a person.
When these two things combined, his mind automatically generated a complete picture.
This picture wasn’t something he had actually seen.
It was the most likely reality, automatically constructed in his mind by his new flow state based on the available details.
A thrill of excitement shot through Li Dong.
To verify it...
He immediately pulled himself out of the flow state.
The room instantly returned to normal speed, and Wang Hao’s movements became crisp and efficient.
Li Dong turned his head.
Wang Hao was sitting at his desk. On it lay an original English-language book: *Algebraic Geometry*.
Indeed.
Wang Hao heard the movement and grinned at Li Dong.
"Finished your cultivation, Brother Dong?"
Li Dong’s eyes fell on the book in his hands, and he smiled.
"Haozi."
"I’ve done a bit of research in that field myself."
"You could actually apply to be my graduate student in the future."
Wang Hao: ????
Li Dong ignored his dumbfounded expression.
He smiled, turned back around, and pulled the printed copy of the joint paper from his drawer.
Now he was going to start tackling Wu Kai’s section.
As expected, with his upgraded flow state stacked with the Memory Palace...
Li Dong tackled Wu Kai’s section even faster than he had anticipated.
With every page he turned, a corresponding section of his mind opened up.
The loading pathways for the single iron atoms, the modulation of the electronic structure of the skeletal coordination, the density functional theory for the active sites...
The associative search function also came in handy at this moment.
When he got to the part about the L?,? absorption edge of iron, his Memory Palace immediately linked several related concepts: the transition of 3d electrons to unoccupied orbitals, the two-orders-of-magnitude difference in signal intensity between the far-field and tunneling regions...
The entire paper appeared in his mind as clearly as a map.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
As he worked through it, Li Dong got stuck in a few places.
These sticking points were all in the experimental section conducted by Wu Kai. Just from the paper’s description, he couldn’t completely reconstruct every step of the experimental procedure in his mind.
So, Li Dong took out a notebook and jotted down these points one by one.
After he finished writing, Li Dong pulled out his phone and dialed Wu Kai’s number.
The call connected after two rings.
"Li Dong?"
"Teacher Wu, are you at the university?"
"I’m at Sister Zhang’s house."
Wu Kai’s voice on the other end was quiet, as if he was afraid of disturbing someone.
"Is it urgent?"
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat when he heard this. He also realized this was a good opportunity to visit the elderly Professor Zhang Lufang, so he said,
"I have a few questions I’d like to ask you."
"If it’s not a bad time..."
"Come on over."
Wu Kai cut him off before he could finish.
"Sister Zhang isn’t doing too well today, so she probably won’t be up for chatting long."
"Ah, okay."
"I’ll be right there."
After hanging up, Li Dong grabbed the notebook and headed out.
He arrived at Professor Zhang Lufang’s front door.
Li Dong rang the doorbell.
Qi Yu answered the door.
When Qi Yu saw it was him, she didn’t speak. She just tilted her head toward the inside and put a finger to her lips.
Li Dong understood.
He followed her inside, treading lightly.
The old woman was sitting on the old sofa, the same thin blanket from last time covering her knees.
This time, however, she was leaning back against the sofa, her eyes closed, her breathing faint.
It looked like she had fallen asleep.
Wu Kai was sitting on a small stool opposite her, a printed document spread out on the coffee table in front of him.
Hearing the sound at the door, Wu Kai looked up. He then softened his steps and walked over.
"Let’s talk outside."
Wu Kai said in a low, hushed voice.
Li Dong nodded.
The two of them left, one after the other.
Qi Yu followed them to the doorway, gently closed the door, and then tiptoed back into the living room.
Li Dong and Wu Kai went downstairs, one after the other.
Once downstairs, Li Dong didn’t immediately take out his notebook.
"How is Teacher Zhang’s health?"
Wu Kai sighed and said nothing.
Li Dong quickly asked,
"That thing we made..."
"Is it not working in a clinical setting?"
Li Dong was asking about the single-atom iron nanozyme.
In theory, it could save a large number of myocardial cells during the window of ischemia-reperfusion injury.
"It hasn’t been tried yet."
Li Dong didn’t understand.
"Not tried?"
He frowned.
The patent had already been approved. By his understanding, it should have been pushed toward clinical trials long ago.
Wu Kai glanced at him. He knew Li Dong had never been through the clinical translation process, so he had to explain it clearly.
In the medical field, a patent being granted absolutely does not mean it can be immediately used on patients.
