After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

In the second row, a British doctor with a mustache stood up.

He had a dark red silk handkerchief folded in his breast pocket, his chin held high, and his meticulously trimmed mustache twitched twice as the corners of his mouth moved.

That was Williams, the head of cardiac surgery at the Royal Infirmary of London, a notorious conservative who looked down on new technologies that didn't follow the rules, especially since this technology came from an Asian woman.

"absurd."

"This is utterly absurd!" Williams' voice carried the characteristic arrogance of a London accent, he didn't even bother to take the microphone. His gaze swept past the whispering crowd in the front row, piercing straight at Ye Zhen on the stage. "How do you secure that metal mesh? How do you handle the foreign body rejection reaction? Platelets will aggregate on the mesh, forming new blood clots. How do you do anticoagulation? Systemic high-dose administration? You'll just clear the blood vessels, and the patient will die on the operating table from a brain hemorrhage! This isn't treating a disease, it's murder!"

All eyes were on him.

This is a crucial question, and also the biggest pain point for current interventional technologies.

Zhang Guohua's palms were sweaty, and Xu Wenqiang was so nervous that he didn't dare to breathe.

Ye Zhen stood under the spotlight, her face showing no sign of panic. She looked at Williams' face, slightly flushed with excitement, and nodded gently.

"Good question."

Ye Zhen turned around and picked up a piece of white chalk. The blackboard made a crisp "tap tap tap" sound as chalk dust fell. A few seconds later, a complex chemical formula appeared on the blackboard.

That's the molecular structure of rapamycin. At that time, it was just an inconspicuous antifungal drug, lying quietly in a corner of the laboratory. No one knew that it would one day become a golden partner for heart stents.

"Regarding thrombosis and restenosis, what we need to do is not systemic anticoagulation, but localized targeted treatment." Ye Zhen threw away the chalk, dusted off her hands, and said calmly, "The stents of the future will be drug-eluting stents."

She pointed to the molecular formula: "We coat the anti-proliferative drug onto a polymer carrier on the surface of the stent, like painting it. After the stent is implanted, the drug is slowly released locally into the blood vessel wall at a high concentration, but it doesn't enter the systemic circulation. It's like..."

Ye Zhen paused for a moment, her gaze sweeping across the entire scene before finally settling on Williams: "We have stationed a garrison in the veins, only checking posts at the city gates, but not interfering with the lives of the people in the city."

Williams was stunned, his mouth half-open, his two mustaches sticking up comically. He wanted to refute, but Ye Zhen's concept of "local release" was completely beyond his existing cognitive framework, and from a pharmacological logic point of view, he couldn't find any fault with it.

"As for rejection..."

Ye Zhen braced her hands on the edge of the podium, leaning slightly forward. This gesture was extremely imposing; the confidence emanating from her very bones forced the director of the Royal Hospital to take a half-step back.

"That's a fortress that materials science needs to conquer, not a reason for medicine to stop. If we don't do it because we're afraid of rejection, should we abolish cars because we're afraid of car accidents? Should we never touch the sky because we're afraid of plane crashes?"

Her voice wasn't loud, but it had a power to penetrate people's hearts.

"The medical profession is essentially a gamble with death."

Ye Zhen placed her hands on the podium, leaned forward, and exuded a powerful aura, causing the British doctor to unconsciously take a step back.

"However, quack doctors gamble on luck, while we—"

She pointed to her head.

"It's a gamble on knowledge."

These five words, when spoken in German, are powerful and resounding.

The venue was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

After a few seconds of deathly silence.

"Whoosh!"

Someone clapped their hands first, and then, like a flood bursting its banks, applause erupted. The sound was so loud it could have lifted the roof off, mixed with whistles and cheers, completely drowning out Williams, who was still trying to speak.

Hans, sitting in the front row, slammed his notebook down, clapping loudly as he turned to Thomas and yelled, "Did you hear that? That's genius! Coating! God, how could I not have thought of that!"

In the last row of the hall, in the shadows near the corner, sat several young Chinese faces. They wore ill-fitting, cheap suits with worn-out cuffs. They were government-sponsored students who, in this academic circle full of white elites, habitually kept their heads down and walked close to the wall.

But at that moment, they stood up.

A boy wearing thick-rimmed glasses took off his glasses and wiped his face haphazardly with his sleeve, the more he wiped, the more tears streamed down his face. The girl next to him with braided pigtails slapped her palms until they were red and swollen, but she felt no pain. She only felt that the fire that had been simmering in her chest for so long had finally burst forth.

In this medical hall of fame, where Westerners have long monopolized the discourse, in this place where they have to be careful even when they breathe, a Chinese person has finally stepped into the very center of the spotlight, silencing those arrogant foreign experts.

