71: Chapter 71 We've reached the foot of the mountain

The fifth spring in the Wasteland.

Here, the so-called spring was really just thirty consecutive days of temperature readings rising outside the Stone House, night time minimum temperatures no longer forcing the observation point battery into the danger zone, and wind turbine no. 2's yaw correction no longer being as sluggish as in midwinter.

The maintenance cycle could be loosened.

But Jiang Lin still needed to act like an ascetic monk with severe OCD, regularly swapping storage cards, changing batteries, inspecting lens covers, clearing windblown sand, and calibrating brackets.

These tasks were utterly boring.

A ten thousand times more boring than being an IT ops guy swapping server hard drives back in the Real World.

But he knew exactly why he had to endure this monotony.

The suspected red band low in the northern sky was simply far too dim.

So dim that on any given night, the images were bound to be mixed with countless false signals.

If you isolated the data from just a single night, not even a deity could tell whether God was winking or if this jerry-rigged setup was throwing a tantrum.

To catch a glimpse of truth in the Wasteland, one could never rely on a single lucky day, but rather on day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out low-value tasks.

Only by piling these boring baseline data high enough to span three or four years could he hope to pan through hundreds or thousands of night logs, like sifting for gold, and filter out a tiny handful of clean samples where every noise source happened to be asleep.

Thus, boredom itself was the infrastructure of scientific research in the Wasteland. And only when the infrastructure was solidified could the study truly open its doors.

By late summer of the fifth year, this almost self-abusive infrastructure building finally bore its first fruit.

On this summer day devoid of cicada chirps, Jiang Lin sat before that graphics workstation, which resembled a black iron monument.

Using a Python script he had coded himself by hand, he ran through all the image and environmental control data accumulated over the past four-plus years.

After setting filter conditions so strict they bordered on psychotic, the massive dataset was chopped down to a pitifully small fraction.

Twenty-seven nights.

Four years, over fourteen hundred days—in the end, only twenty-seven nights were usable.

Yet these twenty-seven nights shared a striking commonality.

The wind speed was low and gentle, the lens cover was spotless, the bracket vibration marker was a dead, flat line, wind turbine no. 2 ran smoothly without triggering dump load protection even once, and the local time baseline error between Point A and Observation Point B had been manually corrected down to the millisecond.

Most importantly, during these twenty-seven clean nights stripped of all terrestrial contamination, the northern low-sky field of view on both cameras captured that faint red bright band.

Jiang Lin tapped the keyboard, tiling the twenty-seven pseudo-color enhanced images across the screen.

Against the pure black background, that thin red bright zone flickered in and out, like a scar this world refused to acknowledge.

It was truly there.

No longer a retinal illusion caused by fatigue, no longer noise floor from the instruments.

Yet Jiang Lin picked up his cup, took a sip of soy milk, and forcefully suppressed his excitement.

Because the mere fact that it was there was, at best, just putting on shoes indoors at the start of a ten-thousand-mile march.

As for the next step: what exactly was it?

Jiang Lin stared at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, and gave a bitter smile.

That step was something he wasn't even qualified to take yet.

Thus, when creating the file archive, he forcefully held back the urge to name it.

In the end, he simply typed an utterly mundane line on the first line of the dataset's README file.

Wasteland Low-Elevation Red Bright Band Dataset V1, Origin Unknown.

He didn't write aurora, airglow, ionospheric anomaly, nor magnetospheric breach.

It wasn't out of modesty, but because taking any one of these terms meant linking back to a whole logically rigorous system of Physics.

If he couldn't push through those physical equations to derive directly why it was red, why it rested low in the sky, and why it exhibited this periodic appearing-and-disappearing nature, then slapping any label on it right now would be acting like a thug toward the universe.

He packaged the files, quietly moved them to the offline database, and neatly wrote down an index code on the paper notebook beside him.

SKY-RED-V1

Then he opened Space Physics.

He had flipped through this textbook many times before.

But the way he browsed it previously was typical utilitarian dictionary-lookup.

When the observation point needed to account for ionospheric refraction, he looked up the chapter on the ionosphere.

When he wanted to evaluate the Wasteland solar wind's interference on radio background noise, he looked up the chapter on solar wind.

This time, however, he dragged the progress bar back to page 0 and began re-reading from the very beginning.

Because that red band, lurking in the dark, was forcing him to re-evaluate what level of monster he was truly facing.

He drew a mind map on paper.

If this red band was merely an atmospheric optical phenomenon, it belonged to atmospheric chemistry and radiative transfer, which was relatively easy to handle.

If it was airglow in the upper atmosphere, then it couldn't be decoupled from ionospheric electron density and recombination rates.

If it was some kind of modified aurora, then things were far more serious; behind it would lay the entire planet's magnetospheric structure, the injection of solar wind particles, and the dynamic processes of charged particles precipitating along magnetic field lines.

If this thing was also related to local geomagnetic disturbances, it would be an even bigger tangled mess.

Jiang Lin looked at the messy arrows on the paper and sighed.

He didn't know which category this red band belonged to.

But he noticed one thing: among all possible explanation paths, the vast majority of ultimate outcomes could not bypass a core course.

Coupling of Magnetic Fields and Plasmas.

Someone who couldn't even explain how magnetic fields moved on this Wasteland lacked the right to pick even one of those explanations.

So the next step was to catch up on fundamentals—first learn how magnetic fields moved.

And describing how magnetic fields moved fell under the jurisdiction of a subject called Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD for short).

Continuity equation, momentum equation, induction equation, Ohm's law, equation of state.

These concepts, which had tormented countless Physics graduate students back in the Real World, had now become the sole guiding lighthouse in the Wasteland.

Jiang Lin erased an old derivation mark near the bottom of the east wall, picked up a pen, and first wrote down the core induction equation of MHD on the wall.

∂B/∂t=∇×(v×B)+ηₘ∇²B

The left side represented the time evolution of the magnetic field.

The first term on the right was the advection term, and the second was the diffusion term.

Next, beneath it, he wrote down the dimensionless number that determined which of these two terms took dominance—the magnetic Reynolds number.

Rm=VL/ηₘ

Jiang Lin looked at this string of dimensional combinations made of magnetic permeability, characteristic scale, characteristic velocity, and resistivity, stepped back two paces, and a flash of insight suddenly struck his mind.

This brute logic of comparing two timescales to see which ran faster was actually very familiar to him on the Wasteland.

The induction equation was asking: is the magnetic field carried along by the plasma flow, or does it stealthily diffuse away on its own?

This was comparing the advection timescale with the diffusion timescale to see which was shorter.

Wasn't this just like when he built the Stone House on the Wasteland?

Was heat slowly conducting inside the stone walls, or was it swept away all at once by the minus-twenty-degree gale outside?

This was comparing thermal conduction time with surface convective heat transfer time.

Look again at wind turbine no. 2 outside.

When the battery finally managed to take in a bit of power, was it stored stably in chemical bonds, or did excessive voltage cause it to be crudely burned off by that pitch-black dump resistor?

