My Apocalypse System Arrives 10 Years Early

Chapter 197: Chapter 153: Great Tea Sales, Trip to the Provincial Capital

The first shipment of tea arrived—over 1,600 jin from two separate suppliers.

Tea leaves are actually quite bulky, so over 1,600 jin looked like a massive amount.

This time, they had ordered a total of 19,000 jin of spring tea from six different factories. The order included both black and green tea of various grades, costing a total of over 7.6 million yuan. The average price was around 400 yuan per jin. Still, Li Xiang’s house was so large that storing this amount of tea was no problem.

The 19,000 jin of tea wouldn’t arrive all at once, but in batches. Meanwhile, Li Xiang had already started live-streaming with the three girls to sell it.

Right, whatever they couldn’t sell online would be saved for the teahouse’s grand opening later.

The National Tea House would be completed around summertime, and its opening would also require tea. Since spring was the main harvesting season, it was better to stock up now. If they waited until summer to buy, the factories might not have any good stock left. Even if they did, it would just be what was left over from spring.

Meanwhile, large quantities of packaging bags, canisters, and gift boxes also began to arrive, turning Li Xiang’s house into a bustling tea-packing operation.

For this live-stream sale, Zhao Xueqing was naturally the main star. She would be brewing, tasting, and explaining the tea on camera. Li Xiang was also one of the most important streamers, as the audience was basically all his fans.

Yao Yao and Lei Xiaohui, on the other hand, could only make occasional guest appearances on the stream, as they were responsible for supervising the packing team.

With so many orders, and each customer having different packaging requirements, didn’t each one have to be packed individually?

Some women from Li Family Village, like Aunt Jiang and Li Yucheng’s wife, along with a few women Zhao Xueqing brought from Zhaojiaping, and some folks from Lei Family Gully and Yaojialing, were all hired to help. They were all nimble-fingered, used to years of farm work and household chores. Everyone packed together, and even Granny Li Xiang joined in.

These helpers were all paid 100 yuan a day. While it wasn’t a huge amount, the work was simple—just weighing, packing, sealing, and preparing packages for shipping. For such light-handed work that also let them sit and chat, the women couldn’t have been happier.

”How much money must Xiang Ya be making? With all this tea.”

”I know, right? They ship so much every day. The courier truck comes to pick up the goods around four in the afternoon.”

”I’ve never seen so many packages shipped in a single day. This really is a big business.”

The women couldn’t help but gossip, their words filled with envy. When Granny Li Xiang heard them, she would just chuckle and offer a few humble replies.

Some of the people from Zhaojiaping, Yaojialing, and Lei Family Gully had originally thought that Zhao Xueqing, Yao Yao, and Lei Xiaohui were just fooling around with Li Xiang every day. They saw it as improper work, and it gave the girls a ”bad reputation.”

’Three girls constantly revolving around one man—what did that look like? Were they really doing proper work?’

But after coming to do this temp work, they finally understood. The girls were incredibly busy every day, and they made money so easily. The women all wanted to recommend their own younger relatives for jobs here, but when they asked, Li Xiang wasn’t hiring at the moment.

He would only start hiring after the neighboring Holy Realm Garden was finished and the National Style Tavern, teahouse, cafe, milk tea shop, and other businesses opened.

These aunties were quick to seize the opportunity and started trying to reserve spots in advance.

Li Xiang promised them that he would give their children priority when the time came. Those whose families had no children of a suitable age were quite envious.

Yao Yao and Lei Xiaohui were mainly in charge of printing shipping labels and cross-checking them with the tea grade and quantity for each order, ensuring nothing was sent out incorrectly.

The hired women were middle-aged and older; while they were excellent workers, they weren’t necessarily meticulous with such details. That’s why Li Xiang had the younger girls oversee them.

When Yao Yao and Lei Xiaohui did join the live stream, their main job was to be the ”hype crew”—showing off their talents and livening up the atmosphere.

After all, a live stream where someone just drones on and on about the product all day is boring.

Yao Yao’s dancing and Lei Xiaohui’s martial arts were both quite stunning.

They had brought all their performance costumes with them. Li Xiang gave them a separate room to use as a dressing room, complete with a wardrobe and a large, full-length mirror, allowing them to switch up their look each time.

Streaming with Li Xiang also helped them gain followers. All three had now surpassed 100,000 fans, with Yao Yao doing even better at nearly 300,000.

But they were all contracted artists with Eternal Night Media, so they couldn’t just go solo. Besides, with that number of followers, it was better to stick with Li Xiang and earn some easy money than to strike out on their own.

’And if by any chance one of them became the boss’s wife, well, that would be even better.’

