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

New York, Manhattan.

Mayo Clinic Animal Laboratory.

Two o'clock in the morning.

Harrison had been in the lab for four hours.

A miniature monitor was laid out on the table, and the same video was playing repeatedly on the screen.

The footage was a copy of the surgical video that Henry had obtained; the image quality was poor, grainy, and had a blurry watermark in the corner.

But that's enough.

It was enough for him to clearly see Ye Zhen's every move and trajectory.

On the metal tray in front of him lay a fresh pig heart, about the size of an adult's heart.

Next to him was a pair of ophthalmic microscissors of the same model as the one in the video, which was the closest substitute that his assistant had found from the surgical supplies catalog.

He rewound the video and stopped at the beginning of the coronary artery blindness separation.

Ye Zhen held the scissors in her right hand and began blunt dissection from the outer edge of the muscle layer, against the direction of the fibers.

He watched it for the fifth time.

Pause the monitor.

Pick up the scissors.

The first incision is made in the coronary artery area of ​​the pig's heart, with the fingers advancing along the edge of the muscle layer, the back of the scissors pressed against the tissue surface.

He tried to replicate Ye Zhen's angle, but the needle insertion point was too high, and the tip of the scissors touched the coronary artery wall.

A stream of crimson liquid seeped out from the wound.

He put down the scissors and pushed the pig's heart aside.

"Next one."

The assistant took out the second one from the refrigerator and hesitated for a moment.

"Professor, should we adjust the light angle again?"

"No need, there's no extra light source in her operating room in the north of the city."

On his second attempt, he changed his approach angle and started from a lower position.

After advancing about three millimeters, the tip of the scissors got stuck between the muscle bundles.

He applied a little more force, tearing the muscle fibers and ripping off a thin membrane along with the coronary artery wall.

It broke again.

The third one.

The fourth one.

The fifth one.

The reasons for each failure are different.

Some problems stem from angle, some from force, and some from misjudging direction.

He stopped looking at the monitor and instead used the muscle memory from forty years of surgical experience to find the unseen path.

The twelfth pig heart.

He held his breath as the scissors reached the crucial position, feeling an extremely faint elastic feedback from his fingertips.

right here.

He adjusted the blade angle, turning it inward by less than a millimeter.

Scissors tip across.

The blood vessel wall had a hole the size of a pinhead.

He removed his hand from the tray, the scissor handle between his fingers trembling.

The eighteenth one.

Eighteen attempts.

Eighteen ruptured coronary arteries.

The last pig heart slipped off the tray and fell to the ground with a dull, wet thud.

Harrison didn't pick it up.

He sat on a high stool in front of the lab bench, his arms resting on the table, his head lowered, his forehead pressed against the cold stainless steel surface.

His hands were shaking.

It has nothing to do with tension, nor with fatigue.

Forty years.

His understanding of the limitations of cardiac surgery technology, built up over forty years, was shattered in the past four hours by a pair of 1.2 yuan scissors from a Chinese girl.

He can't do it with the model.

It's far from perfect; it's simply impossible.

She did it on a living person, on a newborn, without a microscope.

The image on the monitor screen was still paused, with Ye Zhen's fingers hovering above the surgical field, the blade two millimeters from the tissue surface.

He stared at that frozen image for a long time, unable to utter a single word.

The laboratory door was pushed open.

The man who walked in was Phillips, the executive director of the Mayo Clinic. He was in his early sixties, with gray hair and a scarf still around his neck, clearly having come directly from home after receiving a call.

He glanced at the remains of a pig's heart on the ground and the tray, then at Harrison sitting on the stool.

"Graham, what are you doing here?"

Harrison did not look up.

"Testing a hypothesis."

Phillips sat down next to him.

"What assumption?"

"Can her coronary artery blindness be replicated?"

Phillips glanced at the broken pig hearts on the tray and counted them.

"And the conclusion?"

Harrison finally raised his head.

His eyes were red, and his nasolabial folds were an inch deeper than they had been four hours earlier.

"I can't do it."

Phillips remained silent for a moment.

"Graham, do you know why I rushed over in the middle of the night?"

Harrison looked at him.

"News from Geneva has arrived. The motion you proposed in your open letter was overturned at the committee meeting this afternoon. Andrei vouched for the authenticity of the Chinese surgery with his personal reputation, and the Royal College of Surgeons has chartered a plane to Beicheng."

He pulled a fax paper from his scarf.

"Furthermore, WHO Director-General Mahele decided to personally travel to North City to present the letter of appointment and announce that the North City Summit has received full WHO endorsement."

He placed the fax paper in the middle of the pile of pig hearts in front of Harrison.

"You know very well what this means. The North City Summit will become the highest-level academic conference in the field of cardiac surgery for the next decade. Anyone who is absent will have a cross on their resume."

Harrison looked down at the fax paper.

"I know."

"So what do you plan to do?"

Harrison's gaze passed over the fax paper and landed on Ye Zhen's frozen hand on the monitor.

"I need a spot to attend the conference."

Phillips sighed.

"You wrote an open letter eleven days ago questioning someone's qualifications, and now you want to attend their meeting?"

"Yes."

"You know that China has ample reasons to refuse you."

Harrison stood up from the stool, walked to the sink, turned on the tap, and put his hands, which were covered in pig's blood, under the running water.

"I know."

He watched the pink water swirl and disappear down the drain.

"But if I don't go, the Mayo Clinic's position in the field of cardiac surgery will be redefined in the next five years, and this is not a matter of my personal face."

He turned off the tap and wiped his hands with a tissue.

"Phillips, that Chinese doctor, did more than just one surgery. Her approach design, her material selection, her autologous pericardial conduit—each of these alone is worthy of a Lasker Award."

He threw the tissue into the trash can.

"If I don't learn it, five years from now, all the congenital heart disease surgeries in the world will be using her methods, while Mayo's textbooks will still be based on standards from twenty years ago."

Phillips looked at him for a while.

"Under what pretext?"

Harrison's Adam's apple bobbed.

"In my private capacity, I wrote a letter to the organizing committee of the North City Summit, requesting a place to attend as an observer."

Phillips stood up.

Are you sure?

"Sure."

Phillips picked up the fax paper from the table, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

He turned his head back as he reached the door.

"Graham".

"Um."

"The last sentence of your open letter, regarding other factors."

Phillips' voice was devoid of emotion.

"If you go to Beicheng, I suggest you explain to her in person what that sentence really means."

The door closed.

Harrison stood alone in the laboratory, amidst fragments of pig hearts scattered on the floor, and glanced at himself in the mirror above the pool.

He couldn't even describe the expression on his face in the mirror.

He returned to his desk, found a blank sheet of paper, and unscrewed the cap of his pen.

I wrote, stopped, and then wrote again.

I wrote it three times, and tore it up the first two times.

On the third draft, he wrote the final version.

Dear North City Summit Organizing Committee

I, Graham Harrison, Chief Cardiac Surgeon at the Mayo Clinic and President-elect of the American College of Cardiac Surgeons, am writing to the organizing committee in my private capacity to request a seat as an observer at the summit.

I earnestly request.

He wrote those two words very slowly, the pen tip lingering on the paper longer than the pause during any surgical suture.