64: Chapter 64 The Named Sky

March 27.

On Sunday at the Physics building, the doors of most offices were tightly shut.

The corridor was dimly lit, and only a few laboratories gathered by hardcore grinders still leaked pale fluorescent light from beneath the door cracks.

The water dispenser at the end of the corridor probably had a malfunctioning temperature control system, emitting a buzz like the idling of an old tractor, with a ring of faint blue light glowing on its panel, resembling some untimely guard signal or as if declaring to the empty corridor that it was still alive.

When Jiang Lin pushed open B304, Meng Che was slumped in the peeling gaming chair in front of the computer, his entire body looking like a cutlassfish with its spine pulled out.

His eyes stared blankly at a pile of dazzling Origin data plots on the screen, his right hand gripping the mouse with his index finger hovering over the left button, refusing to press down for a long time.

Yin Hang sat at the workstation next to him with his spine held straight, the lenses of his dark anti-blue light glasses reflecting the cold light of the computer screen.

A webpage was open on the screen, but at the same time he was also typing a string of Python code.

Meanwhile, Yao Siyu was holding her phone with her brows tightly knitted, lowering her head to fill out some spreadsheet, next to a thick stack of invoices piled up, looking as if she had been press-ganged by Teacher Lu to do the soul-tormenting dirty work of handling reimbursements.

Hearing the door push open, Meng Che heavily lifted a slit of his eyelids and glanced at Jiang Lin.

"You're here, Junior Brother Jiang."

Ever since that B104 low-frequency drift incident was successfully resolved, Meng Che had been using the address "Junior Brother" more and more smoothly.

No matter how incongruous it was for a high school senior to appear in a university laboratory, in this circle that only recognized strength and results, the person who could solve problems was qualified to earn a title.

Jiang Lin put his schoolbag next to the temporary workstation, swept his gaze over the spot where Professor Lu usually sat, and asked casually: "Teacher Lu is not here?"

"He went to the department meeting."

Yao Siyu didn't even raise her head, her fingers poking rapidly on her phone screen, her tone exuding a trace of resentment.

"Professor Wang's side wants to pull out the direction of the subsequent mechanical error chain separately to have an internal discussion, and Old Lu was called over, so he probably won't be back before mealtime."

Yin Hang suddenly stopped typing on the keyboard, turned his head to look at Jiang Lin, and asked out of nowhere: "Jiang Lin, how is your mathematics?"

Meng Che had originally been slumped, but upon hearing this question, as if pricked in the buttocks by an invisible needle, half of his body jerked upright.

"Your question is of a very high standard." Meng Che dragged out his voice, his tone full of absurdity, "You ask how his mathematics is about a guy who can peel apart our interferometer's mechanical error chain layer by layer like cutting an onion, and even model micron-level deformations in his brain? You might as well ask a dog if it likes eating meaty bones."

Yin Hang ignored Meng Che's nonsense, reached out to push his glasses, and his expression remained rigorous: "I am not asking about the kind of barely-sufficient mathematical tools in Physics modeling; I am asking about competition mathematics. That pure, unprincipled competition mathematics specifically used to screen brain structures."

"What competition mathematics?"

"Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, have you heard of it?"

Jiang Lin shook his head.

He had vaguely glanced across the name before, but had never seriously clicked into it to look at the competition format.

In an environment like Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, subject competitions were not the mainstream path to begin with, let alone an online mathematics competition open globally.

Yao Siyu finally finished filling out that damned reimbursement form, put down her phone, let out a long sigh, and turned to join the conversation.

"Online preliminary round, global participation, no threshold, anyone can participate. Registration for this year actually started several days ago, and Senior Brother Yin and I have both signed up."

Meng Che shrank back into his chair like a deflated ball and sighed deeply: "I also want to try it, even if it's just to go in and get abused to experience the disparity in intelligence. Unfortunately, my life is bitter: I have group meetings to report on, experiments to make up data for, thesis proposal defense is coming right up, the boss urges me to my doom three times a day, and those anonymous reviewers are practically soul-chasing ghosts. Add these few things together, and it's enough for me to die three times. If I were to go do those life-questioning math problems again, I'm afraid my cerebral blood vessels couldn't take it and I'd pass away right here in B304."