With the new tea on the market, many people were eager to try something fresh. This, combined with Li Xiang’s competitive pricing and his large base of loyal fans, led to great sales. Many people bought some to try, and their reaction was, ’Damn, this is great value for the price! Brother Xiang is a stand-up guy.’ As a result, they became repeat customers or recommended the tea to their own friends and family.

After the fans’ friends and relatives tried the tea and found it to be excellent and reasonably priced, they also placed orders.

In the end, it was all about word-of-mouth.

In less than three days, they sold over 8,000 jin. Li Xiang had to call his suppliers to hurry them up, as his stock could no longer keep up with sales.

The suppliers: ”...” ’Holy crap, are they really that good?’

Urged on by Li Xiang, the suppliers had no choice but to work in shifts through the night to expedite his shipment, giving him top priority. After all, Li Xiang had placed his order early, and it was a large one.

In reality, during the tea harvesting season, the factories were almost always lit up and running all night. It was their busiest time of the year.

After about seven or eight busy days, all the stock Li Xiang had previously ordered was completely sold out, forcing him to place another large follow-up order.

Another two weeks passed. In total, the Eternal Night Media team had sold over 45,000 jin of tea, with a gross profit of over 11 million yuan.

This performance left Zhao Xueqing, Yao Yao, Lei Xiaohui, and the accountant, who was Zhao Xueqing’s cousin-in-law, utterly speechless.

You have to understand, many publicly traded companies don’t even make that much profit in a year; a lot of them actually lose money.

There’s a joke online that the annual profit of many public companies isn’t enough to buy a single apartment in a first-tier city, yet their shareholders can buy several just by selling off a small portion of their stock.

The soul-searching question: which bubble is bigger, the real estate market’s or the stock market’s?

With results like these, Li Xiang only needed to do a few of these sales pushes a year, and he could spend the rest of his time just playing around.

Of course, tea sales couldn’t stay this explosive forever. As the harvesting season ended, Li Xiang’s sales hit a bottleneck. Things slowed down, and they were left with about two thousand jin of unsold inventory, which was stored in a room on the first floor of his house.

This remaining stock would be listed in their online shop to be sold off slowly. It could also be used when the National Tea House opened, or just serve as their daily drinking tea.

Li Xiang gave several jin of tea to his maternal grandparents, his Little Aunt, Jiang Jianguo, Zhao Xueqing, Yao Yao, Lei Xiaohui, Li Jinyu, Li Yucheng, a few people from the village committee, and some officials he knew in the town and county governments. After all, he was running such a big business; shouldn’t his friends and family get a few perks?

Top Aunt was also extremely supportive, buying a large quantity of the most expensive pre-Qingming tea from Li Xiang.

Of course, Luo Feifei couldn’t possibly drink that much tea herself. She was purely supporting Li Xiang. Her mother could then use the tea as gifts to maintain her social connections.

Li Xiang included a few small gifts with Top Aunt’s order. Among them were some trinkets he had carved from the Thunderstruck Wood in his spare time: a Hairpin, a bracelet, a Pendant, a Protective Talisman, and even a small Peach Wood Sword.

He couldn’t carve anything too complex, only simple things like these.

When Luo Feifei received them, she stored them all in a special jewelry box. She didn’t actually wear much jewelry, as her natural beauty needed no adornment from gems. But when it came to the ones Li Xiang sent, she would occasionally pick one out to wear.

With the tea sales winding down, Li Xiang took Yao Yao, Zhao Xueqing, and Lei Xiaohui to the provincial capital.

Because they had been so busy with the tea business, the girls’ driving lessons had been delayed. They still hadn’t gotten their licenses, so Li Xiang, the boss, had to do all the driving himself.

The provincial capital wasn’t too far, only two or three hundred kilometers away. After arriving, they checked into the hotel at Xu Xuan’s sports club, each getting their own deluxe king-bed room.

Xu Xuan had joked about getting them a large suite so all four of them could stay together. Li Xiang’s reply was, ”What kind of person do you think I am?”

The main purposes of this trip were to deliver some medicine to Xu Xuan and to meet the Old Master of the Xu Family.

Xu Xuan’s payment of fifty million had arrived a long time ago, but Li Xiang had been too busy to follow up.

Another reason was that Yao Yao had contacted a red wine supplier, and Li Xiang was bringing his team for an on-site visit to negotiate a deal.

Everyone had been involved in the tea business, so this time Zhao Xueqing wanted to ”contribute” as well. ’I can’t let myself be left out this time,’ she thought. ’Besides, if Lei Xiaohui and I don’t go, doesn’t that mean Li Xiang will be on a business trip alone with Yao Yao? And they’d be staying overnight? Damn! Who knows what might happen then!’

That’s why all three girls were so enthusiastic about going on business trips.

This made Li Xiang feel quite gratified. The three of them might still be lacking in terms of professional skills, but their work ethic was impeccable—they were practically fighting each other for the chance to come along.