Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

At 4:30 a.m., the smoke in the private room was so thick it was almost solid, making people's eyes sting.

The front-end recommendation page that Wan Lianghao was in charge of, the crawling script that Zhang Jian was mainly responsible for, the ranking page designed by Zhang Qingheng, plus the database created by Bai Yuhang and the core compression algorithm that is like black technology, finally came together in the same directory at this moment.

"Sixth Brother, is it starting?" Zhang Jian's middle and ring fingers hovered over the Enter key. His hands, which had become shiny from typing code for the past few days, were trembling slightly.

Bai Yuhang stubbed out the last half of his cigarette in the ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, his voice hoarse as if he'd swallowed two pounds of sand: "Let's do it. Let's see what it's made of."

"Smack."

The Enter key was pressed. The rapidly scrolling green characters on the screen stopped instantly, and at the end, a reassuring "Build Success" message appeared.

"No errors! Compilation complete!" Wan Lianghao yelled, almost crushing the iced tea in his hand.

"Don't rush to yell, check the local operation." Bai Yuhang slid his chair closer to the screen.

Opening the IP address of the internet cafe's local simulation environment, the page loads instantly. The previous rudimentary test page is gone, replaced by a clean and intuitive music ranking and download site. On the left are "Chinese Male and Female Singers," and on the right are "This Week's and This Month's Hottest Songs," with Nicholas Tse's cool face prominently featured in the recommendations.

Zhang Jian swallowed hard and clicked the orange online play button next to "Thank You for Your Love 1999".

Almost instantly, the website's media player popped up, and the guitar strumming intro was crisp and melodious, without any noise.

"This compression... is amazing." Zhang Jian stared at the "1.1MB" in the file properties, and listened to the clear human voice from the speakers. He had a look of disbelief on his face. "Sixth Brother, with this skill, if we went to sell pirated CDs, we could crush those people in Zhongguancun."

"Get to work." Bai Yuhang kicked Zhang Jian's chair leg. "Hurry up, stop getting carried away. Fourth brother, connect to the FTP server, target the Beijing Telecom server room, and dump all this stuff on it."

"Alright! I'll get right to it!" Wan Lianghao quickly opened the FTP software and started uploading files.

Watching the progress bar slowly move forward, Bai Yuhang turned to Zhang Jian and said, "Director Zhang, that 400GB of hard drive cache is our lifeline. Go check the scheduled cleanup script again. If the hard drive is full and causes a crash, even selling you wouldn't be enough to cover the losses."

Zhang Jian didn't even turn his head, his keyboard clattering loudly: "Don't worry. I've set up a 'kill' mode. Once the disk usage exceeds 90%, all those obscure songs ranked below 50% that nobody listens to will be wiped out. That's why hard drives are so precious now. When we have terabyte-level hard drives in the future, I'm going to store all of humanity's songs."

"That day will come." Bai Yuhang turned his gaze to the seventh brother, who was huddled in the corner. "Seventh brother, raise the flag."

Zhang Qingheng, who was holding a web design book and staring blankly, quickly sat up straight upon hearing this: "Hang...hang what?"

"Add a banner with 'GG' at the very top of the Qihang Navigation homepage," Bai Yuhang gestured. "Red background with yellow text, big font, and that kind of tacky color scheme. Write 'Massive music library, instant playback, free download, no lag.' Forget all those fancy words, just be simple, direct, and slap it right in the user's face."

Zhang Qingheng's face scrunched up like a bun. He hovered the mouse over the color palette for a while, unable to make a move. "Sixth Brother, this... this is too ugly! Our page has always been quite clean and refreshing. Red and yellow? That's like scrambled eggs with tomatoes. It's so unbecoming."

"Ugly? Ugly is what makes it eye-catching! This is the color for the opening!" Bai Yuhang slammed his fist on the table in exasperation. "Seventh Brother, remember this: the clean and simple design of the navigation site is to differentiate it from other products. Launching a music site is like hawking meat at the entrance of a market, not listening to an opera in a grand theater. Users go online to listen to music for fun, not to appreciate art. You have to make them think at a glance that this thing is definitely lively and comprehensive. Hurry up, stop dawdling."

Zhang Qingheng reluctantly chose a bright red background and added bold, bright yellow text. Once it was up and running, the originally minimalist page instantly gained a strong rustic feel, like a gentleman in a suit suddenly wearing a large gold chain.

"That's right." Bai Yuhang nodded in satisfaction. "Even a blind person could see these words at this moment."

After arranging everything, Bai Yuhang closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and his mind raced.

While the Geek Alliance group is still using static images to trick people into clicking and is still struggling with how to remove watermarks, his Nginx and compression algorithm architecture will be a game-changer even five years from now.

The internet today is like an uncultivated wasteland; whoever shouts the loudest and digs the fastest gets the land.

"Sixth Brother, the transfer is complete." Wan Lianghao's voice interrupted his thoughts. "File verification passed."

"The banner is up too, it's so glaring, like a skin disease," Zhang Qingheng muttered under his breath, clearly still bothered by the color scheme.

Bai Yuhang opened his eyes and glanced at the time in the lower right corner of the screen; it was exactly 5:00 AM.

"Switch DNS resolution. Point the domain back." Bai Yuhang stood up, stretched, and cracked his knuckles. "We previously pointed the domain to a backup US hosting server to avoid any issues. Now, it's time for the real deal to appear."

Zhang Jian took a deep breath, entered the command, and switched the parsing.

"Ping it." Bai Yuhang lit a cigarette, the flame illuminating his bloodshot eyes.

Zhang Jian pressed Enter.

Lines of "Reply from…" flashed rapidly across the screen.

"It's working!" Zhang Jian slapped his thigh. "Only 5 milliseconds of latency! That's about the same speed as reading from a local hard drive!"

"All done." Bai Yuhang exhaled a smoke ring, looked at the somewhat ugly but powerful GGBANNER image on the screen, and smiled. "Let those bastards from the Geek Alliance sleep. By the time they wake up, the world will have changed."

April 8th, 5:00 AM. Qihang Music Station, in the darkness before dawn, silently entered the landscape of the Chinese internet.

There was no ribbon-cutting, no flowers, just four young men with dark circles under their eyes from staying up all night, and empty cigarette boxes and iced tea canisters scattered all over the private room.

"Alright, you can take turns lying down like corpses now." Bai Yuhang stubbed out his cigarette. "Fourth and Seventh, keep an eye on the logs. If you have nothing to do for half an hour, take turns sleeping. When it gets light, we'll go eat meat buns, the kind with thin skin and lots of filling, and there have to be plenty."

"I want to eat five!" Zhang Jian mumbled sleepily, then tilted his head and started snoring on the keyboard.

Bai Yuhang collapsed onto the two chairs pushed together, and just like that, he instantly lost consciousness.

I didn't sleep well; my dreams were filled with flying code and server alarms.