"Stop making excuses for yourself; you're not signing up purely because last year you ambitiously participated in the preliminary round, only to be rigidly stuck by the very first proof problem for three hours, and in the end didn't even make it into the finals."

Yin Hang mercilessly added a cold knife from the side.

Meng Che immediately sprang up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on: "Bollocks, it's because the questions were perverted, okay? Is that something an ordinary person could solve? That question setter is definitely a psycho, kneading topology, number theory, and analysis together—why didn't he just ask me to prove the Goldbach Conjecture!"

Yao Siyu looked at him expressionlessly and continued to deliver a slash: "Yeah, you were so angry back then that you walked in circles here, pointing at the screen and cursing the question setter for a full twenty minutes, and the senior brother next door even thought you crashed the server by running code."

"That's called rationally expressing the frustration of a scientific researcher when facing knowledge barriers, understand?"

After refuting with a stiff neck, Meng Che turned to look at Jiang Lin, his eyes brightening as if he had found a new source of fun, "But seriously, Junior Brother Jiang, you could give it a try."

Jiang Lin didn't speak.

Meng Che thought he was hesitating about the gold content or threshold of this competition, and suddenly got into the mood of lobbying: "This competition is quite interesting, really. It doesn't look at whether you're a math major, and doesn't even look at whether you're a student. Whether you're a food delivery guy, a coder, or still studying in high school like you, you don't even need a recommendation letter from the school. Online preliminary, open-book, anyone can sign up. If you really have time, signing up to play around is actually not bad, just as a brain workout."

"Don't make it sound too easy for him either." Yao Siyu frowned and reminded him, "Although it has no threshold, it is definitely not the kind of Gaokao math where you can get a high score just by grinding problems, nor is it that kind of stereotyped traditional Olympiad math problem. Many of the problems in it don't ask for calculation ability, but ideas and intuition. You have to be able to prove a seemingly unrelated proposition by yourself, and most importantly, you have to be able to endure hours or even a dozen hours of torture without any progress."

Yin Hang nodded in agreement: "The preliminary time given is very long, a full two days, but this definitely doesn't mean it's simple. What it tests is whether you can keep your mindset from collapsing in front of a completely open problem without a standard answer path, and steadily push forward step by step."

Hearing this, Meng Che chuckled instead: "That's why I think you kid can give it a try, because isn't your greatest specialty grinding away endlessly in front of a problem, with a patience that simply doesn't seem human?"

This remark could hardly be considered a clever compliment, at least it didn't sound like one.

Jiang Lin took out his phone to search for related information, quickly scanning the registration instructions, participation methods, and preliminary round time.

Late April.

There is still some time away from now.

From his own time mechanism perspective, it didn't conflict.

But Jiang Lin did not immediately click to register.

He simply saved the page link into his phone's notes.

The note title was very simple.

[Alibaba Mathematics Competition, confirm after returning.]

Meng Che stretched his neck to peek, saw the title pending confirmation, and couldn't help being stunned: "No way, just signing up for something, and you still have to hesitate for a few days."

Jiang Lin stuffed his phone back into his pocket and said in a calm tone: "Write it down first, and see how things go when the time comes."

"This is Jiang Lin's working style." Yao Siyu complained from the side, "This person is as rigorous as an old-school German engineer; even signing up has to first enter a pending-confirmation queue process, and he probably even does a risk assessment in his head."

"Junior Brother Jiang, if you really get bored and take the exam, and accidentally kill your way into the finals, your No. 7 High School principal will probably go crazy with joy, overnight ordering people to hang a two-meter-tall giant photo of yours at the main gate, with 'Light of No. 7 High School' written on it."

Meng Che amused himself as he spoke.

"There is still no sign of it yet, Senior Brother, you're thinking too far ahead."

Jiang Lin's expression remained completely unperturbed.

"So I'm just saying 'what if'; a person must always have a little imagination and can't always be like a machine."

Meng Che spread his hands, restrained his joking tone a bit, and his expression turned a few shades more serious.

"Actually, to be serious, Jiang Lin, don't you quite like using partial differential equations when you deduce formulas usually? If you register, go register for the analysis and differential equations direction. We aren't asking for top tens globally; even if you just bring back an excellence award result, it will be much more convenient in the future. It will also save Teacher Lu the trouble of having outsiders or professors from other departments ask him why a high school senior has sneaked into the laboratory, forcing Teacher Lu to laboriously explain everything from the principle of optical levers all the way to mechanical hysteresis phenomena every single time."