This was comparing charging time with the controller's dump load response time.

And then there was that yaw mechanism that had tormented him for over a decade.

Could the nacelle smoothly follow changes in wind direction, or was it dragged down by the damnable dry friction of the bearings, stuck at an awkward angle?

This, again, was comparing the time for aerodynamic torque to do work against the time of frictional hysteresis.

All things operate on the same principle.

All systems—whether plasma flying in the sky or a beat-up wind turbine spinning on the ground—were making brutal choices between different timescales.

Physics textbooks often write that a certain mechanism "dominates".

Jiang Lin understood now: so-called "dominant mechanism" wasn't some scholarly adjective at all; its essence was a single sentence.

In this race of timescales, a certain physical process won, and won decisively.

This was an extraordinarily fascinating transfer of intuition.

The engineering intuition Jiang Lin had honed over the past decades on the Wasteland, amid the wind and sand, and through being repeatedly slammed by mechanical failures, aligned seamlessly for the very first time with those cold, noble partial differential equations in textbooks.

In the sixth year, Jiang Lin's derivation progress reached the most famous concept in MHD theory.

Magnetic Frozen-in Theorem.

Under the assumption of ideal MHD, assuming plasma electrical conductivity approaches infinity—meaning resistivity is zero—the magnetic Reynolds number becomes extremely large.

The diffusion term in the induction equation is directly wiped out, leaving only the advection term.

The derived mathematical picture was unbelievably beautiful.

The magnetic field lines seemed frozen right into the plasma fluid.

However the plasma moved, the magnetic field lines were dragged along with it.

However the magnetic field lines twisted, the plasma flowed right along. The two shared life and death, inseparable.

This picture was so elegant, so beautiful, beautiful enough for many Physics beginners to remember it for a lifetime after their exams.

After Jiang Lin sketched a pile of magnetic field lines twisting alongside fluid elements on the wall, he too was captivated by this concise physical beauty, standing before the wall to admire it for a moment.

Yet after finishing a cup of cold herbal tea, the appreciation on his face faded.

Turning around, he looked at the dataset named SKY-RED-V1 on the screen and asked himself an extremely sharp question.

If magnetic field lines are truly frozen perfectly into the plasma, does that mean the red band I spent years braving sandstorms to pursue is nothing more than a meaningless joke?

Why?

Because the logic was simple.

If the appearance of the red band was related to magnetic disturbances, and magnetic disturbances could only move passively like a marionette tied to plasma, then at best, this red band was merely drawing a trajectory map of plasma flow across the sky.

It did nothing by itself and released no energy sufficient to light up the night sky.

Yet the observational data from those twenty-seven nights told him loud and clear that the red band was not a static drawn line.

It was present sometimes, absent at others.

Its brightness fluctuated within an extremely subtle range, and its location across different nights shifted slightly—a drift so slight it was almost swallowed by error margins.

These changes in themselves still could not prove that magnetic frozen-in condition failed.

They could stem from upper atmosphere density changes, line-of-sight integration path variations, particle precipitation flux shifts, or simply observational residuals he had not fully eliminated.

However, if one day the red band were proven to be linked to energy releases in high-altitude plasma, the issue would pivot back to the boundaries of the magnetic frozen-in condition.

Where does the magnetic field structure cease to be dragged completely by the fluid?

Which small region allows topological changes?

Through what mechanism is energy transferred from the magnetic field to particles?

This was what Jiang Lin truly needed to pursue.

[Magnetic frozen-in is not a fact; it is merely an approximation.]

[Resistivity is non-zero, scale is finite, boundaries exist.]

[If the red band involves high-altitude plasma energy release, the region where the frozen-in approximation breaks down will be an essential entry point to investigate.]

After writing this sentence, Jiang Lin felt a heavy stone lifted off his chest.

This is engineering!

The manual for wind turbine no. 2 boasted glamorous automatic yaw protection on paper, but upon dismantling it, inside lay brutal life-or-death realities: friction, hysteresis, tail vane torque, spring stiffness, dump load temperature rise, tower vibration.

The low-light all-sky imaging advertised in the observation point manual translated in practice on this Wasteland into lens dust, bracket jitter, time drift, image vignetting, and wind speed flags.

Magnetic field line freezing was of the exact same breed.

Behind its beautiful and elegant mathematical picture, one had to honestly specify when it held true and under what conditions it was torn apart.

And the answers Jiang Lin sought were hidden precisely on the side where it was torn apart.

He turned around and started a new, massive table on another clean section of the stone wall.

[MHD Applicability Boundary Self-Check Table: Model Assumptions / Ignored Physical Terms / Observables Required for Proof / Current Wasteland Availability]

He wrote line by line.

Isotropic pressure?

Ignored viscous tensor?

Ignored displacement current?

With every line he wrote, he filled in the status in the final column.

For the vast majority of lines, the final column held a despairing conclusion.

Unavailable, partially available, severely lacking key parameters, can only do order-of-magnitude estimations with one's toes.

When this table was filled, it looked like a diagnostic report pronouncing a death sentence on Wasteland research.

Yet Jiang Lin actually laughed.

Because this ugly table was honest, telling him an ironclad rule: if you don't know where the applicability boundary of a model lies, don't blindly use partial differential equations.

In the winter of the sixth year, the cruelty of the Wasteland taught Jiang Lin another lesson on boundaries.

After a blizzard-sandstorm raged continuously for twenty hours, something went wrong with the bracket at Observation Point B.

It wasn't blown over, but rather the ground anchor experienced a slight slippage in the frozen sand-soil layer.

The azimuth angle shifted by merely 1.4 degrees.

It was precisely this 1.4 degrees that rendered the red band comparative data captured over five consecutive nights following the sandstorm completely useless.

Jiang Lin felt no heartache.

Scrapped data itself wasn't frightening; it was a daily occurrence on the Wasteland.

What was truly terrifying?

It was that the bracket shifted by 1.4 degrees while he, as an observer, remained oblivious, comfortably running partial differential equations with this pile of garbage data.

Thinking he was measuring the depth of the sky, when in reality he was merely measuring the tilt of his own bracket.

Without hesitation, he dragged those few gigabytes of image data into a folder named Polluted_Trash.

Then, slinging his toolbox over his shoulder, he braved the sub-zero freezing temperatures to re-tamp the ground around the base of Observation Point B, hanging two twenty-kilogram wind-eroded rocks as counterweights.

Returning to the Stone House, the very first thing he did was walk up to that MHD Applicability Boundary Self-Check Table, pick up his pen, and heavily circle the words "boundary conditions".

Boundary conditions were never a mere appendage to the governing equation.

This was true for ground-based observation stations, and equally true for differential equations written on walls.

If boundary conditions were wrong from the start, the more precise your subsequent derivations and the more elegant your code, the more convincingly wrong the result would look.

By the seventh year, Jiang Lin's desk work was no longer limited to hand-deriving formulas.

To answer that specific question itching increasingly in his mind—how magnetic diffusion and advection tore into each other and raced against each other in those equation dynamics on the wall—

he decided to boot up the graphics workstation and begin running simple numerical experiments.

