Even if I can participate, essentially, many doctors in county hospitals still cannot.

If it weren't for Tong Yuan'an's support, no matter how outstanding Lu Cheng was, he would have been treated the same as other doctors in county hospitals.

Forget about qualifying for the national competition, he might not even have the chance to participate in the provincial competition.

This is the real world, a structure dictated by reality and ability. You have to accept it, whether you like it or not.

The harsh realities have already filtered out a batch of excellent people. Of course, some people are just occupying their positions, but overall, county hospitals are inferior to city-level hospitals.

This is true everywhere in general; exceptions are just exceptions.

A feeling of shared misfortune!

...

Tong Yuan'an is an associate professor at Xiangya Hospital, with a surpassing status in Long County, in a class of his own!

But in the field of microsurgery in Xiang Province, he is still just a more respectable nobody, unable to change too much.

This year's Xiang Province Microsurgery Young Physicians' Skills Competition adopts a registration system for city-level hospitals and a recommendation or invitation system for county hospital participants.

That is to say, in the Xiang Province Microsurgery Skills Competition, related professionals from city-level hospitals can normally register to participate, whereas county hospital staff can only be recommended by associate professors from city hospitals or be specially invited by the organizers.

The way out of trouble is narrow and reserved for the lucky few.

But inevitably, more than ninety percent of people will be excluded from the threshold, and Lu Cheng is among the remaining ten percent.

Lu Cheng did not wallow in the shared misfortune but, upon receiving the notification and ticket to participate, immediately began booking tickets and hotels…

October 23rd, Friday, light rain.

After finishing his shift on the 22nd, Lu Cheng went home to rest. After waking up in the afternoon, he ate a meal and rushed to Sha City's high-speed train.

On the train, Lu Cheng glanced at the landscapes zipping by the window while chatting with Mu Nanshu, who had already returned to Han City.

Lu Cheng said, "So what do we do now? Should we just make up experiments temporarily?"

"Yeah… if the original data is lost, we definitely have to make up the experiments…"

"I only recently found out that Professor Xie was quite unscrupulous. He even…"

Mu Nanshu hesitated: "Of course, Professor Xie is still a good person, at least he gave his student a chance to graduate."

"Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to graduate normally."

"What I mean is, Professor Xie wasn't generous enough. If he were truly generous, he should have given his graduating doctoral student the paper for his thesis and this project's paper too."

The situation Xie Yuan'an encountered was really a matter of "equal exchange"!

Professor Xie's doctoral student's project was so large that there were no results at graduation, making it impossible for him to graduate normally, and so he had to extend his studies.

So Xie Yuan'an used one of his own relatively minor papers to swap with Professor Xie's doctoral student, letting the doctoral student graduate normally.

Then Xie Yuan'an continued the project, and the paper's ownership went to Xie Yuan'an.

But now it turns out that during those early experiments conducted by Professor Xie's doctoral student, the data was poor, and there were fabricated data situations.

Moreover, now, he himself can't remember which data was fabricated and which data was real…

Lu Cheng said, "Being able to graduate well is good enough, why give this and that too?"

"If something like this hit social media, it would just be another essay!~"

From Lu Cheng's perspective, Professor Xie didn't do anything wrong; he just wasn't generous.

But at that time, Xie Xiao was just an associate professor. How could he have so many articles to casually give to his doctoral students?

He didn't have just one doctoral student. Was he supposed to supply them like an old sow, giving out willy-nilly?

"Xie Yuan'an said she wants to video call you," Mu Nanshu sent a message, ending it with a period.

Lu Cheng: "???"