Li Dong didn’t go home this year.
He still barely used the two-bedroom apartment at Blue Banner Camp. He’d still crash in the dorm room in Building 35 from time to time; those three animals were used to it anyway.
The main reason was that it was more convenient to discuss experiment details with Wu Kai at the university.
When Li Qin called, Li Dong was in the break room on the second floor of the Hecheng National Research Center for Microscopic Matter Science.
On the other end of the line, Li Qin just asked him over and over if he was eating well and getting enough sleep.
Li Dong simply said, "Everything’s fine, Mom. Don’t worry."
After hanging up, Li Dong glanced out the break room window.
It was snowing in Hecheng.
There weren’t many pedestrians on Jinzai Road outside. Snowflakes fell through the halos of the streetlights.
He stood leaning against the window frame for a moment before turning back to his lab bench.
Meanwhile, in Capital City...
Qi Yu had taken Professor Zhang Lufang to the hospital again.
This time, she was admitted.
When Li Dong found out, he didn’t say much, just kept his eyes fixed on the vacuum chamber.
The synthesis was still ongoing. Time waited for no one.
The snow fell all night long.
And beyond this heavy snowfall,
some things were quietly beginning.
The Southern Hemisphere.
A small sheep-farming town at the southern end of the Patagonian Plateau.
An old shepherd named Mario had lived in the town for years.
Every evening, he would turn on his truck radio to listen to the agricultural and livestock news broadcast from Buenos Aires.
It was one of his few connections to the outside world.
But for the past week, his old truck radio had started acting strangely every evening after six o’clock.
Static slowly drowned out the main frequency.
By seven, the radio was basically nothing but noise.
At first, Mario thought the antenna was broken.
He had his son help him check the old antenna, but there was nothing wrong with it.
Later, he took out a handheld compass to check the direction.
The compass needle was supposed to point south.
But for the past few days, around dusk, the needle had started to deflect eastward.
The angle of deflection was different each day.
Mario squatted by the wooden fence in front of his house, frowning at the wildly swinging needle.
"My God."
"The heavens are about to change."
The Pacific Ocean.
Northwest of the Fiji Islands.
A group of fishermen, having ended their fishing trip early, sat in their backyards.
Their boats had returned empty today.
Not because there were no fish, but because their navigation systems had failed.
The weather was clear, the seas calm.
Normally, navigation wouldn’t be a problem in such weather.
But today, their electronic charts had suddenly gone haywire, the onboard GPS signal kept cutting out, and even the backup high-frequency shortwave radio was intermittent.
For safety, they had all turned back.
An old fisherman named Ramatu glanced at the northern sky.
That part of the sky looked no different than usual.
Except for the color of the sun.
The old man stared at it for a while.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
He just felt that today’s sun seemed a little whiter than usual.
Alaska.
A small town south of the Arctic Circle, at a not particularly high latitude.
The town’s residents were used to seeing the aurora on a few nights each year.
But this past week, they were shocked whenever they went outside at night.
Because this town wasn’t supposed to get auroras this intense.
Usually, what they saw was a pale green.
This week, however, the auroras they saw were crimson.
They were bright enough to cast shadows on the snow outside.
The town’s elders said that in their sixty-plus years, they had never seen an aurora like it.
The young people, however, were excited, eagerly taking out their phones to film it and post on various social media platforms.
Social media platforms quickly exploded with discussion.
[Southern Patagonia: All our compasses are going crazy, and the radio is just static in the evening. What’s going on?]
[Northwest of Fiji: GPS signal keeps dropping at sea, backup shortwave is down too. Anyone else having the same problem?]
[Alaska: Everyone, look how romantic the crimson aurora is! Welcome to Alaska to see the northern lights.]
Netizens from many other countries replied below.
[Paris, France: Nope? Everything’s normal here.]
[Tokyo, Japan: My signal’s fine. Haven’t heard about any issues.]
[Singapore: All good over here, business as usual.]
These "all good" replies flooded more than half the screen.
Then a new post was pushed to the top.
[Some town in Chile: My compass has been pointing east for three days now.]
[You guys think... could it be that thing from the prediction?]
A long chain of replies immediately followed.
[What are you thinking!]
[You’ve all seen Professor Richter’s memo, right? The director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research personally came out to debunk it.]
[Are you seriously taking what that mathematician said for real?]
[Come on, even Professor Richter thought it was unreliable. How can you believe it?]
The discussion under this post grew increasingly sidetracked and was eventually buried under a pile of explanations about how compasses are inherently inaccurate and GPS dropouts are common.
Meanwhile, netizens in Huaxia watched these overseas discussions, and the vast majority treated them as a joke.
Because everything in Huaxia was normal, except that the 996 work schedule had become 007.
Hecheng.
Hecheng National Research Center for Microscopic Matter Science.
In the small corridor on the second floor of the laboratory building.
Li Dong had just stood up from an in-situ TEM when the phone in his pocket vibrated.
It was a call from Chang Jin.
"Hello, Director Chang."
The voice on the other end was quiet.
"Li Dong."
"Our global synchronization contingency plan has just completed its final drill."
Li Dong paused.
"All of them?"
"Yes."
There was little emotion in Chang Jin’s voice.
"The Quebec power grid ran its final round this morning."
"Japan’s low-latitude satellite orbital redundancy switch passed inspection yesterday."
"The HF communication alternative link passed its double-blind test."
"The Meridian Project has completed all three rounds of full-link drills."
He paused.
"Regarding the T?+14.0 time point from your paper..."
"We’re less than a month away."
Listening to Chang Jin, Li Dong walked out to the corridor outside the lab and spoke into the phone.
"It’s good that they’re all done."
The other end was silent for a few seconds.
Then Chang Jin spoke in a low voice.
"Aren’t you... nervous?"
"If the Carrington Level solar flare doesn’t appear, then..."
He didn’t continue.
Li Dong thought for a moment, then chuckled into the phone.
"Director Chang."
"If it doesn’t happen, wouldn’t that be for the best?"
The other end was stunned for a moment.
Then he heard Chang Jin laugh.
"...You’re right."
"It would be better if it didn’t happen."
Chang Jin sighed himself.
"Alright."
"I’m heading to the command center."
"Let’s just wait for this final stretch of the fourteen months to pass."
The call ended.
Li Dong stuffed his phone back into his pocket.
The snow was still falling outside the corridor. He stood in place for a few seconds, then turned and walked back into the laboratory building.
The eighth pilot run for the second-generation enzyme was set to ignite this afternoon.
And at that very moment.
One astronomical unit (AU) away from Earth.
On the face of the sun—that star that still seemed gentle, still rose and set on time each day—things were quietly happening that only data could see.
In a sunspot group just south of the equator, the magnetic flux had accumulated to nearly seven times its normal value.
Beneath this sunspot group, a compressed magnetic rope was slowly rising.
Its rate of ascent was imperceptible to the naked eye.
But in the SDO’s high-cadence Dopplergrams, it moved one pixel every hour.
The filament at the top of the sunspot group, which had been clinging to the photosphere three days ago,
had now lifted off the photosphere’s surface and was suspended there.
The X-ray background slowly climbed from the C-class noise floor to the lower edge of M1-class.
The magnetic shear angle on the western limb had twisted from a stable 45 degrees to nearly 70 degrees.
The entire coronal loop system was being slowly stretched open by a quiet, suppressed energy.
Like a bow being silently drawn taut.

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