The human brain cannot visualize the dynamic evolution of partial differential equations in a two-dimensional grid.

He had to see it with his own eyes.

Only by seeing it could he build up the intuition to judge, when facing real observation signals in the future, which spatial-temporal scale anomalies might be the handiwork of which process.

In a Linux environment, he hand-coded a minimalist 2D magnetic diffusion and advection solver program using C++.

The code was a few hundred lines at most.

It used the roughest uniform mesh, paired with the simplest periodic boundary conditions, and time stepping utilized a conservative explicit Euler method.

The first version of the code compiled successfully and ran.

[part:gemini-3.5-flash-lite]

A visual dynamic window popped up on the screen.

Jiang Lin set the initial field to a clustered magnetic flux.

As the time steps progressed, under the entrainment of the convection velocity field, the magnetic field lines slowly began to bend and stretch, while displaying natural diffusion vignettes at the edges due to the resistivity setting.

The image was full of motion, smooth in color, and simply as beautiful as a work of art.

Jiang Lin stared at the screen for a full ten seconds.

Ten seconds later, he expressionlessly pressed Ctrl + C and killed the process directly.

In the picture, the originally smoothly transitioned magnetic field structure changed.

The diffused edges became unusually sharp.

He changed the boundary conditions again, altering the periodic boundary on the right to an open outflow boundary.

In the picture, the magnetic field lines that had originally hovered stably within the region completely collapsed in shape, like a deflating balloon.

Finally, he slightly increased the numerical dissipation in the code.

The running result was even more ridiculous; the stable physical structure that originally looked like it could maintain tens of thousands of steps instantly blurred into a pot of spilled mosaic porridge.

Jiang Lin leaned against the stool, looking at this pile of self-deceiving pixels on the screen, feeling an inexplicable sense of absurdity.

This suddenly made him feel that this expensive workstation was actually playing another form of wind and sand on this Wasteland.

The physical wind and sand outside would leave physical dust on his all-sky lens, blocking the starlight.

Meanwhile, the numerical dissipation and truncation errors in the workstation would leave behind the wreckage of fake Physics in his simulated world, distorting the truth.

What the wind and sand wore away were the sharp corners of the mechanical surface, while what numerical differentiation wore away was the true physical structure.

If he, as a coder, couldn't even see which line of his program was lying and which step was cheating, how could he dare take this pile of colorful animations to verify any of his guesses about the red band of the Wasteland?

Jiang Lin opened the source file of the code, and heavily typed a line of words in the topmost comment section:

"// WARNING: Numerical images are definitely not physical evidence, they are just a heartless machine responsible for drawing out those stupid assumptions in your head."

After typing, he took a pen and copied this sentence onto a yellowed sticky note, slapping it on the lower frame of the monitor.

From this day on, Jiang Lin adopted a cruel interrogation attitude toward his simulation program, just like he treated the outdoor Wasteland observation equipment.

Every time an item was added, errors must be verified.

Every time a difference scheme was changed, conservation must be checked.

Code that did not undergo torture-like interrogation would never deserve to be a link in the evidence chain of his pursuit of the red band.

In the summer of the eighth year, the night sky of the Wasteland was exceptionally clean.

And Jiang Lin's "Red Band Dataset" finally ushered in the iteration from V1 to V2.

Version 1 took four years to prove that the red band existed.

For version 2, the goal Jiang Lin set for himself was much more ambitious.

It had to answer where the red band was and how big it was.

This was a hardcore geometric proposition.

If the red band was always only captured by Point A and Point B, two fixed camera positions no more than a hundred meters apart, then under strict scientific scrutiny, it could never clear its suspicion.

It was entirely possible that it was just the scattering of some local light source near the Stone House, or reflective dust kicked up by a specific terrain, or even some collective background fluctuation of these two batches of cameras from the same batch.

To nail the red band down into the true coordinate system of the sky in court, he needed at least three observation perspectives that were extremely spatially separated to perform trigonometric parallax measurements.

Point A and Point B had been solidly staked for three years.

For this third perspective, Jiang Lin could no longer build a permanent base station.

For one thing, cables could not be pulled over; for another, he didn't have that many backup batteries to sustain life in the cold winter.

His only choice was to draw out a manual mobile observation line.

The rules were primitive and tormenting.

Every ten to half a month, taking advantage of good weather, he had to carry a backup all-sky camera, a simple magnetometer probe homemade from a tin can box, plus a heavy emergency battery, and walk to different wilderness coordinate points a few kilometers away to conduct short-night observations where he would shoot and move.

With this approach, the data quality was extremely terrible, and the maintenance cost was maxed out, but this was the triangulation network Jiang Lin could hand-craft on this dilapidated Wasteland.

During that time, Jiang Lin plunged deep into the wilderness almost every week.

The topography of this Wasteland had been measured countless times with the soles of his feet in his previous beginnings.

Where there were quicksand pits, where there were hidden thorns of weathered rocks, he could figure them out with his eyes closed.

But every time he went out, he was still like a recruit about to go to the battlefield, filling his emergency water bottle, warming the backup batteries close to his body, checking the bandages in the first aid kit, and pulling down his face mask and wind-proof goggles.

Camera plus magnetometer plus battery, the whole set of odds and ends actually added up to less than ten kilograms.

But on the Wasteland, these ten kilograms could crush a person.

Walking to suitable open highlands two or three kilometers away, setting up the tripod, leveling, determining true north, recording startup metadata, and then wrapping in a cold-proof blanket to guard bitterly all night in the sub-zero teenage winds.

Waiting for the first ray of dim light to light up the next morning, then dragging his frozen body to dismantle the equipment, and walking back to the Stone House carrying the ten-kilogram ice lump.

The whole process took nearly twenty-four hours.

When walking this mobile observation line for the third time, something happened.

On the way back, it was just getting light, and visibility was at its worst.

Jiang Lin stepped into thin air and fell into a hidden cave beneath the weathered layer.

Even though the exoskeleton leg armor instantly locked and shared most of the falling momentum, his right ankle still made a muffled sound and sent a sharp pain.

Jiang Lin lay prone on the gravel beach, cold sweat instantly soaking his close-fitting thermal underwear.

He didn't shout.

Shouting on this wilderness had no meaning at all.

He could only grit his teeth, limping, and spent three times the usual time dragging himself back to the Stone House.

Sitting on the edge of the stone bed, he unlaced his boots, and his ankle was swollen like a steamed bun.

After that, he expressionlessly added an unbreakable ironclad rule under the operational code of conduct for the mobile observation line in the system log.

"Prohibited items: The frequency of mobile observations must not exceed twice a month, and the single straight-line distance must not exceed three kilometers."

The red band had floated in the sky for who knows how many years, and it could wait.

If he broke his leg in a sand pit three kilometers away, the Outpost on this Wasteland would completely become a swan song, and no second person would come to take over from him to pull out the SD card.

In the half-year after his injury healed, Jiang Lin restrained his desires and strictly enforced the bottom line of twice a month.