Although this sentence carried a habitual tease, Jiang Lin could tell that it was a heartfelt truth.

Jiang Lin knew very well that his position in this top-tier Physics laboratory full of graduate students and Ph.D.s was actually very abrupt.

The reason why Professor Lu was willing to withstand the pressure to give him the green light, allow him to enter and exit freely, and even mobilize the laboratory's resources, was entirely because he had produced solid, concrete things.

But this could only convince Professor Lu and these few team members who spent day and night together, as well as a handful of people including Teacher Guo Jianye and Professor Wang Heng.

To the department leaders, researchers in other laboratories, and the vast majority of normal people who walked step by step by the book, a high school senior not grinding test papers in the classroom, but frequently entering and exiting a university key Physics laboratory, was in itself something that required explanation.

Abnormalities often attracted unnecessary gazes.

And a high-value mathematics competition transcript, although unable to explain all the mysteries on him, could at least build a solid genius persona.

Geniuses always had privileges, and geniuses doing slightly out-of-line things could be forgiven and understood.

This could help him block a large portion of meaningless suspicion and questioning.

This might be an extremely effective protective coloration.

Jiang Lin nodded, finalizing this matter in his heart: "I know, thank you, Senior Brother."

However, his coming to Jiangda University today was not to discuss any mathematics competition.

With March about to pass and the sixth trip to the Wasteland about to arrive, he had to start reorganizing and expanding his database once again.

"The third floor of the library has engineering, and the fourth floor has Physics. If you want materials on field surveying and geological exploration, listen to my advice: don't flip through those flashy modern outdoor survival manuals; they're all meant to trick the petite bourgeoisie into camping. Go directly for old textbooks on geophysics and meteorological observation published before the year 2000. Old textbooks have ugly typesetting and a lot of nonsense, but their observation methods are extremely solid, all figured out with real swords and guns in harsh environments without high-tech equipment."

Hearing that Jiang Lin was going to the library to find materials, Yin Hang recommended it like this.

"Also, don't just look at how to measure; don't forget to look at how the raw record sheet is designed."

Yao Siyu stopped the pen in her hand, raised her head, and added, displaying her professional qualities as an experimental record maniac.

"A lot of times, field observation failures or data invalidation are not because the instruments aren't precise enough, but because the format of the record sheet wasn't designed well from the beginning. Some variables were missed, some related data weren't put together, and when you want to look back and analyze the data to find patterns a few months later, you find that it's all a mess and completely unusable."

"Understood."

Jiang Lin earnestly noted down these two points, nodded at them, turned around, shouldered his backpack, and walked towards the library.

The sunlight was very nice, not dazzling, spilling warmly onto the asphalt road surface.

The two rows of tall sycamore trees by the roadside had not yet fully unfolded their leaves, and the tender green branches swayed gently in the breeze, making a rustling, fine sound.

Several college students wearing loose sportswear rode shared bicycles, laughing and talking as they passed by him.

The bicycle wheels made a brisk turning sound, and in one girl's bicycle basket diagonally stuck two badminton rackets, with a bag of milk tea still oozing condensation droplets hanging beside it.

This was the most ordinary weekend afternoon on Jiangda University's campus.

The power grid was stable, the signal was full, the cafeteria opened on time, and the library had millions of books neatly arranged according to the Chinese Library Classification, along with central air conditioning maintained at a constant 24 degrees Celsius year-round.

People living here probably had their biggest troubles as failing final exams, failing to grab popular elective courses, quarreling with girlfriends, or complaining that the food delivery was too slow.

Jiang Lin walked along such a campus tree-lined path, yet his backpack contained an observation logbook.

In the library, even on a Sunday, there were quite a few people, but most students were like phototactic insects, concentrated in those spacious and bright self-study areas on the second and third floors.

Inside the book stacks, it appeared much quieter, with only the occasional sound of page-turning and coughing.

Following Yin Hang's advice, Jiang Lin first went to the engineering book stacks on the third floor.

"General Surveying", "Engineering Surveying Basics and Practice", "Alpine and Plateau Meteorological Observation Methods", "Field Geological Recording Specifications and Legends", "Research on Material and Equipment Reliability under Low Temperature and High Radiation Environments"...

