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

A rickety gray van, rattling and groaning except for its horn, pulled up in front of the military hospital. As soon as the door opened, a blast of cold air, a mixture of coal smoke and dry dust, rushed in, making Thomas, sitting in the back seat, cough violently.

The global president of Siemens Healthineers was wearing an Italian handmade wool coat that could buy half a courtyard house, and shiny pointed leather shoes. At this moment, he was looking at the mud splattered on his trousers with a look of utter disbelief.

"Hans!" Thomas exclaimed, his face ashen, pointing at the dilapidated car with its shock absorbers practically nonexistent. "This is the 'highest level of courtesy' you're talking about? Where's the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Hongqi limousine? Even a Jeep would have been better!"

Hans, with his messy hair and dark circles under his eyes (as if he'd been punched twice), clearly hadn't slept well. He grabbed his boss's arm, practically fuming, "My God, boss! Forget about the car! If GE finds out you're in Beijing, they'll buy this junk and dismantle it for research!"

Thomas snorted, straightened his expensive collar, adopted an arrogant posture as if he were inspecting a slum in a third-world country, and got out of the car.

Then, he froze on the spot.

The square in front of him, the general hospital of the military region, was no longer the solemn and dignified hospital he had imagined; instead, it resembled a huge, operational front line of the battlefield.

Hundreds of military green tents were densely packed on the cement ground, stretching as far as the eye could see. The air was filled with the pungent smell of honeycomb briquettes, Lysol, and the unique warmth of thousands of people gathered together.

The cold wind howled, stirring up the loose soil on the ground, dazzling the eyes.

Amidst the swirling dust, countless college students, bundled up in bulky cotton-padded coats and wearing red armbands, moved like worker ants among the tents. Holding red, yellow, and blue cards, they called out in a dialect Thomas couldn't understand, guiding the farmers who were carrying children.

The farmers, some carrying tattered sacks, others with shoulder poles, their faces etched with deep lines from the elements, shone with a light brighter than the candles in a church when they looked at the young people in white coats.

"What is this?" Thomas even forgot to cover his mouth and nose. "Is there an infectious disease outbreak in Beijing? Is this a refugee camp?"

"No, boss." Hans's voice carried a hint of inexplicable respect. "This is Noah's Ark."

"ark?"

"They're screening children with heart disease," Hans said, pointing to a large tent in the distance adorned with a Red Cross. "In three days, they screened four thousand children. Without sophisticated equipment or generous subsidies, they relied entirely on manual touch and listening. We wouldn't even dare to dream of such efficiency in Germany."

Thomas fell silent.

As a capitalist, he had seen too much efficiency driven by profit. But the power that erupted purely for the sake of "keeping people alive" made his heart, which beat only for the mark and the dollar, skip a beat.

"Take me to see Ye." Thomas's disdain vanished. "Now."

Hans led him, stumbling through the crowd, until they finally arrived at the warehouse where Ye Zhen worked.

The curtain was lifted, and Thomas bent down and crawled inside.

On a table lay the sketch of the "nickel-titanium alloy interventional device" that drove Hans mad. Instead of an expensive crystal paperweight, pressed against the corner of the sketch was a half-eaten white steamed bun and a plate of dark, shredded pickled vegetables.

Ye Zhen sat behind the table.

She was wearing a large military overcoat, the collar revealing a section of her fair and slender neck. She held a red and blue pencil in her hand, sketching on a map.

Hearing the noise, she looked up. Her eyes were as cold and clear as the stars in a winter night, showing no ecstatic joy at seeing the God of Wealth, only a detached indifference that came from seeing through the ways of the world.

"Sit down." Ye Zhen pointed to the creaking folding chair opposite her. "There's no more tea, but you can have as much plain water as you want."

Thomas stared at the enamel mug covered in coal dust, but didn't move.

His gaze was fixed intently on the sketch. A true expert's skill is immediately apparent. The parameters alone related to the "thermal memory effect" were enough to double Siemens Healthineers' stock price.

"Ms. Ye," Thomas took a deep breath, trying to seize the initiative in the negotiation, "working in such... harsh conditions is truly unworthy of your talent. If you sign an exclusive licensing agreement, I've prepared an independent laboratory for you in Munich, with an annual salary of..."

"Ten units." Ye Zhen interrupted him, her voice not loud, but it made a strong impression.

Thomas was taken aback: "What?"

Ye Zhen picked up the steamed bun, casually tore off a piece of skin, and put it in her mouth: "I want ten of the latest Sonoline SL-1 ultrasound diagnostic machines, in stock. Also, I need half of the Asia-Pacific region's probe inventory. Shall we do this deal?"

Thomas nearly choked on his own saliva: "Ten SL-1s? That was our flagship model last year! Each one costs fifty thousand US dollars! And the inventory is extremely tight right now..."

"Then there's nothing to discuss." Ye Zhen reached out to collect the blueprints on the table, her movements swift and decisive. "I heard that the president of GM is quite generous; they shouldn't mind helping me clear out this inventory."

"Wait!" Thomas cried out, leaning forward so much he nearly knocked over the dish of pickled vegetables on the table. "Deal! But I have one condition: I want exclusive global patent rights! For twenty years!"

Ye Zhen's hand paused.

She looked up at Thomas, a hint of mockery in her eyes: "Mr. Thomas, do you think I've been in this tent for too long and my brain has been fried by the coal smoke?"