The core results of the V2 dataset finally slowly surfaced in this extremely restrained rhythm.

The miracle did not lie in how advanced the new equipment was, but in the suffocating alignment of multi-point angles.

On a few extremely pure autumn nights, Point A and Point B of the Stone House base captured the red band at the same time.

Meanwhile, on a temporary highland two and a half kilometers away, the frosting-covered backup camera also captured that touch of dark red in the corresponding pixel region at the same time.

Jiang Lin imported the three photos from different geographical coordinates and completely different camera directions into the workstation.

He first calibrated the lens distortion, then entered the coordinates of the three locations, the north-finding error, the timestamp deviation, and the edge vignette parameters of the low-elevation area.

The script ran three times.

Every time, he relaxed and then tightened the allowable error to see if the directional bundle corresponding to the red band would completely disperse.

The result was not pretty.

It did not give a precise three-dimensional coordinate that could be written into the paper abstract.

The red band was too diffuse, the low-elevation distortion was too heavy, and the edge area of the fisheye lens did not allow him to pretend that he possessed satellite-level positioning capabilities.

But the three sets of directional beams did not fight each other.

What Point A, Point B, and the mobile point saw did not look like isolated ghost images created by three cameras respectively, but more like a continuous structure in the same northern low-altitude direction.

That was enough.

But it was already enough for Jiang Lin to write in the V2 report:

"The probability of the red band being a non-single-point instrument artifact has significantly decreased."

"The red band possesses the characteristics of spatial extension phenomena."

"Cause unknown."

That night, the wind was unusually small.

The three fiberglass blades of wind turbine no. 2 slowly cut through the air in the night, with almost no wind noise heard.

Jiang Lin sat in front of the stone table.

On his left hand side was a three-point joint observation image that was enough to keep a Space Physics graduate student awake at night in peacetime.

On his right hand side was a draft filled with a whole book of MHD partial differential equation derivations written by him.

And between them was a clean sheet of white paper.

Jiang Lin picked up a pen and wrote a sentence in the exact center of the white paper.

"Data can never stand up by itself to become a theory, and theory is absolutely impossible to speak for silenced data."

He raised his head and looked at the deep Wasteland night sky outside the window.

Over these eight years, his greatest progress was not how many Physics textbooks he had chewed through, not how many tens of thousands of lines of numerical simulation code he had typed out, and even less the hundreds of gigabytes of night sky images hoarded in the SD card.

His true transformation was that he finally learned to wait in this barrenness.

Wait.

Seeing the red band image appear, he was not in a hurry to explain it.

Running out a pretty numerical image, he was not in a hurry to believe it.

Deriving an elegant approximate equation, he was not in a hurry to worship it.

It wasn't that he didn't want to know the answer earlier.

Rather, the wind and sand of these eight years told him that before the evidence chain was closed-loop, eagerly jumping to conclusions meant that he was beginning to lie to himself in loneliness.

And a researcher who was used to lying to himself was the most useless on this Wasteland.

In the deep winter of the eighth year, the stove fire was burning vigorously.

Jiang Lin spread out paper and pen, and began to write the stage grand summary of these past few years.

[Space Physics and MHD Stage Summary]

The objective spatial extensibility of the red band has been confirmed, but the cause remains a mystery.

The MHD framework is sufficient to build a mathematical language to describe this monster.

The magnetic freezing theorem of ideal MHD is only a fragile approximation, not the truth of the universe.

Pain point: Ground observations in the Wasteland extremely lack key plasma parameters of the upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere.

The key breakthrough entrance for the next stage: Magnetic Reconnection.

Prerequisite task: Must manually derive the classical model from scratch.

Why did he suddenly point his spearhead at magnetic reconnection at this node?

Because as he pursued the questioning all the way to this step, the encirclement of the problem had sharply narrowed.

If the luminescence of the red band was eventually proved to be related to plasma processes, then what he needed to question most was under what conditions the magnetic freezing approximation failed.

Failure did not automatically equal catastrophe.

It only meant that the magnetic field topology had the opportunity to be rewritten.

Only when this rewriting occurred on a sufficiently large scale, connected to a sufficiently strong magnetic energy reserve, and could effectively transfer energy to particles, could it participate in a considerable luminous process.

This road was very long.

But in the MHD framework, the most classical, core entry point for studying magnetic freezing failure repeatedly dissected by generations of physicists was called magnetic reconnection.

After writing the last line of the report, Jiang Lin opened the electronic version of "Plasma Physics" in the workstation, and heavily circled the starting page number of the chapter on Magnetic Reconnection in the table of contents with a red circle.

He walked to the wall, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote the three large characters "Magnetic Reconnection" at the highest point.

Immediately afterwards, he followed it up below with a soul-searching interrogation.

"If magnetic field lines are like being frozen and refuse to break easily, then by what on earth do they reconnect together?"

Next to this question mark, with a slightly respectful stroke, he wrote down a hyphenated name recorded in history.

Sweet-Parker.

In the winter of the ninth year, the east wall of the Stone House welcomed a massive cleanup.

Using a homemade scraper, Jiang Lin scraped clean the black ash at the very bottom of the wall that recorded the old formulas, revealing the mottled stone base.

In that cleared space, he drew an extremely exaggerated geometric figure with chalk.

A long and thin rectangular area.

On both sides of this long rectangle, he drew magnetic field lines with completely opposite directions and thick arrows.

In the exact center of this rectangle, he drew an extremely narrow channel and labeled it with four words: Current Sheet.

Current Sheet.

On the left side of the diagram, he wrote: "Sweet-Parker Model (1957)."

On the right side of the diagram, he wrote: "Wasteland Year 9, re-derived."

Why start stubbornly tackling this antique-level model?

Because in the entire research chronicle of magnetic reconnection, Sweet-Parker was the epoch-making first quantitative mathematical model.

Before 1957, the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic field lines in the minds of physicists was at best a vague philosophical intuition.

Sweet and Parker successively provided the slow reconnection framework later jointly called the Sweet-Parker Model.

"If you believe that magnetic reconnection really exists, then you Physics folks must honestly calculate for me how fast it actually is."

In all top papers discussing magnetic reconnection over the next half century, whether Petschek's shock wave model, Hall reconnection considering the Hall effect, fragmented Plasmoid instability, or chaotic turbulent reconnection, their starting moves were all conversing across space with this ancestor's baseline answer of Sweet-Parker.

Understanding it was getting the basic admission ticket to enter this field.

Jiang Lin didn't want to consume those second-hand textbooks simplified by later generations.

He wanted to derive it authentically by himself, even if he cracked his head and bled, he wanted to clearly feel where this great model was painfully struggling back then.

However, writing up to this point, Jiang Lin did not immediately bury his head in deriving formulas like an impatient student.

Instead, he threw away the chalk, put on heavy cold-proof clothing, pushed open the heavy wooden door of the Stone House, and went to inspect wind turbine no. 2.

In the winter Wasteland, the wind was as hard as a razor blade, scraping painfully on the face.