Gu Zheng leaned against the pillar of the side curtain, out of the light. He was dressed casually, his arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

He looked at the radiant woman on the stage.

That's his wife.

The woman who would normally cower under the covers because she was cold, or frown because she didn't want to eat fatty meat, was now like a drawn sword—sharp, dazzling, and so beautiful that it was impossible to look away.

Gu Zheng took the cigarette out of his mouth, twirled it between his fingers, and finally put it back in the cigarette pack. He felt his eyes getting hot and his throat tighten; it was a feeling of joy, but even more so, pride.

This is his wife.

That's fucking awesome.

The lecture ended, but no one wanted to leave.

As soon as Ye Zhen stepped off the podium, she was surrounded by a surging crowd. Those professors and department heads who were usually aloof and high-ranking were now like a group of middle-aged women grabbing discounted vegetables at a market, holding up their notebooks and business cards, desperately trying to squeeze in.

"Hey! Is the polymer carrier for that drug coating polylactic acid or polyglycolic acid?" Hans, using his strength, smashed through the crowd like a bulldozer to the front, his expression almost fanatical. "Siemens is willing to fund a joint laboratory! Whatever equipment you need! Even a particle accelerator, I'll get it for you!"

"Make way! Make way!" A bald man, his tie askew, pushed his way through. He was the R&D director of Philips Healthcare. "Dr. Ye! Our Philips angiography machine is the best! We can provide full sponsorship! And that latest DSA machine, I can arrange for it to be given to your hospital for trial use!"

"Trial use? We'll donate directly!" A representative from General Electric also joined the fray.

Zhang Guohua stood on the outer circle, jostled and pushed around, his shoes trampled several times. But he wasn't annoyed at all; instead, he grinned from ear to ear. In all his life, when had he ever seen anything like this? Before, he had to beg and plead to buy someone else's outdated goods and even have to be subservient to them. Now, these foreign devils were chasing after him, showering him with money and equipment.

Really relieved!

The speech dragged on for over two hours before finally ending. Germany's largest-circulation newspapers, Bild and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, both sent their top reporters, whose flashbulbs turned the venue into a disco.

Early the next morning.

Gu Zheng was awakened by a knock on the door. Xu Wenqiang waved several newspapers in his hand, so excited that he could hardly speak, and he almost tripped over the carpet and fell flat on his face when he rushed into the house.

"Dr. Ye! Commander Gu! Look! It's on the front page!"

Gu Zheng took the newspaper, glanced at it, and chuckled.

It was the front page headline of Bild, an astonishingly large page. In the photo, Ye Zhen, wearing that red cashmere coat, stood on the podium, with a densely packed audience behind her. Although the black and white photo lacked color, her clear, cool eyes stared directly at the camera, carrying a uniquely Eastern mystery and confidence; one could almost feel her aura through the paper.

The title, in bold black font, was particularly sensational: "The Witch from the East! A Scalpel Cuts Through the Arrogance of Western Medicine!"

The subtitle is slightly more serious, but still conveys a sense of shock and naiveté: "The Hand of God? No, she's Ye Zhen!"

"A witch?" Gu Zheng sat on the sofa, shaking the newspaper loudly, his eyebrows raised high. "What kind of culture do these Germans have? Is this what they call praising someone?"

Ye Zhen was sitting by the window drinking milk, the sunlight softening the aggressive sharpness of the previous night. She took the newspaper, glanced at it, and said calmly, "Witch or witch, as long as those two vascular machines are successfully packed and transported back, I'll call them whatever they want."

She put down her cup, her fingers tapping lightly on her knees: "Just now, Director Zhang said that Siemens has agreed to sign the contract. They can disassemble those core pieces of equipment into more than three hundred parts and ship them by sea, mixing them with agricultural machinery parts."

"That's good." Gu Zheng folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the coffee table, leaning back with his long legs outstretched. He looked at Ye Zhen with a mischievous smirk in his eyes, a roguish look he only showed in private.

"But I still don't like this title." Gu Zheng reached out and pulled Ye Zhen over.

Caught off guard, Ye Zhen fell onto his lap. Just as she was about to struggle, her waist was gripped tightly by an iron arm.

"What witch?" Gu Zheng leaned closer to her, his hot breath spraying onto her neck. "This is clearly a goddess."

Ye Zhen's ears turned slightly red, whether from the heat or something else, she didn't know. She pushed against Gu Zheng's hard chest: "Stop fooling around, Translator Xu is still outside."

"Ignore him." Gu Zheng didn't let go at all, rubbing his chin against her shoulder, his stubble tickling her. "If anyone dares to write anything like 'witch' or 'devil' in the newspapers again, ruining my wife's reputation..."

He paused, looked up, grinned, revealing a set of gleaming white teeth, his smile a mix of fierceness and indulgence.

"I'll go and pull his teeth."