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

Ye Zhen agreed to Professor Green's request, but told him to be prepared for hardship, the first hurdle being language.

At 8 p.m., all the fluorescent lights in the first conference room of the Beicheng Military Region General Hospital were replaced with new light tubes, making it so bright that every chalk mark on the blackboard could be seen.

Ye Zhen stood in front of the blackboard, her white shirt sleeves still rolled up to her elbows, her right hand holding a piece of red chalk, and her left hand in the pocket of her white lab coat.

There were more than forty people sitting in the audience.

The first three rows were occupied by key surgical personnel from various provinces across the country. They sat with their notebooks open, more disciplined than elementary school students in class.

The group of experts from the UK is in the fourth row and behind.

Williams sat on the side of the aisle, with a palm-sized Oxford English-Chinese dictionary in front of him.

Anderson sat next to him, holding an even thicker copy of the Xinhua Dictionary, with a few pinyin characters crookedly written on the title page.

Xu Wenqiang sat to Anderson's right, his voice already hoarse. On the table was a cup of water infused with Malva nut, with a thick layer of sediment at the bottom.

Ye Zhen finished drawing the last coronary artery branch on the blackboard and turned around.

"What I just described was the standard suturing path. If you have any questions, please ask now."

A chief physician from Wuhan in the front row raised his hand: "Dr. Ye, you just said that the suture tension at the corners of continuous sutures should be reduced by 30% compared to straight segments. How is this 30% quantified?"

"No need for quantification."

Ye Zhen put the chalk in the blackboard slot and picked up a piece of thread from the table.

She held the thread with her left thumb and forefinger, and a regular sewing needle in her right hand.

The needle tip pierced a piece of gauze on the table used for demonstration, and with a slight twist of the wrist, the thread was pulled in and then pulled out.

The action was only performed once.

"Look at the curvature of this line."

She held up the gauze, and the curves of the threads were clearly visible under the light.

"If you pull the thread in with the right tension, it will naturally form this curve. If it's too tight, it will straighten; if it's too loose, it will wrinkle."

She put down the gauze and looked at the director who had raised his hand.

"Once you practice until your fingers memorize the arc, you won't need to quantify it."

"Go back and practice with pig hearts. Sew a hundred of them first, then come back and ask me your second question."

The director's face turned bright red, and he quickly wrote "100 pig hearts" in big letters on his notebook before sitting down obediently.

Xu Wenqiang had just finished translating this passage when he coughed twice as if his throat was on fire, then picked up the dried seaweed and took a big gulp.

Anderson raised his hand in the back row.

"Dr. Ye, I have a question."

He spoke Chinese, and his intonation was still completely distorted, but it was much better than during the day; at least every word was clear.

Ye Zhen glanced at him and said, "Speak."

Anderson stood up: "When you're stitching, does the wrist rotate or flip?"

Xu Wenqiang opened his mouth, ready to translate.

Ye Zhen raised her hand to stop him: "I understand."

She walked to the blackboard and drew two simple diagrams of wrist movements, one labeled "rotation" and the other "flip".

"When inserting the needle, the wrist moves in a rotating arc, not a flipping motion."

She picked up the needle holder and compared it, slowing her movements to one-fifth of the normal speed.

"The center of rotation is at the wrist joint, the radius is fixed, and the trajectory of the needle tip is a standard arc, so the tissue is evenly stressed."

"The center of the rotation is at the knuckle, the radius is unstable, the needle tip trajectory will deviate, and the penetration depth is uncontrollable."

Anderson's eyes widened, and he frantically drew circles on his notebook.

After finishing the drawing, he held up the notebook and waved it at Ye Zhen: "Like this?"

Ye Zhen glanced at it: "It's a circle, not an ellipse."

Anderson plopped down, muttering "round, round, round," and flipped through the dictionary to find the character for "round."

Williams leaned over to look at the oval Anderson had drawn, shook his head, and pulled a slip of paper from his Oxford dictionary and handed it over.

The note had the character "yuán" written on it, with a fairly standard circle drawn next to it.

Anderson took the note and looked at him in surprise: "Arthur, when did you learn that?"

"While you were sleeping," Williams said, flipping to the next page of the dictionary without batting an eye, "you snored for nine hours on the plane during the eleven hours, while I memorized the pinyin for three hundred Chinese characters."

"Translator Xu, take a break," Anderson suddenly called out in broken Chinese.

Xu Wenqiang was taken aback.

Anderson picked up the Xinhua Dictionary and patted it, looking very serious: "We'll read the dictionary ourselves, you're working too hard."

Williams nodded, raised his Oxford Bilingual Translation Book, and said to Xu Wenqiang in English, "Young man, you've been translating for almost five hours today, go and rest."

He turned to look at Ye Zhen and stammered in Chinese, "Dr. Ye, I, we, ourselves, see."

After saying that, he patted the dictionary cover and added in English, "Starting tomorrow, I will ask questions in Chinese."

Anderson was even more enthusiastic than him, pulling out the slip of paper tucked inside the dictionary, which was already densely covered with dozens of pinyin words and their corresponding medical terms.

"I'm going to practice the word 'pericardium' tonight when I get home."

Green was silent for a few seconds, then pulled out a brand new Chinese-English Medical Dictionary from under the paper.

The plastic film on the cover hasn't been removed yet.

He tore open the film, turned to the table of contents, and circled the "Cardiac Surgery" section with a pencil.

