Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

On the screen, the eerie green dots, like countless stars, converged into a surging river.

Zhang Jian stared intently at the real-time data stream in the background, forgetting even to blink.

This was the first time he had ever directly seen more than 500,000 living people transformed into code flowing from his fingertips.

Every tick of the data represents a moment when someone across China is typing on a keyboard, sending laughter or tears.

"This architecture... is so damn beautiful." Zhang Jian couldn't help but reach out to touch the screen, his tone full of pilgrimage-like piety. "This code is cleaner than my face, with closed-loop logic and not a single unnecessary word. Pony Ma and his team really have some skills."

"He's definitely a master." Bai Yuhang stood behind him, twirling a lighter in his hand. "If we were to write this from scratch, even with me, it would take at least six months to develop a product with this level of capability. Multimedia messaging, real-time sending and receiving, offline processing, status management—he's filled in all the gaps."

Wan Lianghao pushed up his glasses and pointed to one section: "But Sixth Brother, there's a problem. I see the data throughput is stable now, but if the concurrency doubles, won't the server just start smoking?"

"You have a sharp eye." Bai Yuhang pulled up a chair and sat down. "This is what I'm going to talk about next. Pony's technology is fine, but he didn't expect the user base to grow so quickly, and he didn't have the money for redundancy. Right now, OICQ is like a highway with only one lane. When there are few cars, it goes incredibly fast, but when there are many cars, it gets completely blocked."

He tapped twice on the table: "Third brother, fourth brother, your task from now on isn't to expand servers and modify code, it's to expand the infrastructure. Don't just focus on the 500,000 daily users; build a redundant architecture based on the standard of 5 million online users. We have money now, plenty of servers, plenty of bandwidth, but if the foundation isn't laid properly, no matter how tall the building is, it will collapse."

Upon hearing the number "five million," Zhang Jian's eyes gleamed even brighter, the kind of excitement a tech fanatic feels when faced with a top-tier challenge.

At his workstation, Zhang Qingheng squatted under the newly installed computer desk, plugging the last network cable into the back of the computer case. He poked his head out, covered in dust and dirt, with a bead of sweat still clinging to his glasses, a drop of sweat that had fallen from his head while he was crawling under the desk.

"Sixth brother, third brother, fourth brother! The network is working now. I'm going to log into the backend and take a look at our old servers in Harbin."

This shout startled Zhang Jian, who was engrossed in reading the data on his new keyboard using OICQ.

The people in the room stopped what they were doing and realized that from the time they boarded the train until now, a full two days and two nights, forty-eight hours, the Qihang Navigation Station, Music Station, and Renren.com had been left there like orphans, left to fend for themselves.

Forget about maintenance, there isn't even anyone to check the backend and restart the service.

In this era where systems frequently crash with "illegal operation" blue screens, even if you're using a Linux architecture with an Nginx engine, running a website naked for two days is no different from throwing money away on the street.

"How is it? Did it break? Is it all red?" Jiao Liwei stopped wiping the rag in his hand and looked over at Zhang Qingheng.

Zhang Qingheng didn't say anything, but simply turned the brand-new Philips monitor in front of him around and tapped his fingers on the Enter key.

On the screen, green data streams flowed down like a waterfall, without any red error messages, only neat lines of access logs, user posting records, and user click feedback.

"Incredible!" Zhang Qingheng pushed up his glasses, grinning broadly at his white teeth. Pointing to the load curve on the screen, which was as smooth as a ruler, he exclaimed, "Our low-spec server in the data center, combined with Lao Liu's architecture and Lao San's scripts, actually held up! Two days without anyone checking or restarting it, and not a single lag. No drop in traffic, no service interruption—this thing is incredibly resilient!"

Upon hearing this, Zhang Jian slammed the IBM manual he was using to fan himself onto the table, his nostrils practically pointing to the sky, his face radiating the smugness typical of tech geeks: "Nonsense, look who wrote the architecture. It's the result of countless sleepless nights we brothers spent coding it. Back then, Lao Liu forced me to do redundancy and stress testing, and I complained. But now, look at this, it's not a website, it's just a lump of metal. You could throw it anywhere and it'd dent it, but it just won't break."

"What a braggart!" Liu Jing said, prompting a burst of laughter from the crowd.

Bai Yuhang leaned against the floor-to-ceiling window, twirling a windproof lighter in his hand. Listening to his brothers' excited chatter, he finally felt relieved.

This is their original foundation, perhaps rough, perhaps wild, but with a reassuring resilience.

Just like the brothers in 206, even if no one is watching, as long as there is electricity and some sunlight, they can keep spinning until they poke a hole in the sky.

I glanced at the clock on the wall; it was just past ten o'clock.

The office was tidied up, and these energetic young men couldn't stay idle any longer.

Bai Yuhang turned to Zhang Qingheng, who was holding an English dictionary and flipping through it: "Seventh Brother, stop memorizing words and do something productive. Go online and look up two domain names for me."

"What domain name?" Zhang Qingheng put down the dictionary and went to the computer.

"QQ.com, and QH.com."

"QH, I know, it's an abbreviation for 'Starting Ship'," Zhang Qingheng asked while typing. "What does QQ mean? Isn't our chat software called OICQ? We have two domains, OICQ.com and OICQ.net."

"The name is too long and hard to pronounce. We'll have to change it sooner or later." Bai Yuhang didn't explain much. "The name OICQ is causing a lawsuit with the Americans. From now on, we'll call it QQ. It's easy to pronounce."

A few seconds later, Zhang Qingheng looked at the screen and scratched his head: "Sixth Brother, QH.com is fine, no one's registered it. But QQ.com... looking at the domain's WHOIS information, it's in an American's hands, someone named Robert something. What do we do?"

"What else can we do? Contact him and buy it." Bai Yuhang's tone was as calm as if he were talking about buying two scallions. "Send an email to ask the price. No matter how much it costs, we have to get it."

Jiang Shuo, who was pressing the calculator nearby, perked up his ears the moment he heard the word "buy" and turned around warily: "We have to spend money again? How much are these letters worth? Sixth Brother, we just spent over two million..."

"This is called a house number." Bai Yuhang glanced at him. "We're going to build an internet empire in the future. We can't let hundreds of millions of users forget where their houses are, can we? If we're a second late, the price will increase tenfold."

Jiang Shuo clutched his chest, sat back down with a pained expression, and muttered, "What a waste of money! So wasteful! We had to go to America to buy a few cheap domain names..."

The glass door made a slight clattering sound when it was pushed open.

Su Muqing stood at the door with several books in her arms, clearly having rushed over as soon as get out of class ended.

A few strands of hair, ruffled by the wind, still clung to her forehead, and her eyes were full of surprise.

"Wow, you guys moved way too fast! I thought I was going to see cardboard boxes all over the floor."

Su Muqing walked into the office, her leather shoes making a crisp sound as they stepped on the freshly polished marble floor.

She looked around, her gaze lingering for a moment on the two rows of brand-new IBM computers in the office area, before finally settling on Bai Yuhang in front of the floor-to-ceiling window in the center.

"Boss Bai, that's quite efficient."

Bai Yuhang stubbed out his cigarette and pointed at Zhang Jian, who was grinning foolishly at Zhang Qingheng's computer: "The main thing is that these guys are more excited about the new machine than they are about to see their own mother, so they're full of motivation."

"That's right!" Zhang Jian turned around and patted the monitor to show off. "Mu Qing, come and see! Our internet speed is amazing; downloads open in seconds. Lao Liu just connected to the Tencent backend, and we're monitoring all the netizens in China chatting right now."