There’s a long road from a laboratory prototype to final clinical application.
The first step is preclinical research, which requires cell and animal experiments to determine toxicity, dosage, and preliminary efficacy. This step alone can take one to two years in the lab.
Next is submitting an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the drug administration. Just getting through that approval process takes anywhere from six months to a year.
Once it finally gets to Phase 1 clinical trials, you have to find dozens of volunteers to test for safety and tolerability and screen for unexpected adverse reactions. That’s another year or two.
Phase 2 then requires expanding the scale several times over to verify efficacy, which takes another two to three years.
And the most difficult part, Phase 3, requires hundreds or even thousands of patients to participate in large-scale randomized controlled trials, comparing it directly with existing standard treatment plans. This stage takes at least three to five years, if not more.
Once you pass all these hurdles without any mishaps, submit the new drug application, and finally get it approved by the drug administration for market release... based on the industry average...
Wu Kai let out a long sigh and gave a heavy number.
"Ten to fifteen years."
Li Dong was stunned...
’Make her wait fifteen years?’
’What kind of joke is that?’
Li Dong was speechless for a moment.
Wu Kai didn’t speak either.
"So..."
The word had just left Li Dong’s lips
when Wu Kai continued.
"So, we talked to Sister Zhang a while ago."
"The data for our drug in animal models is incredibly solid. We’ve determined the toxicity, dosage, and effective window."
"The next step would have been to find patients whose conditions are similar to Sister Zhang’s and who are willing to cooperate in the very first wave of experimental trials."
"Theoretically, this kind of trial does carry a certain amount of risk."
"We’ve assessed it repeatedly, and the probability of risk isn’t high."
"Not high... but not zero."
Wu Kai looked at Li Dong.
"Sister Zhang agreed to it herself."
Li Dong looked up at Wu Kai.
Wu Kai didn’t look back at him. Instead, he said,
"She said she knows what she’s getting into."
"She can’t wait ten or fifteen years."
"Even if it’s just for one or two years, if it lets us get a set of real data from a human trial, she doesn’t care about the rest."
Li Dong lowered his head and sighed.
’It’s the only way.’
Wu Kai glanced at him and changed the heavy subject.
"Alright, didn’t you say you had some questions to ask?"
Li Dong nodded and didn’t bring up the matter again. Instead, he took out his notebook and asked the questions that had stumped him.
The first two were about the single-atom iron.
The physical model for the two-orders-of-magnitude difference in the L?-edge signal between the far-field and tunneling regions, and the underlying logic for why the iv-peak in the NEXAFS spectrum vanished in the tip channel.
Wu Kai didn’t waste any time. He started with the difference in solid angles for Auger electron capture and worked his way to the PDOS distribution from DFT calculations, clearly breaking down the details of how the Fe d_z2 and N p_y hybrid orbitals were filtered out and the mechanism behind the so-called "zero crosstalk."
As for the third point, it was about a set of data from an experiment Wu Kai had conducted himself.
A lateral scan performed on a [Tb(pcam)?]? dimer with a step size of 0.18 nm.
What Li Dong couldn’t figure out was the tunneling process’s extreme sensitivity to atomic position.
Why was a clean M? peak only detected directly above the two Tb ions, which were 1.26 nm apart, while the space in between was completely empty, without a trace of a signal?
Wu Kai drew a top-down view of the dimer on paper and gave a detailed breakdown, explaining the exponential decay of the tunneling current with distance combined with the directional selectivity of X-ray-excited orbitals.
How the lateral resolution could be compressed to a scale smaller than the synchrotron beam spot—it all finally clicked into place in Li Dong’s mind.
He broke it down, sentence by sentence, and illustrated it, stroke by stroke.
The three dead ends were checked off, one by one.
When all the questions had been answered, Li Dong checked the time. A little over an hour had passed.
He capped his pen and put the notebook back in his bag.
"Teacher Wu, since Teacher Zhang is still resting, I won’t go up and disturb her. If anything happens, please let me know right away."
"Okay, head on back."
Wu Kai waved his hand.
Li Dong turned and started walking back toward the university.
Wu Kai and the others were working hard, and Li Dong naturally wouldn’t slack off either. It was uncertain whether the single-atom iron nanozyme would be ready in time, but even if it was, what if it didn’t work?
So, Li Dong still had to digest the paper as quickly as possible and then reap the rewards.

Comments

Loading...