Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the air in the private room of New Century Internet Cafe was so stuffy that it could suffocate flies.

Zhang Jian and Wan Lianghao were already fast asleep, their heads resting on the keyboards. Wan Lianghao's drool dripped down the Enter key, forming a glistening little river in the gaps between the keys.

Bai Yuhang did one last check of the server's backend logs. In the scrolling IP list on the screen, the familiar string `202.106.xxx.xxx` suddenly started jumping faster, like a greedy child staring intently at the newly launched "Stocks" and "Perpetual Calendar" interfaces, grabbing data every few seconds.

"Your nose is pretty sharp." Bai Yuhang lit a cigarette, stared at the web crawler IP from Beijing, and twitched the corner of his mouth.

The two new dynamic data modules, stock and weather forecasts, were launched less than six hours ago, and these tech fanatics already got hooked.

This is a good thing, it means that "Qihang" is a lucrative opportunity.

Without disturbing the two soundly asleep, he closed the log window, shut down the computer, logged off, and took them back to the dormitory first.

The three of them stumbled back to dormitory 206, completely exhausted. They didn't even bother washing their faces before collapsing into bed. Zhang Jian's snoring was barely started when Bai Yuhang threw a pillow at him, interrupting his sleep. He rolled over and continued sleeping.

I slept soundly until 1 p.m.

"Beep beep beep—beep beep beep—"

The pager next to his pillow vibrated like a death knell. Bai Yuhang groggily reached for it and saw it was Zhao Jianjun again, followed by a string of urgent code "999".

He rolled out of bed, threw on a coat, ran downstairs, grabbed the phone, and dialed back.

"Dude! It's blown up! It's all blown up!" Zhao Jianjun's voice was so loud it sounded like he was shouting. "Just now, a few old men who trade stocks were banging on the table here, saying they heard that my website allows you to see real-time trading information without registering. But when they turned it on, the stock section on the navigation page was full of gibberish, like some kind of cryptic script! Has the market crashed?"

"Gibberish?" Bai Yuhang's drowsiness vanished instantly. "What's it displaying?"

"It's all squares and question marks! Some even display a bunch of random symbols that I can't understand at all. It's really creepy."

"Got it. Keep those old men calm and tell them the data is being adjusted, it will only take ten minutes."

After hanging up the phone, Bai Yuhang went upstairs to change his clothes. He turned around and kicked Zhang Jian's bed frame, making such a loud noise that it shook the dust off the upper bunk.

"Get up! Wake up! Something's happened!"

Zhang Jian was startled and almost rolled off the bed, looking completely bewildered: "What happened? Did the teacher check the dorms?"

"Sina must have changed the encoding; the crawling script is malfunctioning, and it's displaying garbled text." Bai Yuhang had already put on his coat. "Hurry to the server room! Lao Si, don't play dead, grab the floppy disk!"

The three of them, their hair a mess, sprinted into the department's computer lab. It was lunchtime, and there weren't many people in the lab. Bai Yuhang randomly picked a machine, skillfully opened the SSH tool, and connected to the server.

The screen displays green text on a black background.

Sure enough, in the captured data stream, the original Chinese characters had all turned into unrecognizable gibberish.

"Damn it, those bastards at Sina, why are they changing the encoding format in the middle of the day instead of sleeping?" Zhang Jian rubbed his sore eyes, cursing as he looked at the garbled text on the screen. "They actually changed it from GBK to UTF-8?"

"It's not just the encoding; the tag structure has also been tweaked." Bai Yuhang's fingers flew across the keyboard, bringing up the Vim editor that comes with Linux. "This is the price of being dependent on others and stealing their data. If they change a punctuation mark, we're cut off from supplies."

"What should we do then? Rewrite the regular expressions?" Wan Lianghao had just inserted the floppy disk and hadn't even had a chance to open the FTP software yet.

"There's no time to rewrite it, so I'll just write a transcoding patch to make do."

Bai Yuhang's hand speed is so fast that his finger movements are almost invisible.

He added a forced encoding command directly at the entry point of the scraping function, using the server-side "iconv" library to forcibly convert the scraped data stream back to GBK, and then replaced the script with a short string to correct the misaligned labels.

Save, exit, and restart the service.

"Refresh and see."

Zhang Jian quickly refreshed the Qihang homepage on the machine next to him.

The small box that was originally displaying garbled text flashed, and the red "1768.23" reappeared, with the small arrow next to it pointing steadily upwards.