He was like a miner panning for gold in the sand, pulling out these dust-covered old books one by one.

He didn't look at the preface, nor those grand theoretical overviews, turning directly to the table of contents, jumping to the appendix, and quickly scanning the sample record sheets, makeshift instrument calibration methods, and lengthy discussions on error sources and elimination.

Much of the content, viewed from a modern perspective, was indeed a bit outdated, and even appeared clumsy and laughable.

For example, using the naked eye to observe cloud thickness to estimate high-altitude wind speed, or using the most primitive hair hygrometer to measure humidity.

But in the Wasteland, old-fashioned never meant useless; instead, it represented survival.

The more one was in a low-resource and highly harsh environment, the less one could entrust their life and fate entirely to those delicate latest electronic instruments.

What he wanted to find was the kind of observation method that, after stripping away all the sugar-coated cannonballs of modern technology, could persist for a long time in desperate situations relying solely on the human eye, paper, pencils, mechanical watches, tape measures, and the most basic vernier calipers, while maintaining relative accuracy.

While leafing through a copy of "Meteorological Observation Methods" whose cover was almost falling apart, Jiang Lin found a Soviet-style surface meteorological record sheet from the 1950s in the appendix page at the very end of the book.

The routine items of the table were very ordinary, ordinary enough for a junior high school student to understand.

Time, temperature, humidity, air pressure...

Jiang Lin stared a couple of extra glances at the special weather phenomena column.

In the Real World, this box was usually used by meteorologists to abbreviate a few words: thunderstorm, hail, heavy fog, frost, or sandstorm.

Whereas in the Wasteland, the space in this box might be far from enough to write down those grotesque and bizarre fatal phenomena.

He immediately unzipped his schoolbag, pulled out his own notebook and gel pen, quickly copied the basic format of that old-style table, and then, based on the original foundation, combined with his several experiences in the Wasteland, directly heavily modified a version of the record sheet that belonged exclusively to him right next to it.

Unconsciously, the time had reached 4:20 PM, and Jiang Lin went up to the fourth floor.

On the east side of the fourth floor was the territory of purely Physics-related book collections.

The knowledge systems corresponding to these book titles had already been chewed up and swallowed into his stomach through crazy self-squeezing in the time difference between the Real World and the Wasteland over the past period, and they were no longer unfamiliar.

His original plan was to come to this floor to find some obscure materials related to high-altitude atmospheric optics and space environment Physics.

The books placed on the shelves here were all high-level textbooks so obscure that not even a few people borrowed them throughout the year.

"Introduction to Space Physics", "Basics of Solar Physics", "Ionosphere Physics", "Magnetosphere Physics", "Plasma Physics"...

Jiang Lin's footsteps paused slightly.

To be precise, his gaze was intercepted by the cover of one of the books.

That copy of 《Plasma Physics was not wedged in too deeply, resting diagonally between two thick books.

The cover featured a false-color processed image of a Solar Flare eruption.

Against a purely breathtaking black background, a sun occupied the lower half of the frame.

But that was definitely not the round, bright sun emitting a warm glow as depicted in elementary school Chinese textbooks.

In this image, the sun looked like a terrifying sea of fire burning to a boil.

Its chromosphere surface churned with dense, violent textures, and a flare of immense volume was gushing out from the edge.

The light was blindingly pale, carrying an aura of destruction.

In the core region of the flare eruption, several translucent lines outlined later to represent magnetic field lines rose curved from the sun's surface in a distorted posture.

These invisible energy lines intertwined and strangled each other at high altitudes, as if forcibly braided into a rope by some unimaginable cosmic giant hand.

Then, that overburdened magnetic field line rope violently snapped and exploded at an extreme height, releasing energy sufficient to destroy a planet.

This drawing was immensely visually tense, as if one could feel the heaven-burning, earth-destroying high temperature and ferocity even through the paper.

But this still wasn't the real reason Jiang Lin stopped.

The real reason was that when he looked at this image of magnetic field lines twisting and breaking during a Solar Flare eruption, his mind was struck by a bolt of lightning, instantly flashing back to the sky of the Wasteland.

The sky of the Wasteland was red.

But it was definitely not the romantic sunset red in the Real World, nor was it a poetic rosy cloud.

The red of the Wasteland was low-pressure, gloomy, and dead silent.

