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

On the morning the summit opened, the sun rose over the northern part of the city.

At 8:00 a.m. sharp, the first group of foreign guests arrived.

Two buses stopped outside the gate. The doors opened, and the 47-member Soviet delegation filed out.

Andrei walked at the very front.

He carried an old leather bag with worn edges in his left hand and clutched the black notebook filled with notes from his forty-three-year career in the north of the city in his right hand.

As he passed through the security checkpoint, he nodded to the 761st Unit sentry next to the metal detector gate.

The sentry snapped back with a standard military salute.

Andrei was followed by Ivan and the transport medic whose legs had gone weak on the runway.

The two men had serious expressions, but the neck of the transport medic never stopped moving – looking left at the armored vehicle and right at the searchlight, as if they had entered a military museum.

Ivan tugged at him, his voice low: "Watch where you're going."

The British delegation's bus came from another direction.

Sir Williams stood by the roadside to greet his family, wearing a grey plaid suit and Oxford pointed leather shoes with a speck of mud on the surface of his shoes—probably from the hundred-meter dirt road.

He bent down to wipe his shoes, and as he straightened up, he met Andrei's gaze.

The two stared at each other for a second, five meters apart.

Williams first extended his right hand.

Andrei walked over and grasped it.

"Andrei".

"Williams".

They clasped hands for three seconds. No more words were needed.

Williams released his grip, a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth: "I never imagined we'd be sitting on the same side one day."

Andrei straightened his scarf: "What I didn't expect was that the person who put us on the same side was a Chinese girl in her early twenties."

A queue formed at the registration desk at the entrance.

Frenchman Lefebvre stood in the middle of the line with four colleagues, holding a stack of printed materials that was almost half an inch thick—Ye Zhen's surgical records, which he had translated overnight on the plane, and whose covers were frayed from being turned so many times.

Yamada led the eight-member Japanese delegation behind the French, each with a miniature tape recorder hanging around their neck.

The entire process was recorded; not a single word was intended to be missed.

Gu Zheng stood at the exit of the security checkpoint.

His military uniform was impeccably tailored, and the stars on his epaulets twinkled in the winter sunlight, as if they were specially gilded to enhance his wife's home turf.

He held a roster in his hand, and as he passed each person, he bent down and put a checkmark next to their name. His movements were unhurried, almost like inspecting troops.

Zhou Hai stood next to him, his lips moving as he silently counted heads.

"One hundred and forty-nine...one hundred and fifty...one hundred and fifty-one..."

The sound gets softer and softer as you count.

The last person to sign in was a cardiac surgeon from Lyon, France. After signing, he returned the pen to the young soldier at the registration desk and walked inside without looking back.

One hundred and sixty.

Zhou Hai closed the roster.

All official representatives are present.

He subconsciously turned his head and glanced towards the gate.

A black sedan without any markings was parked on the dirt road outside the gate.

The car doors were tightly closed.

The car windows are tinted, so you can't see anything from the outside.

Zhou Hai narrowed his eyes: "Whose car is that?"

Gu Zheng handed the roster to the guard next to him, his tone as if he were remarking on the nice weather.

"It's from the United States. I was picked up by the embassy car when I cleared customs at the Capital Airport this morning."

Zhou Hai frowned.

"Harrison's here?"

"Possibly."

Gu Zheng's lips twitched slightly.

"But he's probably still in the car, wondering whether he should get out."

The back seat of a black sedan.

Harrison took off his gold-rimmed glasses, wiped them, and put them back on.

He took it off, wiped it clean, and put it back on.

It was repeated three times.

A folded canvas stool rested on his lap.

Stool.

He asked his embassy assistant to buy it from a nearby convenience store after he cleared customs at the Capital Airport.

His assistant asked him why he bought this.

He said he would use it for meetings.

The assistant's expression at the time seemed to be confirming whether he had actually received the incoming president of the American College of Cardiac Surgery.

At this moment, the last group of international experts in suits had disappeared into the main hospital gates.

Only a few soldiers on duty and a cement ground covered with a thin layer of snow remained on the open space in front of the security checkpoint.

The driver turned around and glanced at him from the front seat.

"Mr. Harrison?"

He didn't answer.

He peered through the crack in the car window at the main building of the hospital behind the security checkpoint.

Grayish-white walls, railings, windows, and a red flag fluttering in the wind atop the roof.

Compared to the Mayo Clinic where he had spent forty years, this building seemed like a completely different world.

But the world's most daring heart surgery was performed here.