"The application of nickel-titanium alloys is the ticket to the future of cardiac surgery." Ye Zhen tapped her knuckles lightly on the table, each word sharp as a knife. "What I'm giving you is the key to monopolizing the next era. Ten ultrasound machines? That's like throwing money away to a beggar."

Thomas's forehead was beaded with sweat. Despite the low temperature inside the tent, he felt unbearably hot.

"Then what else do you want?" Thomas asked through gritted teeth.

Ye Zhen put down her pen, leaned back slightly, and uttered a code name that plunged the entire tent into a deathly silence: "QAD-1".

Hans, standing next to her, gasped and stared at Ye Zhen as if he'd seen a ghost.

The QAD-1 was the world's first prototype ultrasound machine with color Doppler flow imaging (CDFI) capabilities!

In an era where everyone is still looking at black and white wavy lines, color Doppler ultrasound is like a nuclear weapon! It can directly show the direction and speed of blood flow inside the heart!

"Impossible!" Thomas jumped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "That's top secret! It hasn't even been approved by the FDA yet! It's still in the lab testing phase! Absolutely not!"

That's Siemens' lifeline, their trump card to shock the world at next year's RSNA (Radiological Society of North America)!

"Debugging phase?" Ye Zhen laughed. "Is it because the blood overflow problem can't be solved? Is the artifact severe at low flow rates? And that damn aliasing phenomenon?"

Thomas froze. How did she know?

Ye Zhen dipped her finger in tea and casually drew a waveform on the table: "Actually, it's quite simple to manipulate the pulse repetition frequency. Just add an adaptive filtering algorithm, and then adjust the threshold of the high-pass filter..."

Thomas and Hans's eyes followed Ye Zhen's fingers, their breathing becoming increasingly rapid. That algorithm! The algorithm that had plagued them for half a year! Right here on this filthy desktop, it was almost complete!

"As long as..." Ye Zhen was about to draw the crucial stroke.

Suddenly, a large, calloused hand slid in and covered Ye Zhen's mouth.

Gu Zheng entered at some unknown time. He was still covered in the heat from moving supplies and stood like an iron tower in front of Ye Zhen, his face full of fierceness.

"Wife! Shut up!" Gu Zheng glared, his face showing the pain of seeing his spendthrift wife about to give away money. "This stuff can be exchanged for a lot of US dollars! We can't just give it away to those foreign devils for free, even if we have to sell tea eggs at a street stall! We have to pay extra! We absolutely have to pay extra!"

Ye Zhen blinked and then fell silent.

There's no such thing as a guaranteed Nobel Prize; those are just basic principles from textbooks. But in this era, they're the magic tricks that break through the barriers.

Thomas felt his heart bleed as he looked at the tea stains that Gu Zheng had wiped away with his large hand.

It's like someone who's been starving for three days, just smelling the aroma of braised pork, and then the plate is taken away.

"I'll give it to you!" Thomas exclaimed, his eyes red with the madness of a gambler going all in. "I'll give you the prototype! But I can only get one! It's the only one in all of Europe!"

"make a deal."

Gu Zheng immediately removed his hand, and Ye Zhen's helpless expression instantly turned into composure.

She pulled a pre-written note from her coat pocket and slapped it in front of Thomas: "This is the filtering algorithm. Whenever the machine arrives at Tianjin Port, I'll give you the second half of the formula."

Thomas took the note with trembling hands, as if holding a Bible.

He stared at the couple before him. The man was domineering and protective of his own, the woman shrewd to the point of being almost demonic. This wasn't a doctor and an officer; they were clearly two wolves that would devour people without spitting out the bones!

"Ye," Thomas said with a wry smile, tucking the note into his pocket, "are you really just a doctor? I think Wall Street is a better fit for you."

Ye Zhen picked up the cold steamed bun again and took a bite.

"Wall Street can't save these kids," she said, pointing to the anxious parents outside the tent, "but this ultrasound machine can."

Thomas paused for a moment. He looked at Ye Zhen, then at Gu Zheng standing behind her.

The cold wind howled outside the tent, but inside this simple room, there was something scalding hot that he, a Westerner, could not understand.

"The machine will arrive in three days, and I will personally draft the contract." Thomas put on his gloves and gave Ye Zhen a slight bow. "This is the craziest and most worthwhile business deal I've ever made in my life."

Thomas left, taking Hans and that priceless sketch with him, as if he were carrying a bomb.

Gu Zheng watched the dilapidated bread truck disappear into the dust, then turned to his wife: "One color ultrasound and ten B-ultrasound machines, is that enough?"

"That's enough for now." Ye Zhen swallowed the last bite of steamed bun, her eyes sharpening. "With these machines, those complex congenital heart diseases will no longer be like the blind men and the elephant."

She stood up and dusted off the dough crumbs on her hands: "However, now that we have the machine, even bigger trouble is on its way."

"What's the trouble?" Gu Zheng asked.

"In all of China, not many people can read ultrasound images, let alone color Doppler ultrasounds." Ye Zhen walked to the tent entrance and looked at the group of busy students in the distance. "We've replaced their guns, but if they don't know how to pull the trigger, these guns are just firewood."

"Next, it's my turn to be an instructor."

Gu Zheng grinned, revealing a set of white teeth, with a roguish air about him: "Then I'll be your military inspector. Anyone who dares not to study properly, I'll kick their ass."

In the cold wind, the couple stood side by side, with thousands of lights shining behind them.