"It's alive!" Wan Lianghao breathed a sigh of relief and slumped into his chair. "That scared me to death. I thought I had to rewrite the whole module."

Bai Yuhang glanced at the time in the lower right corner; only four and a half minutes had passed since he entered the room.

"That's called operations and maintenance." Bai Yuhang stood up, patted Zhang Jian's still trembling shoulder, and said, "There will be a lot more of this in the future. You'll get used to it. We're middlemen, so we have to be ready to clean up the messes for our upstream suppliers at any time. Being able to write code is like 'The Foolish Old Man Who Moved Mountains,' being good at writing code is like 'Nuwa Mending the Sky,' but we're more like 'Pangu Creating the World.'"

Looking at the few lines of extremely concise code on the screen, Zhang Jian swallowed back the curses he had just uttered and managed to say, "Sixth Brother, how many years of being single did you practice to develop this typing speed?"

"roll."

With the crisis averted, the three strolled leisurely back to their dormitory. As soon as they pushed open the door, a refreshing breeze rushed in.

The smelly socks, crumpled paper, and plastic bags that used to litter the floor are gone; the floor is now gleaming, almost reflective. The room has been sprayed with floral water, giving it a fresh, natural scent. Three newly bought eye drops and a freshly filled kettle are neatly arranged on the table.

The eldest brother, Jiao Liwei, was sitting on the edge of the bed sewing clothes. When he saw them come back, he put the needle and thread aside, pointed to the table, and said, "Hurry up and put the drops in. Your eyes are all red like you have conjunctivitis. I've prepared the water for you, it's boiled. Go to the bathroom to wash up, and add some cold water."

"Boss, are you possessed by the Snail Fairy?" With Liu Jing not around, Zhang Jian couldn't hold back his words again, grabbing eye drops and spitting them into his eyes.

"Stop talking nonsense." Jiao Liwei threw the sewn clothes to Zhang Qingheng. "I've already gone to the counselor. He said you guys were taken by Professor Zhang from the department to adjust the server, and it's considered official leave. Don't make me clean up this mess all the time. I'm practically the king of lies in our department."

"This is what you call logistical support." Bai Yuhang picked up the eye drops, tilted his head back, and dripped two drops into his eyes. The cool liquid seeped into his eyeballs, relieving the soreness quite a bit. "Boss, this service is five-star."

"Don't give me that crap. After you finish surfing the internet tonight, you have to add an extra dish to your dinner." Jiao Liwei chuckled and scolded, then said seriously, "By the way, I went to the water room earlier and overheard a few guys from the Materials Science department talking about our website. They said the stock function is amazing, even faster than the stock market on TV, and they're all guessing which big company is behind it. Some even said it was a professor from the Computer Science department at the university who led a team to do some side work."

"That's right, look who wrote the code." Zhang Jian got excited when he heard that, straightened his back, and was about to walk out. "I'm going to have a chat with them and teach these bumpkins a lesson."

"return."

Bai Yuhang grabbed him by the back of the collar and pushed him back into the chair.

"What are you showing off for? Are you afraid people won't know that we were just a bunch of poor students who did this?" Bai Yuhang tapped the table. "The more sensational the rumors are, the better. It would be best if they thought we were backed by a subsidiary of Microsoft or IBM. Mystique is the best moat. Once they find out it was just a few of us in dorm 206 who did it, those big companies can crush us in no time."

Zhang Jian shrank his neck: "So... we're just going to hold it in like this?"

"Hold it in." Bai Yuhang stuffed the eye drops his boss had just bought into his pocket, looking out the window at the university campus where peers were still worrying about their studies and postgraduate entrance exams. "Once we've ripped the sky out of Harbin, we'll tell them who poked the stick. That'll be real fun."

Wan Lianghao chuckled: "Sixth Brother's move was cunning; that's called hiding one's merits and fame."

"Alright, stop joking around. Listen to Lao Liu, none of you should stand out and show off. I'll quickly explain things to the others as well." Jiao Liwei glanced at his watch.

"Let's go back to sleep. We don't have classes this afternoon, so let's go to an internet cafe to relax, practice our shooting, and also check out the 'company' in Taikoo Street. There's something I want to talk to you all about," Bai Yuhang said as he took off his coat.

The dormitory quickly returned to silence, except for Zhang Jian's carefree snoring, which once again echoed in the clean room.

Bai Yuhang lay in bed, listening to the familiar rhythm, and closed his eyes. That web crawler from Baidu was probably still crawling tirelessly at this moment.

Come on, everyone come on.

This game of chess has only just begun.