The sky presented a morbid grayish-red color.

wind turbine no. 2 was rotating its blades unhurriedly under this bleak sky.

Jiang Lin noticed that its tail rudder was slightly deflected by an angle.

Its yaw action was no longer as nimble and agile as pointing wherever it wanted when it was first installed, but fortunately it didn't have the terminally ill sluggishness and jamming of that old wind turbine back then.

Routinely squatting down, he checked that the large nuts at the tower base were not loose, and tested the temperature of the yaw bearing shell with the back of his hand; there was no abnormal heating.

He looked up at the dumping resistor hanging on the outside of the stone wall.

He then turned to the observation point area.

A thin layer of frost dust had fallen on the all-sky lens cover of Point A, which needed to be carefully wiped.

The multimeter in the power supply box of Point B showed that last night's low temperature pushed the voltage of that old battery to the edge of the safety line, and it must be removed and replaced tomorrow.

Did these trivial matters rolling around in the wind and sand have a dime's relationship with those noble magnetic reconnection partial differential equations on the wall?

The relationship was actually very big.

Jiang Lin thought while wiping the lens.

If the inverter lost power tonight, the workstation in his room would crash directly, and the derivations all over the wall would be done in vain in the dark.

If while he was stubbornly tackling equations in the room, Observation Point B died because of this broken battery, thereby missing the all-night red band that might flash in the sky, then the suffering he endured on the Wasteland these nine years would all become a joke.

Theoretical Physics was never castles in the air divorced from engineering.

It was like a picky emperor, barely putting on airs only by sitting on the engineering shoulders of that pile of grease, screws, and wires.

Late at night, the fire in the hearth made a subtle crackling sound.

Jiang Lin sat back down in front of the wall, took a deep breath, and began to re-derive the Sweet-Parker.

He drew the inflow region on the wall, where the plasma on both sides, carrying magnetic fields of opposite directions, slowly pressed and approached the narrow current sheet in the middle like two armies.

He then drew the outflow region. After reconnection occurred at the center, the plasma spewed out wildly from the extremely narrow ends of the current sheet like squeezed toothpaste at a high speed close to the Alfvén speed.

First, write down conservation of mass.

L * Vin = δ * Vout

Next, write down the equilibrium condition for magnetic field diffusion and convection.

During the first derivation, halfway through, Jiang Lin frowned and wiped it off directly with a rag.

He found that he had been too casual when setting the boundary conditions.

He treated the thickness of the central diffusion region like a cheating game of working backward to match the final answer in the textbook.

If he allowed himself to do this, what he derived would only be exam answers, not his own Physics intuition.

This stuff could get a full score on an exam, but in the Wasteland when facing that unknown red band, the paper was too stiff even for wiping one's ass.

The second time, he honestly started a head-to-head comparison from the time scale of resistive diffusion and the time scale of fluid inflow.

But after writing half the wall, he found that he was still suspected of taking shortcuts regarding the order-of-magnitude relationship between the macroscopic length scale L and the microscopic thickness.

For the third time, Jiang Lin stopped writing formulas, just crossed his arms, and stared fixedly at the crude geometric diagram on the wall.

Long, thin, extremely narrow channels.

The massive fluid on both sides squeezed in slowly, but could only spray out from the tiny openings at both ends.

He stared at the current sheet drawn like a noodle. As he looked, his gaze became a bit trance-like, and suddenly, without warning, the old wind turbine that was tortured to its last breath during the fifth Wasteland apocalypse popped into his mind.

The yaw bearing of that broken wind turbine suffered from severe dry friction because it lacked oil and was mixed with sand.

Back then, when the wind direction suddenly changed, it also struggled desperately like this.

It wasn't that it didn't want to turn.

The fierce wind pushed it from the front, the tail rudder pulled it desperately from the back, and the mechanical structure was originally designed to rotate smoothly.

But what was reality?

The local stress high points protruded, the oil film completely ruptured, the preload redistributed due to thermal expansion and contraction, and the gaps of the worm gear were filled with iron filings.

These factors superimposed together, turning into a rule of Physics, coldly saying to the wind turbine, "You can only turn this slowly."

"You can only be sluggish in such pain."

"You can only get stuck tightly at an awkward angle, and then barely return to center with a sick posture bordering on convulsion."

Slowness was not the wind turbine being lazy.

Slowness was because its physical contact structure had been sentenced to death under the environment at that time.

At this thought, Jiang Lin shuddered all over.

He suddenly realized that the slowness of this Sweet-Parker Model on the wall, which gave countless Physicists a headache, was most likely the same kind of slowness as that old wind turbine.

It was not that the mathematical calculations were wrong, nor that any term in the Physics equations was being lazy.

Rather, the initial preset geometric shape of this model—the long, thin, and narrow current sheet itself—physically locked the channel through which the plasma could escape quickly on a large scale.

The massive magnetic flux wanted to come in for reconnection, but could only discharge through such a narrow gap, just like a large reservoir with only a water-pipe-sized floodgate open.

How could it possibly be fast?

Jiang Lin suddenly grabbed his pen, turned around, and wrote furiously on the wall like a flying dragon and a dancing snake.

Inflow velocity, outflow velocity, macroscopic length of the current sheet, microscopic thickness of the diffusion region, and the Lundquist number characterizing plasma conductivity.

Various dimensions combined rapidly on the wall.

When the last line—the famous formula representing the reconnection rate scaling law—was heavily hammered onto the wall by him:

Msp = Vin / VA ~ 1 / sqrt ( S )

The fire in the corner of the Stone House popped a bright spark right on cue.

Jiang Lin was not startled by the spark.

He stood stiffly in front of the wall, looking at the square root inverse representing infinite slowness, and remained motionless for a long time.

Too slow.

Despairingly slow.

Under the extremely high Lundquist numbers of billions typical of Solar Flares or cosmic celestial plasma, if the data were substituted into this Sweet-Parker formula, the calculated reconnection speed was so slow it was practically like slapping a Solar Flare in the face.

If a Solar Flare really could only rely on the structure drawn on the wall to release energy, its eruption shouldn't look like a destructive nuclear explosion, but rather like a piece of rotten iron thrown into the rain rusting and spreading bit by bit, leisurely, taking months or even years to finish releasing its energy.

But human observation instruments were not blind.

The eruption of a Solar Flare happened in just a few minutes, the energy dumping of a geomagnetic substorm was also instantaneous, not to mention the confined plasmas in laboratories, whose rupture times for rapid energy release were breathtakingly short.

The cruel observations of the Real World were pressing the exact same question toward this wall:

"Why is reality so much faster than what you calculated?"

This question was countless times sharper than holding a textbook and asking whether Sweet-Parker was calculated incorrectly.

Because Jiang Lin had just derived it with his own hands, and he knew better than anyone.

Sweet-Parker did not take even half a step wrong in its mathematical derivation.

Its despairingly sluggish conclusion was forced out by its long and thin geometric premise with a gun pressed against its forehead.

