House Dad's Literary Life

Chapter 425: Your Delivery Has Arrived

“Hello, your Sahara Express package has arrived. Please sign for it.”

At noon, a deliveryman wearing a red Sahara Express jacket, black pants, and a red motorcycle helmet knocked on the door. Mu Yucheng, who had specially taken a day off to stay home, had finally received the package he had been eagerly waiting for.

“Thank you!” Mu Yucheng took the pen, signed the delivery slip, and said to the deliveryman with a smile, “Your company is doing pretty well now. You even have uniforms.”

The Sahara Express deliveryman smiled shyly and nodded, saying, “Yes. Last week, the company issued new uniforms. From now on, we’ll have to wear this set whenever we’re working.”

“Just one set? Are you going to wear this every single day of the year?” Mu Yucheng caught the loophole in the other party’s words and teased him with a smile.

“No, no, there are three sets. This one is the winter uniform, and there are three more sets for summer,” the deliveryman quickly explained.

“Haha, I’m just joking. I actually saw a report about Sahara Express in the newspaper. It seemed like you got a new boss, and everything has completely changed. Just look at this overall appearance and spirit—it has improved a great deal! You’ve already pulled far ahead of the other delivery companies!” Mu Yucheng took the package box, gave the deliveryman a thumbs-up, and said.

After the Spring Festival, Sahara Online Mall announced a new appointment. Fu Jun was no longer serving as the CEO of Sahara Express, and the position of person in charge of Sahara Express was taken over by Li Long. Of course, in terms of position, Fu Jun was still Li Long’s superior, and Li Long still had to report his work to Fu Jun.

The name Li Long was still relatively unfamiliar in China. However, his overseas career had been quite impressive. Before taking over Sahara Express, he had first spent ten years working at DNL, a well-known international logistics company in the German Federation, and then served as the head of FEX International Express’s European division for five years.

Both of those courier companies were giants in the express delivery industry. Of course, China’s domestic express market was unique and relatively closed off. Although those companies had operations in China, their scale was still far smaller than several of the major domestic state-owned delivery companies.

Of course, there was no need to go into so much detail. Li Long was considered one of the elite overseas returnees. After Sahara Express recruited him back, he immediately began making sweeping reforms to the company.

It was also because Sahara Express was young and full of vitality, combined with Fu Jun’s trust and support, that Li Long’s ideas were able to be implemented.

First, there was team building. As Yang Yi had previously suggested, Sahara Express acquired or eliminated all of its miscellaneous franchisees one by one. It provided all its delivery personnel with training in batches, strengthened their sense of discipline, and improved their approach to customer service. This was also the main reason Sahara Express’s customer satisfaction ratings had gradually risen after the new year.

Then came the establishment and maintenance of the brand, including the standardized uniforms that Mu Yucheng saw now, as well as the standardized replacement of their vehicles and so on. Of course, all of this required a considerable amount of financial investment. Even with Fu Jun’s support, it was impossible to complete the entire upgrade all at once. For now, they had only replaced the uniforms with standardized ones, while the vehicles still needed to be upgraded gradually and in batches.

There were also many other improvements, such as technical upgrades in areas like scientific zoning and sorting, as well as improvements on the management side. There were simply too many to list. Li Long was using advanced ideas from overseas to take Sahara Express to an entirely new level.

Of course, Mu Yucheng wasn’t particularly interested in learning more. He had only happened to see the report in the newspaper and casually chatted with the deliveryman about it. After the deliveryman left, Mu Yucheng couldn’t wait to close the door, opened the package, and took out the book he had been waiting for for nearly half a month!

“Journey Under the Midnight Sun”. Like the other 1.2 million fans who had participated in the preorder, Mu Yucheng was very curious about what this book was actually about.

The cover was already familiar to him, so there was no need to examine it any further. He tore open the plastic wrapping on the outside and immediately opened the book. The book had a very distinctive style: there were no color pages at all, and the overall color scheme was purely black and white. It was quite unusual.

There was no table of contents. He turned to the second page, and a small line of text reading “Chapter One” unveiled the first layer of mystery in the story.