It was just like a layer of extremely thin yet forever un-washable rust, evenly smeared across the entire firmament by some unknown force.

Even if blue occasionally revealed itself, it always looked dirty.

In the evening, near the horizon where the sun set, there were never gorgeous evening glows, only an eerie, morbid transitional color intertwining dark red, gray, and purple.

Previously, limited by his knowledge reserves, Jiang Lin roughly attributed all these phenomena in his diary to severe post-nuclear war atmospheric pollution and mutation phenomena.

But now, on the cover of this old book, the pale arc light at the exact moment of the Solar Flare eruption acted like a key, forcefully pushing another vocabulary word hidden in the deep sea of Physics right in front of him.

Plasma.

Jiang Lin furrowed his brow slightly and pulled 《Plasma Physics off the bookshelf.

This was a thin booklet.

Out of curiosity, he opened the first page.

Then, standing beside the bookshelf, he read for a full hour.

The content of this book was actually not written deeply; it was mainly for introductory popular science for senior undergraduate students in the Physics department or newly enrolled graduate students, omitting a lot of tedious formula derivations and focusing more on the construction of physical images.

However, the title of one of the chapters pierced into Jiang Lin's vision like an awl, making him stop to read word by word.

[Magnetic Reconnection and Its Application in Astrophysics and Space Physics]

Jiang Lin almost subconsciously took out the black notebook from his pocket again, pulled off the pen cap, and began to record wildly on the paper, the handwriting appearing somewhat sloppy due to the excessive speed.

Magnetic Reconnection Phenomenon: In highly conductive fluids such as plasma, two magnetic field lines with originally opposite or different directions, when squeezed together due to some disturbance, will break in a tiny local area and reconnect and close with other magnetic field lines.

Core Consequence: At the instant when the magnetic field lines break and reconnect, the topological structure of the magnetic field undergoes drastic changes. Accompanied by this process, the massive magnetic energy originally stored in the magnetic field will, within an extremely short time, explosively transform into the kinetic energy and thermal energy of the plasma, accelerating particles to extremely high speeds.

Macroscopic physical events dominated by this phenomenon ——

Solar Flare eruptions, with energy release reaching the magnitude of 10 ^ 25 joules.

Coronal Mass Ejection (CME).

Earth's magnetosphere substorms (the most intuitive manifestation is the appearance of gorgeous auroras in the polar regions).

Magnetic islands, sawtooth oscillations, and plasma confinement destruction problems in controlled nuclear fusion devices like Tokamaks..

Various deep space astrophysical jets.

Terrifying magnetosphere activities of pulsars / neutron stars.

...

The energy release of Solar Flares, the violent fluctuations of the Earth's magnetosphere.

Auroras.

He once again thought of that red sky on the Wasteland.

Last time, during the last year on the Wasteland.

One night the night sky was not black, but exuded a faint red.

The sparse stars overhead flickered at a frequency and amplitude far more violently than the stars in the Real World in his memory, almost like signal lights beating nonstop under some high-frequency interference.

And further away, near the horizon, some arc-shaped luminous bands that he completely didn't understand would occasionally emerge silently.

The color of that luminous band was pale white with a hint of blue.

At that time he thought it was some kind of atmospheric phenomenon.

But now, looking at the words in the book, Jiang Lin suddenly thought, what if that wasn't an atmospheric phenomenon?

What if it was because the Earth's magnetosphere of the Wasteland World had already experienced some irreversible, fatal anomaly?

What if the Earth's magnetic field lines were frequently breaking and reconnecting, and a large number of high-energy particles were unhinderedly bombarding the top of the atmosphere, thereby triggering that kind of global, permanent aurora?

Jiang Lin's throat felt a bit dry, swallowed a mouthful of saliva, and forced himself to continue reading downwards.

Sweet-Parker Model (independently proposed by Sweet and Parker, and also the earliest magnetic reconnection model.

Basic image: Two plasma regions carrying magnetic fields in opposite directions are mutually squeezed by external pressure, and at the junction of the two, an extremely slender current sheet will be formed.

In this thin layer, magnetic field energy heats the fluid like an electric furnace wire through ohmic dissipation, transforming into thermal energy.

Fatal flaw: This model is very perfect in theory, but the magnetic reconnection rate predicted by it is extremely slow.

Slow to what extent?