Therefore, the conclusion was not wrong.

What was wrong, and what must be broken through, could only be those seemingly taken-for-granted premises.

Either the current sheet could by no means have this long-noodle geometric shape.

Or the plasma resistivity was not a constant at all on a microscopic scale.

Or the outflow conditions at both ends were overly simplified.

Or, the lowest-level single-fluid assumption masked the complex particle motion.

Jiang Lin's mind suddenly cleared up.

He understood.

In the decades of magnetic reconnection research history that followed, every broken-through premise stubbornly grew a new branch of school out of a Wasteland.

Shortening the geometry gave rise to the Petschek Model.

Breaking the single-fluid assumption and calculating electrons and ions separately led to Hall reconnection.

When the long current sheet could not stabilize itself and shattered into pieces, the Plasmoid instability model emerged.

Finding energy dissipation in chaos resulted in turbulent reconnection.

The academic landscape of the entire Space Physics field was stubbornly forced out by the suffocating limitations of Sweet-Parker itself.

Jiang Lin walked to the very bottom of the wall, used all his strength, and added an extremely crude but soul-striking conclusion:

"The slowness of Sweet-Parker is not due to a miscalculation; its geometric structure inherently allows it to be only this slow."

During the remaining days of the ninth year, Jiang Lin, like a monk obsessed to the point of madness, reorganized and recopied the Sweet-Parker derivation manuscripts into three full versions.

The first version was an emotionless, rigorously extreme mathematical derivation process.

The second version was his physical geometric image intuition translated from his wilderness maintenance experience.

The third version was a warning written to his future self who might fall into confusion.

"Never treat a model that calculates slowly as a failed model."

"What fails is only that it cannot explain all of reality."

"Yet it magnificently articulates an iron law."

"Under what kind of terrible conditions a physical system is bound to be unable to run fast."

These three versions of notes stained with toner and machine oil were pinned together and solemnly placed on the top layer of the Stone House data shelf.

A marker pen wrote a serial number: MR-SP-01 (Magnetic Reconnection Research Archive, Volume 1).

Why go to such great lengths to create this archive numbering system?

Because Jiang Lin knew in his heart that the literature and derivations he was going to dig up next would be numerous enough to flood this small Stone House.

If he didn't nail down the archive slots belonging to each school and model right from the beginning, in half a year, he would definitely get completely lost in a pile of self-contradictory waste paper, to the point of schizophrenia.

The blood-and-tear lessons from making metadata systems for wind turbines and observation points in the previous few years had long carved a sentence into his bones.

The cost of recording at the time, no matter how great, was always smaller than the cost of despairing recollections afterward.

When the spring of the tenth year arrived, the second volume was opened on Jiang Lin's desk.

The Petschek Model.

If watching the derivation of Sweet-Parker felt like a tightly crushed throat where even breathing felt suffocating,

then when Jiang Lin drew the Petschek geometric image on the wall, it felt like a sword suddenly clanging out of its scabbard in the darkness.

X-type reconnection points, extremely shortened diffusion regions, open outflow channels suddenly expanding to both sides, plus that physical component that was practically a stroke of divine inspiration.

Slow-mode shocks.

Under Petschek's pen, the release of massive magnetic energy was no longer blocked tightly by that long and narrow current sheet.

As the plasma passed through four outward-expanding slow-mode shock fronts, a massive amount of magnetic field energy was instantly converted into kinetic and thermal energy of the fluid.

The image derived from this theory was so crisp and violent, and so breathtakingly beautiful that it made one tremble all over, producing a pure physiological pleasure.

Perfect as if it were the final answer.

But Jiang Lin forcibly suppressed this blood-boiling sense of pleasure.

He didn't let it last for more than an hour.

Ten years of Wasteland survival, countless experiences of being slapped in the face by harsh weather and suddenly dying mechanical components, had long worn his trust in such glossy, perfect solutions thinner than paper.

He flipped past Petschek's elegant derivation formulas and looked straight at the academic debate section spanning decades at the back of the paper.

Sure enough, rivers of blood.

Peers were all asking: "The core that maintains this rapid energy release, the local anomalous resistivity, how on earth is it generated microscopically?"

They were also asking: "Do those boundary conditions you set really exist in the vast and boundless real space plasma?"

Some people even ran face-slapping results using supercomputers.

Under simple uniform resistive MHD conditions, Petschek's flashy and swaggering X-type structure could not stand up at all; as it ran, it would despairingly degenerate back into Sweet-Parker's drag-dragging long-noodle current sheet.

The beautiful physical image began to crack under rigorous questioning.

The cracks were small at first, but enough to make Jiang Lin, leaning against the back of his chair, abruptly straighten up.

Watching these cruel peer infighting and numerical simulation backstabbing, Jiang Lin did not feel even a shred of disappointment.

On the contrary, the corners of his mouth curled into an arc.

"This is more like a real Physics world!"

In this world, no divine model ever dared to swagger out and say: "Shut up, I am the ultimate truth answer."

The true history of scientific research was by no means the straight red line drawn in textbooks going from one victory to another.

It was a gang-fight scene where a bunch of flawed models blamed each other in the mud, bit each other, patched each other's loopholes with duct tape, and finally constrained each other's applicable boundaries.

Jiang Lin closed the materials with satisfaction and shoved the second thick archive volume into the data shelf.

MR-PK-02.

He made a heavy note on the gray cover:

"Petschek's sword is sharp, but what it gives is by no means a textbook-like final answer."

"At best, it is merely a seductive proposition put forward to nature, yet repeatedly beaten and challenged."

In the summer of the tenth year, just as Jiang Lin was deeply mired in theoretical melee, the mobile observation line sent exhilarating news.

At temporary camping point no. 3, in the dead of a bitterly cold night, he captured the clearest low-altitude red band ever recorded.

The red light even left a faint halo on the unenhanced original image.

Almost simultaneously, point A and Observation Point B left behind at the base also captured it synchronously.

The angular triangulation relationship of the three points was tidier than ever before.

Three lines of sight, like three sharp swords, pinned down a Physics coordinate system deep in the northern night sky.

If this had happened four or five years ago, Jiang Lin would definitely have regarded it as the most significant historical breakthrough since the Outpost was established, and might even have opened a can of meat preserved for three years to celebrate.

But today, looking at these three photos, the expression on his face was calmer than the rocks outside the Stone House.

He simply followed convention and created a folder for this set of data, categorizing it under: SKY-RED-V2-clean-strong.

Clean (clean, unpolluted), Strong (extremely strong signal), but in the bottom column Explanation (Physics explanation), he still left it blank.

Empty.

Jiang Lin knew very well why he was so calm now.

Three years ago, he had not yet established the rigorous Physics framework of MHD in his mind.

If he had seen such strong spatial anomaly evidence back then, he would have acted like a vagrant who struck treasure, frantically flipping through textbooks on "Aurora Physics" or "Atmospheric Optics", desperately trying to cram this red band into the explanatory framework of some ready-made term.

But now?

