With bags in both hands, Natsukawa Sosuke stood beneath the dormitory building and let out a long breath. It was already three in the afternoon. After following the map on his phone all the way here, he'd finally made it to the dorm, though carrying his computer had nearly worn him out. Looking at the modern-looking building before him, he had to admit it was far more luxurious than the dorms at the university in his previous life. This was the "starting village" where he'd be spending the next three years.
He headed for the dormitory lobby on the first floor, then went with Ayanokoji Kiyotaka to the dorm manager's window. After checking that their student information was in order, the dorm manager handed Natsukawa a key card. "Room 403. The rules are in the room. Read them carefully."
"403. Good thing it's not 404." Natsukawa took the key card, the corner of his mouth twitching. "If it were 404, you might not be able to find me one day, Ayanokoji. What's your room number?"
"401."
"Then we'll be neighbors. You'll have to come visit often." Natsukawa patted Ayanokoji on the shoulder. Only after raising his arm did he realize he'd been carrying things this whole way; his hands were practically wrecked. He could have kept going if he'd never put them down, but picking them back up now would be another matter. He glanced at the heavy computer and miscellaneous items on the floor, then at Ayanokoji's free hand. His eyes shifted, and an idea came to him.
"Ayanokoji, my dear bro!" he said earnestly. "As the saying goes, 'Hesitate and you'll lose; act decisively and you'll get nothing'—no, wait, 'act decisively and you'll make friends!' Look at this frail body of mine. A strong breeze could knock me over. Could you give your buddy a hand and carry these things up to the fourth floor?"
Ayanokoji watched him in silence for two seconds, as if trying to process what he'd just said. "Are we already good friends?"
"Of course!" Natsukawa began spouting nonsense with a perfectly straight face. "That's what good friends do: help each other out. Today you give me a hand, tomorrow I give you a push. It's all part of being buddies."
Perhaps a keyword had triggered something, or perhaps it was such a small favor that he didn't mind doing it. Ayanokoji silently picked up the heaviest supermarket bag. "...Let's go."
They took the elevator to the fourth floor. Natsukawa swiped his card and pushed open the door to 403. A standard one-room apartment lay before him, complete with a kitchen and bathroom. He set his computer on the desk in the bedroom, then arranged his toiletries in the bathroom.
"Thanks, Ayanokoji. Here, catch!" Natsukawa tossed him a drink he'd picked up at the supermarket.
"No need to thank me. I'm going back to my room." Ayanokoji caught it one-handed, glanced at the drink, and left without a word.
"Very well, you may leave. His Majesty is tired too." Natsukawa joked as he closed the door. At last, he was alone in the room.
The world fell quiet. Natsukawa went to the desk, opened the packaging, took out his laptop, and plugged it in.
"Alright, time to see what this 'starter pack' can do." He rubbed his hands together, his eyes shining with the unmistakable gleam of a tech geek. "I focused on embedded systems in my previous life, so I'm not as familiar with big-data scraping, but the principles are the same! And the whole reason I chose this was so I could build my own tools in an environment where there's 'nothing to work with, so you have to make everything by hand'!"
Windows, start!
Natsukawa's fingers flew across the keyboard. The laptop came with an original copy of Windows, saving him the trouble of finding some way to make an installation USB. First, he installed the classics: Notepad++ and FileZilla.
No VS Code? No problem. Notepad++ will serve me well into the future!
Next came the main event. He skillfully downloaded the Python 2.7 installer.
Python 3 was already available online, but it seemed to have only come out recently, and its ecosystem wasn't as extensive. He'd stick with 2.7; it would save him a lot of trouble.
The installation went smoothly. Then he started configuring the necessary libraries. Fortunately, the school's intranet had a surprisingly rich collection of resources and even offered a local pip mirror.
pip install requests
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml
A few commands later, the core dependencies were installed.
Thanks to the school's IT department! It really is nice standing on the shoulders of giants. Now I don't have to build everything from scratch, starting with the HTTP protocol.
But he soon hit his first snag. When he tried installing pandas for data analysis, the command line threw up a pile of infuriating dependency errors.
Of course. Setting up a Python environment on Windows will always give you "surprises." My previous life spoiled me with Anaconda. Now I know how brutal a native environment can be.
He sighed and decisively gave up on pandas.
"Does not having pandas mean I can't do data analysis? You're underestimating my manual optimization skills!" He rolled up sleeves he wasn't wearing. "It's just dictionaries, lists, and loops, right? I'll write the statistical logic myself. It might even perform better! (Not really.)"
Core development begins!
He created a new Python file and started typing.
# Import the libraries that will save my life
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time
import datetime
import re
Fortunately, the school forum could be accessed through a computer browser; it wasn't restricted to phones.
"First, I need to simulate a login and get the cookie..." he muttered as he examined the forum's login interface. "This form structure is a little old-fashioned."
Before long, he'd written the network request code and successfully retrieved the HTML for the forum's homepage.
"Next, I need to parse the post list and extract the posting times." He stared at the dense HTML source code, frowning. "This DOM structure... is a bit haphazard. No consistent CSS class names? I'll have to chew through it using regular expressions and parent-child node locations."
BeautifulSoup isn't omnipotent, either. When you run into malformed HTML, you still have to bash your head against it! It's like being handed a Swiss Army knife and then discovering that most of the time, you have to pick the lock with the toothpick.
He threw himself into the battle with the HTML structure. Time slipped away amid the clatter of his keyboard.
He didn't know how much time had passed before his stomach's protests brought him back to reality. Outside, the sky had grown dark.
"Sure, coding feels great for a while, but when you code nonstop... you get hungry." He rubbed his tired eyes and decided to take care of dinner first.
Fortunately, the school had more than just cafeterias. Natsukawa found a ramen shop on the commercial street that looked decent and went there to satisfy his hunger.
After dinner, Natsukawa decided to stop by the supermarket and pick up some ingredients that would be easy to prepare. He wouldn't always want to go out to eat, after all; it couldn't hurt to keep a few things on hand.
He picked up some rice, noodles, pork belly, eggs, and other ingredients, then returned to the dorm beneath the cool night breeze.
Night settled over the campus. The light in room 403 came on again. Natsukawa took a quick shower, then returned to the world of code. He refined the parsing logic and wrote the core functions for converting time strings and calculating hourly statistics.
Close to one in the morning, he ran the final test. The script executed successfully, and the console clearly displayed the distribution of forum posts by hour over the past twenty-four hours.
"Done!" He let out a long breath, his sense of accomplishment driving away his fatigue. "It's only a prototype, but the core pipeline works! Requests for fetching, BeautifulSoup for parsing, and manual data processing... end-to-end!"
It felt like putting together a machine that could actually run with only a limited set of tools, each gear carefully adjusted by hand.
He saved the code and closed the laptop. Outside, the entire campus lay silent.
"Some things really are written into your DNA." Natsukawa smiled and shook his head, then turned off the light. "Like spending the night fixing dependencies and debugging bugs."
The room quietly sank into darkness. But his campus life was beginning to fall into place, along with the first "information-gathering tool" he'd built with his own hands. He knew what lay beneath the school's polished exterior, but he couldn't simply come out and say it. He needed concrete evidence to back up his supposed "deductions." He had to convince buyers that the information he provided was worth the price. And this crude little scraper would become one of his eyes, helping him "see things coming" at this unusual school.
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