However, Mu Yucheng was a little dumbfounded. He found that he was already having some trouble understanding the very first chapter.

It seemed to be about a police officer entering a crime scene to investigate, but the story was very fragmented, even including such trivial details as him buying a grilled shrimp cake before entering the scene.

Dialogues such as “That building had already become a playground for children” left Mu Yucheng completely baffled, and the conversations that followed at the crime scene only confused him even more. There were remarks like “The victim was killed after he had eaten his fill” and “The belt was fastened two holes looser than usual,” and so on.

Were these all clues left by Yang Yi? Was he asking readers to guess who the murderer was?

Perhaps true mystery novel fans could discover some hidden clues, but Mu Yucheng wasn’t at that level. He wasn’t a true mystery novel fan, and could only make wild guesses on his own.

“I think it was probably the victim’s wife. Her behavior was too strange. Even the police officer could tell she was pretending!” Mu Yucheng muttered to himself.

However, he soon realized a problem. This was a physical book, not an online novel. Even if he had some thoughts about the story, there was no comment section for him to share them in!

Wait!

It wasn’t that there was none. Mu Yucheng excitedly logged onto his SNS and asked in a Prison Break readers’ group that fans had created themselves, “Is anyone reading Great Yang Yi’s new book, ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’, right now? Come on, let’s discuss it!”

“What? Great Yang Yi has a new book out? How come I can’t find it on Qiyue?”

Mu Yucheng had no choice but to tell the other party where “Journey Under the Midnight Sun” was being sold, even sending over the link. However, if they placed an order only now, the book probably would not arrive for another two or three days. And even that was only possible because Sahara Express was so fast.

“Old Mu, you’re not being fair! You had something good and didn’t share it sooner, and you’re only telling us now!”

Mu Yucheng’s online name, “Mu Yuchen,” was fairly well-known among Yang Yi’s fans. His conversation with that one user drew quite a few lurkers out of hiding. They all began blaming Mu Yucheng while also calling their friends and ordering the book from Sahara Online Mall.

“Old Mu, I bought ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ too. I just got it in my hands, and I can’t stop reading it! Come on, come on, let’s discuss it. I’ve been wanting to find someone to talk to!” Finally, there was someone who had bought the book.

Once there was a first, there would be a second. Before long, some twenty netizens who had bought the book responded.

However, to prevent them from spoiling the story ahead of time, at the strong insistence of the angry masses, Mu Yucheng hurriedly created a small group and pulled those twenty-some people into it. Then everyone began discussing the book starting from the first chapter, with those who read faster forbidden from giving away any spoilers.

However, after Mu Yucheng put forward his theory, a “veteran mystery novel reader” laughed and told him, “Old Mu, let me tell you—the murderer absolutely cannot be the victim’s wife! According to the usual rules of mystery novels, the more suspicious someone seems at the beginning, the less likely they are to be the real culprit!”

“The real murderer is usually the most inconspicuous and least likely one!” the other person said smugly.

“Then who do you think it is? It couldn’t be Officer Cao, could it?” Mu Yucheng retorted, unconvinced. “He’s the least likely person to be the murderer.”

“Uh… I can’t figure that out either.”

“Don’t you all feel that the victim’s family in the story is extremely depressing? The mother acts very strangely, and that boy named Tong Shiliang is also a dark and gloomy child. Could it be that his mother was having an affair with that employee surnamed Song, and then the two of them killed his father? Maybe Tong Shiliang discovered the truth, which was why he became so withdrawn?” one reader commented.

“That’s possible!” Mu Yucheng thought the possibility was quite high.

“Impossible. That guy surnamed Song appears too often in the book, and the suspicion surrounding him is too obvious. Unless Great Yang Yi had lost his mind, there’s no way he would reveal the murderer so quickly!” the veteran mystery novel reader immediately argued.

“Then how do you explain Tong Shiliang’s mother’s strange behavior?” the other reader asked, unconvinced.

The other readers also began taking sides and offering their own theories, but no one could convince anyone else.

“Stop arguing. How about we read the next chapter together? I really want to know who the murderer actually is!” Mu Yucheng had no choice but to stop them. His suggestion received everyone’s unanimous approval.