After witnessing the half-century-long tragic slaughter among magnetic reconnection models, Jiang Lin completely understood.

Cramming a phenomenon into a term was not called a Physics explanation.

Before he, Jiang Lin, had sorted out and figured out the physical mechanism on the side of magnetic field freeze-out failure and how microscopic energy was macroscopically released, any high-sounding hat he clapped onto the red band right now was merely using elegant colors to whitewash the core of his own ignorance.

That night, Jiang Lin looked at the three-point combined image over and over again, as if wanting to carve every inch of its pixels into his retina.

Then he lowered his head and continued to hard-crunch Petschek's revised notes.

That silent red band in the sky would wait for him.

In the eleventh year, Jiang Lin finally removed his gaze from the macroscopic fluid equations and began to poke his head into the abyss beneath the gorgeous cloak of single-fluid MHD.

Why look down?

Because the crack split open in the Petschek Model was like a slap from the netherworld, fiercely jolting him awake.

The single-fluid MHD theory, which was extremely useful for describing macroscopic fluids, might fundamentally fall short when attempting to describe that tiny yet critical rupture region at the center of magnetic reconnection that determined global energy conversion.

When Jiang Lin first saw terms like decoupling of electrons and ions on a small scale in the materials, he sat silent in front of his workbench like a stone statue for a full two hours.

The underlying logic of single-fluid MHD was to roughly knead the negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions in the plasma together, treating them as a monolithic fluid without internal conflicts for calculation.

This approach was fantastic: macroscopic, clean, and mathematically easy to derive.

But in the real microscopic world, how could nature possibly have such a good temper?

When entering those extremely small characteristic scales, such as the ion inertial length, because the ions are too heavy, they react sluggishly like clumsy trucks and begin to break free from the constraints of the magnetic field lines.

Meanwhile, the lightweight electrons, like agile motorcycles, still run along with the magnetic field.

A single fluid that originally lived and died together is torn apart here.

They no longer act in lockstep like the same person.

This microscopic velocity difference directly rips out a strong Hall electric field in that invisible place.

Hall effect, electron diffusion region, collisionless dissipation.

Looking at these unfamiliar yet murderous Physics terms, Jiang Lin felt a slight chill down his spine.

These vocabulary words smashed the filter of the macroscopic model like a heavy blow, making him desperately realize that the core battle that determined whether the red band in the sky glowed and where the magnetic topological fracture actually changed was not on the clearly visible long current sheet in the macroscopic image at all.

It occurs in a scale deeper, thinner, more microscopic, and more like a fog than the current sheet.

That place cannot be grasped by conventional instruments at all.

Jiang Lin had always liked the word system.

He liked to disassemble a mess of things into Physics modules that could be recorded, maintained, and reproduced.

But now, the plasma system in front of him began to experience terrifying stratification across scales.

The macroscopic single-fluid MHD is on the upper layer, and it is not enough.

The two-fluid model is in the middle layer, which seems to be just a transition.

Further down, there are kinetic equations treating every particle as an independent individual, staring at him coldly from the abyss.

Every layer further down brought the Physics laws closer to that bloody truth.

But what was the price?

It was the exponential and explosive growth of the variables in the description equations!

Jiang Lin took a deep breath and stood up from the stool.

Walking over to the largest north wall of the Stone House, he picked up a pen and mercilessly tore down the previous framework to start over.

He redrew a pyramid-shaped "Plasma Physics Hierarchy Chart".

At the top was single-fluid MHD.

The middle disassembled into: Hall MHD and two-fluid theory.

The very base read: collisionless kinetics.

With every downward arrow he drew, Jiang Lin's heart sank by another fraction.

Because he knew too well that for every layer down, the observation data required to verify the theory became more perverted, and his pitiful Wasteland Outpost became more powerless.

In this destroyed world, what did he, Jiang Lin, have?

He had no satellite constellations soaring through the heavens, no sounding rockets capable of penetrating the upper ionosphere, and he could not catch even a single in-situ charged particle on site, knowing nothing about where the boundary of the Earth's magnetosphere currently was or how fiercely the solar wind was blowing.

All he held in his hands were a few magnetometers on the ground, a few old low-illumination cameras, wind speed, temperature, air pressure, and a pile of dead night sky pictures strictly labeled with pollution premises like an old farmer.

This was truly pitifully little.

So pitiful that if taken to the Physics annual meeting in the Real World, it would be considered too shabby even to serve as a poster background board.

But he turned his head and glanced at the folder named SKY-RED-V2 on the screen.

This was still much, much better than when he could only desperately mutter in the dark a few years ago, "I feel like something is wrong with the sky."

He had to accept a cruel reality.

On this Wasteland unsupported by human civilization, as a lonely watcher, what he could see would forever only be the outermost foothills of this towering peak of science.

He might never climb to the summit in his lifetime to touch the faces of those microscopic particles.

But what did that matter?

Surveying and mapping at the foothills were still surveying and mapping.

As long as every piece of data in his hands was as clean, as credible, and as able to withstand the harshest cross-comparisons as those twenty-seven nights, then these seemingly rough ground records would one day become a corner of the puzzle.

It was possible that on some night in the future, through rigorous logic, he could deduce the scenery of the mountain peak that he currently could not see at all.

By the latter half of the eleventh year, Jiang Lin stopped blindly digging downward.

He needed a map, a global roadmap that would keep him from going crazy among the vast sea of literature.

He began to organize the "Panoramic Map of Magnetic Reconnection Research History" on the north wall.

He did not rote-memorize in the order of those disgusting textbook chronicles, but instead arranged formations like a battlefield commander based on what core crises the academic community aimed to solve.

"Front Line 1: Why does the grand unified classical resistive MHD produce such slow reconnection results?"

"——Representative work: Sweet-Parker (The Trapped Behemoth)."

"Front Line 2: Since it is slow, how can we shorten the diffusion region by changing the geometry?"

"——Representative work: Petschek (The Unsheathed Blade)."

"Front Line 3: Why is that blade always blunted in numerical simulations, and why can't the fast structure be maintained?"

"——Focus: Local resistivity settings, boundary condition disputes."

"Front Line 4: At what moment must the macroscopic fluid be abandoned?"

"——Focus: Hall effect, collisionless reconnection, extremely narrow electron diffusion region."

"Front Line 5: What if the long current sheet couldn't take the grievance and shattered itself?"

"——Representative work: Plasmoid instability (The Carnival of Fragmentation)."

"Front Line 6: Does a real three-dimensional system inherently not deserve elegance, only chaos?"

"——Representative work: Turbulent reconnection."

"Front Line 7: How on earth were those lofty theories rubbed against the ground by nature's instruments?"

"——Ultimate exit: The eruption scale of Solar Flares, the instantaneous glow of magnetospheric substorms, the astonishing capture by MMS satellites, and even the tearing modes of tokamak devices in human laboratories."

When these frameworks and dense arrows were fully drawn, this chart had crawled over more than half of the Stone House north wall like ivy.

It didn't look like a step-by-step tree of knowledge at all, but rather resembled a theater-of-war map full of the smoke of gunpowder.