Slower than the actual eruption rate of Solar Flares observed in reality by a full 8 to 10 orders of magnitude.

Seeing this, a sentence was annotated in the book: "This serious contradiction between theory and observation is called the reconnection rate paradox, and it is a dark cloud in the space Physics community that has not yet been completely solved by a unified, fundamental theory."

"Sure enough, no matter which world it is, is this kind of phenomenon involving the laws of heaven and earth a cross-century big problem?"

Jiang Lin muttered a sentence, and his gaze continued to devour the subsequent content like a scanner.

Petschek Model (1964): To solve the problem of the rate being too slow, Petschek proposed the fast reconnection model.

He brilliantly introduced a slow shock wave structure outside the current sheet, greatly increasing the rate of plasma inflow and energy ejection.

Problem eruption: In 1986, physicist Biskamp used more advanced computers to conduct high-resolution MHD numerical simulations.

The results cruelly showed that the exquisite slow shock wave structure assumed by Petschek could not spontaneously form at all under the condition of uniform resistivity of the physical system.

Even if artificially set up, it was extremely unstable and would still degenerate and evolve back to that sluggish Sweet-Parker configuration.

There was a lot of introduction afterwards.

In the following decades, physicists proposed Hall reconnection, turbulent reconnection, collisionless reconnection... to fill this theoretical black hole.

Every model was extremely complex, but each also had its harsh scope of applicability and unmaskable flaws.

Jiang Lin took out his phone, opened the browser, and typed magnetic reconnection rate paradox, latest progress into the academic search.

There were many papers popped up, but after reading through the abstracts, the conclusion was obvious.

Still, there was no grand and perfect single model that could once and for all uniformly explain all observed fast magnetic reconnection phenomena in the universe.

Counting from when Sweet and Parker independently proposed their loophole-ridden model to the present in the Real World, the year 2022.

Nearly seventy years.

This problem had been shelved, patched, and stitched together by the smartest brains of mankind for a full seventy years.

He closed the book, leaned his body backward, and leaned somewhat tiredly against the hard bookshelf.

The sky outside the window had already darkened.

He remembered one thing.

The second expedition on the Wasteland for the fifth time, in order to find materials for the wind turbine.

He walked north for about fifty kilometers to an area he later marked as Hill B.

There were some scattered giant metal components, steel wrecks half-buried by wind and sand.

In order to distinguish directions, he took out the compass he carried with him at that time, preparing to calibrate the map.

Just as he approached a huge steel beam obliquely inserted into the ground, a weird thing happened.

The compass pointer, like a drunkard, spun wildly and then pointed stubbornly at that steel beam instead of the north.

Those weathered steel beams carried extremely strong magnetism.

But this wasn't the strangest thing.

The strangest thing was that when he walked along that steel beam holding the compass, the direction of the compass pointer was completely chaotic.

One section pointed south, the next section pointed east, and the magnetic field lines were twisted without any logic.

That was definitely not the weak natural remanent magnetism produced by steel placed in the Earth's magnetic field for a long time, nor could it possibly be artificial magnetization performed by humans using machines.

At that time, Jiang Lin's feeling was that the magnetism on that steel beam was like a chaotic electromagnetic storm, forcibly frozen and sealed inside that piece of metal by some unknown grand force at the exact moment of its explosion's peak.

At that time, limited by his experience, he only felt it was a bit strange and made a note in the observation log: Location B: Discovered strongly magnetic scrap iron, chaotic magnetic poles, and then continued to search for the required materials without thinking much more about it.

Now, having finished reading the description about magnetic field breaking and reconnection, he immediately took out paper and pen to record.

[Wasteland Sky and Magnetic Anomaly Suspicion Checklist (Pending Verification)]

1. The sky continuously exhibits a light red / gray-purple background color.

It cannot be simply attributed to ordinary sunset scattering or local sand and dust pollution, but currently lacks spectrum, particle size distribution, and atmospheric composition data.

It may involve weak ionization of the upper atmosphere, or it may just be the joint action of complex dust scattering and residual aerosols.

2. The flickering amplitude of the stars at night is unusually violent.

It may suggest abnormal refractive index disturbances at high altitudes, but it may also be affected by near-ground heat flow, dust layers, observation positions, and subjective memory.

It is necessary to record repeatedly with fixed star points, fixed time, and fixed direction.