Eighteen pig hearts.

He saw the laboratory at two in the morning in his mind again, and the ophthalmic scissors in his hand that he could never control the angle of.

Eighteen times.

All attempts failed.

He glanced down at the stool on his knees.

It has a canvas surface and iron pipe legs, and when stretched out, it is about 30 centimeters off the ground.

Graham Harrison lived to be 62 and never rode in one of these things.

He opened the car door.

The leather shoes crunched softly on the thin snow.

The soldier in front of the security checkpoint glanced at him.

He gave his name.

The soldier flipped through the supplementary list, his finger pausing on the last line.

"Mr. Harrison, please come in. The audience area is located in the last row of the aisle in the main hall."

He tucked the stool under his arm, passed through the security gate, and entered the main building of the hospital.

The main venue was set up in the largest lecture hall in the main hospital.

The 160 seats are arranged in six rows, fan-shaped from front to back.

In the center of the podium is a long table with a microphone and a glass of water on it.

The boiled water was still steaming.

There was nothing written on the blackboard behind the podium.

But below the blackboard, against the wall, stood two white display boards covered with hand-drawn heart anatomy diagrams and surgical procedure flowcharts.

The lines of the red and blue pencils are fine and clear, as if the direction of each blood vessel has been measured with a ruler.

Andrei sat in the center of the first row.

His black notebook had been turned to a blank page, and the pen cap had been removed and placed on the corner of the table with the nib pointing upwards.

Williams sat to his left, his legs crossed, his right index finger rhythmically tapping the table.

This is his habitual gesture when he's nervous—the last time he did this was twenty years ago when he stood on the podium of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Gao Haiping and Liu Jianmin sat in the second row.

Gao Haiping had two pens in front of him, one red and one blue, which he learned from Ye Zhen.

Liu Jianmin flipped through the documents in his hand, turning three pages before turning back, clearly not having absorbed a single word.

Lefebvre was on the left side of the third row, with a stack of tattered printed materials spread out in front of him, key paragraphs marked with highlighter.

Yamada was in the third row on the right, and he had already written down several questions in his notebook.

He flew for nine hours and spent nine hours thinking on the plane, and came up with these few questions he wanted to ask Ye Zhen in person.

At the very end of the last row of corridors.

Harrison pushed the stool open and sat down.

The canvas surface was much lower than I expected. My knees almost touched my chin.

He placed the notebook on his lap and took the gold fountain pen out of his shirt pocket.

No one around him was looking at him.

Or rather, everyone knew he was sitting there, but no one turned around.

In this classroom, he had no title, no seat, and no voice.

He was just an auditor sitting on a canvas stool.

Nine o'clock sharp.

The sounds of conversation that had been rising and falling in the classroom receded like the tide, one layer after another.

The back door is open.

Ye Zhen walked in.

Wearing a white lab coat, the cuffs rolled up an inch above the wrist bone, revealing a slender but steady wrist.

Her hair was gathered at the back of her head and tied into a low bun. She wore nothing around her neck.

She was holding a red chalk and a blue chalk in her hand.

There were no handouts.

There are no slides.

There was no teleprompter.

All 161 people's eyes fell on her at the same time.

She walked up to the podium, her steps neither fast nor slow, the soles of her shoes tapping on the cement surface, one step at a time, just like the rhythm she used when making rounds in the corridor.

She placed two pieces of chalk on the long table.

Then he raised his head.

My gaze swept from the first row to the last row.

Not fast, not slow.

His gaze swept over Andrei—Andrei gave a slight bow.

He glanced at Williams—Williams stopped tapping his fingers on the table.

His gaze swept over Lefebvre—Lefebvre instinctively sat up straight.

The gaze swept over Yamada—Yamada's hand hovered above the tape recorder, and he held his breath.

When they reached the last row at the end of the corridor, they paused for less than half a second.

She saw Harrison.

Her gaze did not linger.

It was retrieved and landed on the microphone in front of it.

She reached out and adjusted the microphone height. Her fingertips touched the metal stand, producing a very soft clink.

Ye Zhen spoke up.

"Welcome to the North City."

Her English was clear and steady, with a touch of Chinese rhythm that she herself was unaware of.

Every emphasis landed precisely where it should, just like the precision with which she made her cuts—not a fraction more, not a fraction less.

"Medicine knows no borders."

She paused for a second.

In the silence that followed, the wind from the northern city outside the window blew across the red flags on the rooftops, making them flutter loudly.

"But from today onwards, the new rules for cardiac surgery will be set by China."