"My goal is a bit higher than yours," Green said, adjusting his glasses. "I want to understand the original Chinese text of that paper."

Not a single word was skipped.

A suppressed laugh rippled through the conference room.

When the doctors in China saw the three top British experts each holding a dictionary, their seriousness no different from that of newly enrolled medical students, many of them couldn't help but smile.

Ye Zhen put the chalk back in the box and patted the chalk dust off her hands.

"That's all for today. Tomorrow night at 8 PM, in the same place, we'll discuss the individualized adjustment of postoperative anticoagulation protocols."

On the same night, at 9:40 PM.

In the state-run guesthouse opposite the Beicheng Military Region General Hospital, the curtains were drawn tightly in a room at the end of the corridor on the third floor.

Parker sat on a single sofa by the window, his suit jacket draped over the back of the chair. The coffee stain on his trousers was still there, the dried brown mark standing out starkly under the light.

Van der Hearst sat on the edge of the opposite bed, his hands supporting his knees, looking as if his bones had been removed.

Clark leaned against the door, arms crossed, and remained silent.

Parker's translator, Lynch, moved a chair to the corner, holding a pen in his hand, the cap of which had been bitten with teeth marks.

"Let's put today's business aside for now," Parker said, his voice much deeper than during the day, but his pace had returned to the methodical rhythm of a professional salesperson. "Emotions won't solve anything, data will."

Van der Hearst looked up: "Parker, 245.8 Newtons. How am I supposed to put this data? My instruments have been taken away; I don't even have a chance to remeasure it."

"So let's look at it from a different angle." Parker tapped his fingertips together lightly twice. "Van der Hearst, you saw the whole thing in the operating room today. I have a question for you: Could someone else have achieved the same result with this surgery?"

Van der Hearst was silent for a few seconds.

"I can't do it."

His voice was low, as if admitting the fact itself was painful for him.

"That suturing system, the combination of interrupted mattress sutures and continuous sutures, is theoretically something any trained surgeon could understand."

"But to achieve that level of even tension..." He shook his head, "It's very difficult."

Parker's eyes lit up.

"That's the key."

He stood up, walked to the window, and pinched the edge of the curtain with his fingers, but didn't pull it open; he just twisted it.

"Her technique has two parts. One is the material solution: autologous pericardium tanned with glutaraldehyde. This is written in the paper, and anyone can understand it in theory."

"The other is the surgical procedure: that suturing system and feel, only available on her fingers."

He turned around.

"No matter how good the materials and plans are, without her skillful hands, it's impossible for others to achieve the same surgical results as the data she described in her paper in the short term."

Clark finally spoke up at the door: "You mean, she's the only variable?"

“Yes.” Parker sat back down on the sofa, tapping his fingers rhythmically on the armrest. “She published this technology in a Chinese magazine, written in Chinese, a full text of 53,000 words.”

"How many cardiac surgeons in Europe can read Chinese now?"

Van der Hearst slowly straightened up, something shifting in his eyes: "You mean we can wait?"

"It's not about waiting." Parker shook his head. "Waiting is passive. I want to take the initiative and lock this window of opportunity in place."

He bent down, pulled a folded piece of paper from his briefcase, and unfolded it on the coffee table.

That was a copy of the copyright page of the Chinese Journal of Surgery.

The editorial office address, editor-in-chief's name, publication number, and postal code are all listed above.

"This magazine currently only has a Chinese version, not an English international version." Parker pointed to the editor-in-chief's name—Li Changqing. "If we could sign an exclusive international copyright agency agreement with this magazine, obtaining the exclusive rights to its overseas distribution..."

Clark's brow twitched. "You want to control the international distribution channels of this paper."

"I want everyone in the world who wants to read the English version of this paper to have to go through our hands," Parker said slowly and steadily. "We don't need to deny her technology; we just need to control how far her voice can travel."

"The translation rights are in our hands, the publication schedule is in our hands, and we decide which content to translate and which to omit."

"Gore-Tex's market share will not be substantially impacted within three years."

Van der Hearst slowly sat up straight, his eyes regaining their luster: "Three years is enough. Within three years, we can improve the material formula, reduce costs, or simply develop a new generation of products to capture the market."

"By the time their English papers are finally published, the market landscape will have already been set."

Parker patted the copy of the copyright page.

"Lin Qi, your Chinese is the best. Go and contact this Li Changqing first thing tomorrow morning."

Lin Qi straightened up in the corner: "Under what pretext?"

"In the name of international academic publishing cooperation," Parker's voice regained its smooth, professional tone from the daytime, "you tell him that we represent the medical journals division of Cambridge University Press and are willing to help them with international promotion and open up the European and American markets for them."

"A Chinese medical journal has been chosen by Cambridge University Press to act as its international copyright agent. Do you think a Chinese editor-in-chief would refuse such a great opportunity?"

Lynch chewed on his pen cap: "What's the price?"

"Fifty thousand dollars. The initial copyright fee." Parker held up five fingers. "For them, that's a huge sum. For us..."

He glanced at Van der Hearst.

Van der Hearst scoffed, "For us, the profit isn't even enough to cover a hundred Gore-Tex patches."

"So this is an outrageously good deal." Parker stood up, picked up his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, and shook it. "We need to act fast tomorrow, before they react."

"No matter how well Dr. Ye performs surgery, he's still just a doctor."

Parker draped his suit jacket back over his shoulders, speaking very softly.

"Business matters cannot be solved with a scalpel."