3. Sporadic, bizarrely shaped arc-shaped luminous bands in the northern low altitude.

High-altitude luminous phenomena or aurora-like mechanisms cannot be excluded, but permanent global auroras are currently just high-risk conjectures; one must first record orientation, duration, color, brightness, and whether it is accompanied by magnetic needle anomalies.

4. Abnormal magnetization phenomena exist in some surface metal wrecks, but it is necessary to exclude possibilities such as the material itself, residual current equipment, artificial magnetization, lightning strikes, and local mineral magnetic anomalies.

Commonalities: The above phenomena may all be directly related to the drastic changes in the macroscopic magnetic field structure and the large-scale injection of high-energy charged particle streams.

Jiang Lin's brain was operating at high speed, like an overloaded computer.

If on the Wasteland, the sky continuously exhibits a pale red color, it means that there is a continuous injection of energy throughout the upper atmosphere, maintaining a sustained ionization process.

If the stars flicker so violently, it means that this ionosphere layer is not only active, but also in a state of violent boiling.

If there are permanent luminous bands that defy common sense, it means that the Earth's magnetosphere of that world is continuously interacting crazily with massive charged particle streams from the universe in a tragic manner beyond human cognition.

If that kind of violently magnetized pattern frozen in an instant was left on the metal components, it means that the surface once—or even now—has undergone large-scale local magnetic field structure tearing and restructuring as powerful as pulling rotten weeds.

All these seemingly unrelated Wasteland survival details, at this moment, were strung together by an invisible thread, eventually pointing to the same fact.

The electromagnetic environment of the Wasteland, one of the physical underlying logics of the Wasteland, is completely different from, or even completely collapsed compared to, the Earth that protects mankind in reality.

In his mind, Jiang Lin repeatedly carried out crude collisions and connections between every abstract model read on these old books today and every eerie phenomenon he observed with his naked eyes and life on the Wasteland several times.

Suddenly, a bold guess jumped out from deep within his intuition.

Those electromagnetic anomalies on the Wasteland and the macroscopic magnetic reconnection phenomenon discussed in Physics are very likely manifestations of the same catastrophe-level physical process at different scales.

Behind those four seemingly obscure words, plasma, lay an entire mountain that crushed people.

Not the kind of mountain in high school courses.

Not the kind of mountain like lathes, files, and the Three-Plate Grinding Method.

Rather, one end plunged into the violently erupting surface of the sun, and the other end heavily pressed on the Earth's fragile magnetotail, existing in the most cutting-edge Tokamak fusion devices in laboratories, and extending into the boundless depths of the universe.

Upon thinking of this, Jiang Lin wrote a line of words above it.

[Sixth Wasteland Side Mission Draft: Preliminarily carry out space physical environment diagnosis, find means to monitor magnetosphere anomalies, and initial response to extreme magnetic reconnection phenomena.]

At dusk, Jiangcheng's sky was clean without a shred of impurities.

As he walked down the long granite steps of the library, a non-glaring setting sun was quietly descending along the gaps of the tall buildings on the west side of the campus.

The sky was a soft light blue, and a few sparse clouds were dyed with a warm light golden layer at the edges by the afterglow of the setting sun.

In the distance, a large area of glass curtain walls of the Science Teaching Building neatly reflected the light of the setting sun, golden and extremely regular, like a row of huge and docile monitoring instrument windows, quietly watching the teachers and students shuttling through this peaceful world.

Jiang Lin stood in the middle of the steps, quietly watching this overly normal sky for a while.

Subsequently, he took out his phone from his pocket.

He clicked open the memos and copied the link he recorded in the laboratory in the morning.

The webpage loaded quickly.

[Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition - Registration Entrance]

In his heart, he was very clear that this mathematics competition, even if gathering the smartest brains in the world, would definitely not be able to help him calculate out of thin air the abnormal frequency of the Wasteland sky, nor could it directly answer for him the magnetic reconnection rate paradox that had plagued the Physics community for seventy years.

But he still had to participate.

Because he needed to put a dazzling and clean enough protective shell in the Real World for his increasingly advanced and increasingly difficult-to-explain Physics and engineering intuition.

Click submit.

A spinning loading circle appeared on the screen.

A few seconds later, the page jumped, and a green checkmark popped out.

[Registration successful, please contestants pay attention to the preliminary round time milestones.]