Pluck a feather from every passing goose.

So, it didn’t matter whether the merchants paid.

It didn’t matter whether the customers paid, either.

What mattered was who held the hundreds of thousands in transaction volume.

Who needed that volume of transactions?

This was about making the party who needed the service pay for it.

Whoever needed what I was offering would have to be the one to pay me.

And pay big!

It was the same principle.

Lu Yuan’s newspaper operated on the same logic.

It didn’t matter whether the readers paid.

It didn’t matter if someone wanted to advertise in the paper, or how much they paid.

In fact, Lu Yuan planned not to run ads for anyone except for his own products.

Anyone selling shoes or pants could take a hike.

What was important was this!

As reading the newspaper became more and more a part of the common people’s daily lives...

...someone would definitely be willing to pay for this service.

And they would pay big.

Lu Yuan had been wanting to set up a newspaper for a long time.

Otherwise, how could he have come up with such a comprehensive series of plans on the spot?

He had originally planned to wait until the factory was stable and all that.

And until the large sheds north of the city were finished.

The main thing was, Lu Yuan didn’t like to keep himself busy.

Why run around all day long? It was exhausting.

Stay home, give Aunt Zhao’s plump backside a squeeze, and kiss his wife’s tender little lips.

Wasn’t that the good life? 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

But then, the Liu Family from the Provincial City had to pop up out of nowhere.

So, this plan had to be moved up.

By afternoon, everything that needed to be arranged was in place.

Next was to let the bullets fly for a while.

First, he’d have the children spread the rhyming jingle.

Then, find a large building in the city to establish the newspaper office.

After that, he’d need to find some "snot-nosed kids" in other cities—that is, paperboys.

He also had to wait for his delivery men to return over the next few days to see if they’d dug up any big scoops.

A real headline, in other words.

Take the headline Lu Yuan had written, for example.

In Taiping City, it was certainly sensational.

But if you published it in the Provincial City...

...who would even read it?!

Some Madam Zhao? Some young master nephew?

Who the hell were they?

No one would even recognize the names!

Speaking of which, this newspaper business was something he planned to expand to every city in the future.

He would create a unique edition for each city.

After all, you couldn’t expect to have huge, sensational gossip that interested everyone every single day.

Going forward, the daily content of the paper would be the daily happenings of its respective city.

Only when there was a major scoop would all the city editions publish the same story.

For now, though, the newspaper office could only be established in Taiping City.

The unique editions for each city would have to be printed in Taiping City, then rushed by express courier to their destinations.

As for why he went through all this trouble instead of just opening local offices...

Heh.

Could he really just open one wherever he pleased?

If Lu Yuan opened an office in another city today and wrote something even slightly unflattering, offending a family with the same kind of local standing as the Zhao Family in Taiping City...

...the office would be on fire by the next day.

But who would dare to touch an office in Taiping City?

He could only establish offices elsewhere after the newspaper’s influence had grown.

For now, he’d have to do it the hard way.

...

「At dusk.」

Lu Yuan had finished his arrangements for the day and was ready to head home for dinner.

"Second Son, we can handle this business with the Liu Family on our own.

I’m afraid I’ll be quite busy for the next few days, so I won’t be able to keep you company.

If you’d like to continue sightseeing in Taiping City, feel free to put anything, anywhere, on the Zhao Family’s tab.

It’s all on us."

Lu Yuan said to Gu Gaoxu, cupping his hands in a fist-and-palm salute.

Lu Yuan was grateful that he had forced the Officials from the Government Office to show up today, but he really didn’t want to get entangled with Gu Gaoxu.

’It’s still easy to sever ties now,’ Lu Yuan thought. ’It’ll be a hassle later on.’

As for Gu Gaoxu, who had been following Lu Yuan all day, his overall feeling could be summed up in a single word.

Shock.

’This Lu Yuan is simply too ingenious,’ Gu Gaoxu thought.

Even now, Gu Gaoxu still didn’t understand what any of this had to do with dealing with the Liu Family.

But just watching him over the course of a day, seeing one intricate plan after another unfold...

Especially that "a, bo, ci, de" thing.

Gu Gaoxu had already memorized its strangely catchy rhythm until he knew it by heart.

And then, using that system to read the article Lu Yuan had written, matching the words to the phonetic symbols...

...it really was surprisingly easy to understand what each character meant.

’This thing...’

’Did Lu Yuan really come up with it in a single night?’

’And that miraculous machine.’

’What was it called... a ’photocopier’?’

’How is his brain wired? How on earth could he invent so many things in just one night??’

Of course, Gu Gaoxu would never know that Lu Yuan had been planning this newspaper business for a long, long time.

Otherwise, even if Lu Yuan had a System and was a transmigrator, he couldn’t have figured out so many details in a single night.

But regardless, Gu Gaoxu was truly and utterly astonished.

...

「Three days later.」

「At high noon.」

A major event occurred in Taiping City.

The Shenling Daily (Taiping City Edition) was published.

It was almost identical to a newspaper from Earth.

Notably, the paper featured not only text, but also illustrations.

They were specially commissioned from an artist.

The paper contained serious news as well as gossip.

It also had the day’s almanac and a section for helpful life hacks.

There were even short, humorous stories.

Not many copies were printed on the first day; only three thousand for the Taiping City area.

One thousand of those were to be sold in the surrounding towns and villages.

There was no need to print too many at the start, as not many people would buy it.

Over the course of the morning, only five or six hundred copies were sold in the city.

But that was fine. A newspaper wasn’t something where everyone needed their own copy.

In a factory workshop with several hundred people, for instance...

...ten copies would be enough to be passed around among all of them.

Besides, people have a natural desire to share.

Those who were literate and could understand the paper would almost certainly tell the people around them what it said.