Chapter Thirty-Five: New Demands

The second month passed in a flash.

During these days, Liu Ru had remained at the lakeside factory, taking part in hardly any of the academy’s lessons and relying mostly on self-study in her spare moments.

As a result, she was also forced to set aside her work with the Burial Snow Society. More than anything, Liu Ru wanted to bring Qiu Rui up to speed as quickly as possible, so that Qiu Rui could truly become the factory director and she herself could finally step away again.

But there was no doubt that this would be a very long process.

Still, even if judged only by Liu Ru’s side, the gains of this month were exceptionally gratifying.

Strictly speaking, it had really only been half a month.

In that half-month, Su Ziye had brought in two more sets of production equipment. To ordinary people, these machines were almost like miracles, utterly beyond comprehension in terms of their inner workings.

Fortunately, they did not need to understand them. It was enough simply to learn how to use them and avoid being killed by them.

Within half a month, the instant noodle factory alone had already reached a daily output of twenty tons.

Each serving of instant noodles weighed roughly one hundred and twenty grams. Two hundred tons amounted to twenty thousand kilograms, or twenty million grams.

That was one hundred and sixty thousand servings.

Each serving was priced at one copper sike, and the profit was about half the selling price. In the most ideal scenario, the daily net income would be eighty thousand copper sikes.

That was four hundred golden leaves.

The ideal monthly profit was twelve hundred golden leaves.

In a year, that would be fourteen thousand four hundred golden leaves.

Once again, it was unquestionably a fortune.

However, unlike the energy drink, whose direct buyers were Yeye Academy and the Golden Flash Trading Company, both wealthy and flush with cash, the instant noodles were only half distributed through the Golden Flash Trading Company. The other half had to be sold by finding buyers independently.

Of course, because the price was truly extremely low, even nearby villages could afford it. There were even many merchants who, upon hearing of it, drove their wagons all the way to the factory gates to buy large quantities at the factory price and resell them farther away at prices that could be multiplied by ten.

After all, for certain adventurers and sea traders, the portability and convenience of these instant noodles had almost no equal on the market. Even if one simply set up a pot to make some broth and added a little of the noodles, the taste of the soup could be lifted several levels at once.

Someone had once told Liu Ru about this, and Liu Ru had relayed it to Su Ziye. The core point was that the instant noodles were priced far too low; even if the price were raised fivefold, they would still be in such high demand that supply could not keep up.

After all, to put it bluntly, the total output right now was only six thousand tons a month. That was certainly an astonishing number, but the issue was that this was food. Edible food. And it was visibly very easy to store. Given the growing trend of merchants flocking to the factory gates to buy it, it would likely not be long before production needed to be expanded.

And the core of expansion lay in the progress of the lathe immortal’s handmade lathes, which, in this regard, was somewhat unsolvable.

Turning out three identical machines had already caused the lathe immortal something akin to creative fatigue. Though the final result was quite interesting, they were really not lathe workers, but masters of metal smelting and forging, among the very best in this era.

Su Ziye was already considering making lathes himself. After all, only by producing the machine tools that produced machine tools could he think about further expanding machinery output.

As for the request to raise prices, Su Ziye flatly rejected it.

He certainly still needed profit, and the current projected annual profit of ten thousand golden leaves was actually a little low compared to the expected one hundred thousand a year.

It was not that Su Ziye did not want to make more money; rather, the production capacity and the market size were right there.

And more importantly, when Su Ziye had established this instant noodle factory, what he ultimately wanted was not merely profit. In fact, one could even say profit was not the main point at all.

What he wanted was the factory’s influence.

At the present rate, wherever instant noodles could be sold, people would very quickly learn that such a wondrous new thing had been born by Shattered Star Lake. And that wondrous new thing was not the instant noodles themselves, but the factory capable of producing them on a massive scale at an almost absurdly low cost and with astonishing efficiency.

That was the best kind of advertising effect, something Su Ziye could hardly have hoped for more.

So, after securing the bare minimum of profit, he had no intention whatsoever of raising the factory price of the instant noodles.

As for those merchants who depended on hoarding and reselling, Su Ziye did not object for the time being. In fact, as the instant noodle factory continued to expand, they were effectively helping to spread publicity in advance. Once the logistics network was eventually laid out to a certain point, those individual merchants could be crushed with ease.

For now, what Su Ziye was thinking about more was the supporting infrastructure for the instant noodle factory.

Chief among these were flour and packaging.

At present, what they were mostly purchasing was wheat, which had to be shipped in bulk to the surrounding mills for further grinding into flour before it could be used. The problem was that the mills’ efficiency simply could not handle too much flour, and ordinarily there would not be such excessive demand. More importantly, the flour ground by the mills did not really meet Su Ziye’s standards; he could only grit his teeth and use it for now.

The shortfall still had to rely on the all-powerful Golden Flash Trading Company.

As for packaging, that too was a major headache for Su Ziye.

At the moment, the instant noodles were basically packaged in no packaging at all.

The most suitable source of plastic products would be petrochemical derivatives, but Su Ziye simply did not have the time or energy to go prospecting for oil. That technological path was basically one he could set aside. Without plastic, the best substitute was paper.

Papermaking was no secret in this world, and there were indeed quite a few workshops producing it.

But the problem was that paper products specifically meant for food packaging basically did not exist. Even if they did, there was no way the output would be sufficient.

And although the noodle block itself was good in every respect, its one flaw was that it could not withstand pressure or jolting at all; it broke very easily.

Many people actually liked eating broken instant noodle crumbs, feeling that they had a unique flavor of their own, but from the standpoint of appearance and intended use, unless one specifically wanted to sell crispy noodles, this was hard to accept. That said, Su Ziye did indeed have thoughts of making crispy noodles, which would allow him to further enter the children’s market. However, that would require an entirely dedicated production line, and the strain on the lathe immortal would be far too severe, so he could only set it aside for now.

So at present, Su Ziye most wanted to keep building factories.

And the targets for those factories were these two.

One was a flour mill to solve the raw material problem, and the other was a paper mill to solve the packaging problem.

In addition, the corrugated cardboard boxes produced by the paper mill were also something Su Ziye desperately needed. Without them, the losses in long-distance transport would be almost unbearable.

So very soon, Su Ziye once again came to stand before Karotes’s desk.