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

On the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, the sun after the snow was dazzlingly bright, shining directly on the logistics square of the military hospital.

Eleven enormous pine crates, each bearing the German word "Siemens" printed in black, stood like a fortress rising from the ground, completely blocking the once spacious open space. Several soldiers, gripping crowbars, intently hammered nails into the crates.

The cold air was filled with the dry, pleasant scent of pine, but to the discerning eye, it smelled of burning piles of foreign exchange—the "smell of money" strong enough to stop one's heart from beating.

"Tsk tsk tsk, is this the legendary QAD-1? It's made quite a stir."

A slightly hoarse voice, tinged with a hint of stale jealousy, rang out from outside the police cordon.

The speaker was a man in his early fifties, wearing a thick woolen overcoat, with a pair of thick glasses perched on his nose, and even leisurely holding a purple clay thermos in his hand. Behind him was a man with a hunched neck and a dejected face, none other than Old Liu, the chief engineer who had broken the machine to a standstill on New Year's Eve.

The elderly man leading the group is Zhao Degong, the president of Shanghai First People's Hospital.

Ever since hearing that Ye Zhen had managed to get her hands on the German prototype through a combination of coaxing and deception, Zhao Degong felt like he had twenty-five mice scratching at his heart. He took a twenty-hour hard-seat train ride overnight to Beijing. He claimed it was a "technical exchange between brother units," but everyone knew perfectly well that he was there to see if he could find any loopholes or find some faults to salvage the reputation he had lost on New Year's Eve at the Huangpu River.

"Dean Zhao, you can look, but don't reach out your hands."

Gu Zheng, dressed in a crisp military overcoat, stood with his arms crossed, blocking Zhao Degong's probing gaze like a demon. A roguish smile played on his lips.

"Our machines are delicate. Although they don't have an anti-disassembly self-destruct device, the people here... are prone to 'slipping their hands'."

These words struck a nerve with Old Liu. His face flushed crimson, and he wished he could disappear into the ground.

Zhao Degong's old face stiffened, then he unscrewed his thermos and took a tactical sip of water, chuckling dryly twice: "Commander Gu is really joking. We're here to learn, and incidentally to help Xiao Ye out. This prototype is, after all, a semi-finished product from the lab, and its instability is extremely high. Although Xiao Ye is steady with a scalpel, when it comes to imaging diagnosis... it's like being in a completely different world."

His eyes, however, seemed to be hooked, fixed on the massive machine that had just been dismantled, and he couldn't suppress the sourness in his voice: "It's a good thing that young people take big strides, but I'm afraid they might pull something... cough cough."

Before he could finish speaking, the last plank hit the ground with a thud.

Under the sunlight, a futuristic, silver-gray machine was revealed. It was larger than any existing ultrasound machine, its streamlined body gleaming with a cold metallic sheen, its densely packed control panels resembling an aircraft cockpit, and a staggeringly large display screen.

Ye Zhen emerged from the shadows of the machine, holding a stack of data sheets in her hand.

She wasn't wearing a bulky down jacket today; underneath her white coat was a high-necked black sweater, which made her complexion appear even more serene and fair. Upon seeing Zhao Degong, she didn't even raise an eyebrow, merely nodding slightly: "Dean Zhao is here? Perfect, let's see together what 'a trade is like a mountain' truly means."

There were no formalities, no small talk, as if Zhao Degong were just an intern who had come to audit the class.

The machine was carried into the house by the group.

"Hans, turn on the power." Ye Zhen turned her head and uttered the words in fluent German.

Hans, sweating profusely, connected the transformer, his fingers trembling slightly on the switch. The machine's circuitry had been modified according to Ye Zhen's "secret recipe," but whether it would even light up was still unknown.

"Buzz!"

A low, humming electrical sound rang out, and the indicator lights sequentially turned green.

The screen lit up.

However, what appeared before everyone's eyes was not a clear image, but a hazy, wildly jumping static, accompanied by a piercing "hissing" noise from the speakers, much like a television set when the signal is blocked.

"Oh dear!" Zhao Degong couldn't help but let out a meaningful exclamation. "This is the prototype? It seems the signal interference problem is a fatal flaw. With this screen full of static, you can't even see the outline of a liver, how are you supposed to see the heart?"

Old Liu, standing behind him, adjusted his glasses, regaining some of his expert confidence: "The signal-to-noise ratio is too low. Doppler shift will be covered by organizational clutter at low flow velocities, which is a global problem. It seems the Germans are also at a loss."

Hans turned pale with anxiety, frantically twisting the gain knob, but the static on the screen stubbornly continued to dance, as if mocking the incompetence of these humans.

"I knew it," Zhao Degong shook his head, adopting an air of experience, "Xiao Ye, you're still too young. You've been fooled by the Germans, haven't you? This machine is just a decoration, it takes up too much space. How about this, we have a few radar engineers in Shanghai, you lend me the machine to take back to Shanghai, and I'll have them..."

Ye Zhen walked to the control panel and reached out to push Hans, who was covered in sweat, aside.

Instead of touching the brightness adjustment knobs, she stretched out her slender fingers and hovered them above the full keyboard's control area.

"Da, da da, da da da..."

The crisp, rhythmic tapping of keyboards echoed across the empty square. It wasn't random slamming; it was a rhythm with a certain industrial aesthetic, so fast it was dazzling.

"What is she doing?" Old Liu craned his neck, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets. "This machine... can be programmed on the spot?"

Ye Zhen stared intently at the screen, her gaze as focused as if she were performing a delicate craniotomy. She was inputting the filtering algorithm she'd only half-written in the steamed bun shop—a mathematical magic that was twenty years ahead of its time.

"The high-pass filter threshold is set to 100Hz."

"Adaptive pulse repetition frequency enabled".

"Importing Colored Wall Filter Coefficients..."

As Ye Zhen whispered and her fingers danced across the screen, the chaotic static on the screen seemed to have encountered its natural enemy, and began to recede in large swaths. The originally dark and noisy background gradually became deep and pure, representing an organization background of absolute stillness, as black as the deep sea.

"Take a look." Ye Zhen stretched out her hand, her words concise and to the point.

The nurse next to him quickly handed him a probe coated with coupling gel.

Ye Zhen turned around and looked at a four-year-old boy lying on the stretcher. The child had cyanosis of the lips and a deformed chest, a typical case of complex congenital heart disease. In the previous M-mode ultrasound, his heart looked like a blurry cloud, with no visible defects or blood flow.

Ye Zhen held the probe firmly against the child's thin, bony chest.

Everyone present fell silent instantly.

The screen, which originally only had three monotonous colors of black, white and gray, suddenly burst open with a burst of brilliant colors without warning!

That's not noise, that's not an artifact.

It was a stream of bright red fluid, like molten lava gushing from the heart, rushing straight toward the probe, full of vitality; followed by a stream of deep blue backflow, forming a perfect, deadly vortex at the tricuspid valve.

Red and blue intertwine, rhythmize, and surge against a black background.

On a winter afternoon in the early 1980s, in an era when most televisions were still black and white, this flash of red and blue color dancing wildly on the screen was like a sharp blade, piercing through the barriers of time and instantly shattering everyone's worldview!

That was the first "colorful" heartbeat to light up the land of China.