Beside every route where these Physics predecessors charged into battle, Jiang Lin mercilessly marked with a red pen the failed attempts, tragic academic disputes, rigorous applicability boundaries, and unresolved doubts that still bore big question marks to this day.

Standing under the north wall, Jiang Lin stared at this map and let out a long sigh.

He finally understood one thing.

Over the past full decade, his day-in and day-out hard study had not actually achieved the grand goal of finishing learning magnetic reconnection.

This field could never be completely learned, because in actual human civilization, this cosmic-level puzzle had not been thoroughly solved at all.

But his decade of effort was not in vain.

He completed another even more remarkable and painful transformation.

He finally profoundly knew why this field had not been solved.

Knowing which damned stone the problem was stuck on was a ghost gate one had to grit their teeth and wade through before knowing the final answer.

When winter arrived in the twelfth year, the Wasteland acted like it had gone mad, whipping up a violent sandstorm that blew continuously for three days and three nights.

wind turbine no. 2 underwent the ultimate test in that fierce gale.

Its tail rudder desperately deflected and turned sideways, the system continuously triggered wind-shedding protection, and the red light of the dump resistor hanging outside the wall lit up and went out, enduring intermittently for three days.

Until the morning of the third day, the wind gradually subsided.

But when Jiang Lin pushed open the door, he found that the outside was unusually quiet.

That old wind turbine hanging a tattered tail light had completely stopped spinning.

There was no smoke, no fire, and it wasn't because a specific gear had snapped.

Rather, its mechanical skeleton that had stubbornly held on in the Wasteland for more than a decade had fallen apart as a whole after enduring this three-day ravaging.

The blades oscillated limply in the breeze like a bird with broken wings, and that already dry yaw bearing was now tightly jammed and locked at a skewed angle.

The insulation layer of the internal coils of the old generator had completely aged, and its internal resistance had soared to an irremediable point.

Those few remaining storage batteries barely keeping themselves alive were ruthlessly dragged down to zero volts by the reverse leakage at night, just like draining blood.

It was dead.

Jiang Lin did not hold any sappy farewell ceremony for it.

In the Wasteland, a machine was a machine.

Expressionless, he brought over a ladder and dismembered this old companion that had accompanied him through the fifth long year of the Wasteland.

In the system log, he changed its status to a cold one.

"[Retained solely as a mechanical memento and source of emergency disassembly parts]"

He stripped off the few bundles of thick copper wire that could still be used and put away a few bolts that hadn't stripped much.

Finally, he used a wrench to forcefully dismantle the yaw friction pair base that was severely worn with dark brown scars.

This heavy friction pair was brought back to the Stone House by him and placed casually on the stone table.

Spread flat on the table at this moment was that stack of derivation manuscripts regarding the Sweet-Parker Model of magnetic reconnection that he had written three years ago.

On one side was the long current sheet drawn in ink on paper, with narrow and crowded fluid channels, resulting in a shockingly slow geometric configuration for reconnection.

On the other side was this piece of scrap iron stained with oil sludge, deeply engraved with metal galling textures and dry friction surfaces lacking lubrication, resulting in a Physics dead end where the nacelle lagged and failed to return to alignment in the fierce gale.

Looking at these two dead objects that differed by unknown orders of magnitude in spatial scale, Jiang Lin suddenly felt that at this moment, with an extremely absurd tacit understanding, they were roaring the exact same truth at him loudly.

"Structure determines how fast you can run, and boundaries determine whether you live or die."

The reason why the yaw of this old wind turbine became sluggish and eventually jammed was not because any single screw suddenly snapped at all.

It was because over the past full fifteen years, the alternating day-and-night thermal cycle expansion, the omnipresent Wasteland sandstorms, and the drying and aging of the grease—this combination of punches—had imperceptibly rewritten the geometric shape of its friction surface together.

The underlying structure had changed.

Therefore, its response speed to the wind was sentenced to death.

And the reason why the reconnection of the Sweet-Parker Model on paper was as slow as a turtle was not because the plasma in nature was lazy.

It was because in this model, the geometric premise of that long and narrow current sheet was like a giant Physics padlock, completely locking the possibility of rapidly releasing energy outside the door.

These two things, across different scales in the sky and on the ground, told of the exact same bloody Physics intuition.

The speed of velocity was never determined by the simple passage of time.

It was forever determined by the physical structure of the system and the boundary conditions jammed all around.

To understand this piece of nonsense that even an ordinary professor would need a long time to comprehend, Jiang Lin spent a full twelve years on the Wasteland.

Late that night, outside there was only the low hum of wind turbine no. 2 steadily cutting through the air.

Jiang Lin created a document named "Twelfth Year Final Summary" on his computer.

"[Twelfth Year Grand Summary]"

"Sweet-Parker Model: That desperate slowness is blamed on its closed geometric structure."

"Petschek Model: That satisfying speed requires extremely harsh microscopic conditions that are even difficult for nature to satisfy."

"Hall/collisionless/turbulence/magnetic island: Theoretically, they provide underground passages for plasma to escape the slow curse. But sorry, the verification of any of these passages requires microscopic space observation data that my crappy Wasteland station could never possibly possess."

"Other people's numerical simulations: All illusions, must be subjected to harsh interrogation."

"The red band in the Wasteland sky: Direction and spatial extensibility have been initially locked down, but height, scale, and origin remain unexplainable."

Typing up to here, he paused.

At the very end of the document, using bold and underlining, he typed out the sole tactical plan for the next year.

"Starting from the thirteenth year, abandon all secondary textbooks and directly chew downward starting from the original primary papers."

Why make this decision that was close to asking for hardship?

Because over these twelve years he had come to understand that formulas in textbooks were spiritual liquid food that others had already chewed for you, or even forcibly beautified for the sake of teaching logic.

Those various lofty academic reviews were route snapshots filtered for you by big shots standing from their own self-interested standpoints.

Over these long twelve years, like a starving orphan, he greedily fed on the wisdom dregs left by these predecessors, barely establishing his own skeleton.

But what he was going to face head-on next was that damned red band.

It was the blood-soaked battlefield boundary in this field that was still groping in the dark and hadn't been resolved at all.

On that unknown boundary, textbooks would definitely not write a single word.

Review papers wouldn't kindly step forward to do multiple-choice questions for him either.

Only by plunging headfirst into the piles of papers originally published decades ago could he see with his own eyes the unwilling hesitation at the tip of Sweet's pen when he wrote that slow model despised by later generations in 1957.

He could see why Parker had to accept those crude geometric simplifications when building this slow model.

He could see how miserably Petschek's stunning X-shaped structure was spat upon by senior peers at the Physics annual meeting right after it was proposed.

Those most primitive hesitations, compromised simplifications, and crude refutations left in the historical manuscripts were what he was now most hungrily eager to learn.

A long-lost layer of excitement welled up inside Jiang Lin's chest.

Twelve years.

Be that as it may, he had finally arrived at the foot of this giant mountain called Space Physics.