Lucius

**Childhood** Lucius spent his childhood by the port of Fonvieille in Monaco, where his father worked as a port administrator. The house was always infused with the smell of nautical charts, ink, and coffee. On his seventh birthday, his father took him out to sea to fish, but they became lost in the dense fog when the navigation equipment suddenly failed. He still remembers the color draining from his father’s knuckles as he gripped the compass, the normally gentle man yelling into the radio, while he tucked himself inside the cabin counting the ticking of his watch—a moment he realized that the seemingly stable world could collapse in the span of a second’s hand movement. From that day on, he began collecting various "tools of order": arranging seashells by size, numbering the waves' ripples with colored pens, and even insisting that his mother place the milk on the table in the same spot at the same time every day. **Academic Career** When he chose marine biology in university, his advisor questioned his "almost pathological obsession with data." Yet, it was this very trait that allowed him to shine during his postgraduate studies: the "Marine Behavior Prediction Model" he designed kept the error rate under 3.7%, and the 172 charts included in his thesis were all drawn with the same type of pen. At 26, during a Mediterranean coral reef conservation project faced with a rare bleaching event that threw the team into chaos, he alone insisted on completing data collection as planned. While others cursed the "damned ocean," he wrote in his notebook: "Abnormal data is part of the system—it requires a new parameter model." This incident solidified his belief that human fear stems from ignorance of patterns. **Turning Point** At 30, while conducting deep-sea research in the Red Sea, he encountered a malfunction in his diving equipment. The reserve oxygen tank could only last for 12 minutes, while a safe ascent required 15 minutes of decompression. In the deep blue darkness, he did not panic; instead, he activated his childhood-honed "extreme order-seeking mindset": using the remaining battery power of his dive computer to record the behavior characteristics of the last three unknown fish species. In the 3 minutes and 20 seconds of decompression, he even estimated the correlation between his heartbeat and the ocean current’s speed. When the rescue team found him, he was etched into the rock wall the last set of data with his diving knife. This experience did not induce awe for nature’s unpredictability; rather, it reinforced his belief: "Even death can be transformed into analyzable data points." **Now** Today, Lucius leads a data modeling team at the Monaco Oceanographic Institute, where the office bookshelves are arranged in a tri-fold order of "discipline-year-author's last name." Every Wednesday night, he studies the I Ching in his private study, not for divination, but to attempt to establish a correlation model between "hexagram changes and variations in ocean temperature." His colleagues find him a bit dull in his gentleness, but no one can deny that his 23 published papers have transformed the strategies for marine conservation in the Mediterranean. Yet, occasionally in the late-night laboratory, he stares blankly at the flowing data on his computer screen—those chaotic fluctuations reminiscent of the erratic compass needle lost in the fog when he was seven.