Make a Fortune and Become Well-off [90] - Chapter 162

Jiang Ning was contemplating this while also calculating her bank balance.

With the popularity of Wuxia driven by Catcher in the Song Dynasty, the magazine sent Jiang Ning a new contract. In the newly signed contract, her thousand-word quota had been increased from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty.

This was nearly double her previous quota.

Of course, this increase was also due to the high royalties offered by Wuxia to prevent Jiang Ning from being poached.

At that time, apart from a few authors from Zhiyin and Storytelling Club who could reach this rate for a thousand words, it was the highest price on the market.

Along with this, the publishing house sent a contract for the second volume.

Catcher in the Song Dynasty had been serialized on Wuxia for four months. Each issue had 20,000 to 21,000 words, and Catcher in the Song Dynasty had serialized more than 300,000 words, which could form the first published book. For the second volume, as soon as the publishing contract was sent to Jiang Ning, 30% of the manuscript fee was quickly received.

Although best-selling novels could sell millions of copies at a time, this was true for very popular bestsellers. Catcher in the Song Dynasty, serialized in popular magazines as a pre-publicity warm-up, had already achieved significant popularity. The novel had more than one volume. It was not a one-time deal; it could potentially have three, four, or five volumes. Even if subsequent volumes did not match the sales of the first two volumes, they would still generate substantial revenue for the publishing house.

The reason why Catcher in the Song Dynasty could sustain continuous popularity for Wuxia was that after each case concluded, new cases could be viewed as independent stories. This way, new readers purchasing the serialized version of Catcher in the Song Dynasty would not feel the awkwardness of missing the beginning.

And once they read an issue of the serialization, they would be hooked.

As a loyal reader, they would constantly crave the next issue, and it would feel like scratching an itch if they couldn’t read it.

This was also the reason why Catcher in the Song Dynasty had been serialized for four months and still continued to be popular.

Even Li Ang, the founder of the Wuxia magazine, did not expect that Ning Meng was so savvy and talented in writing. The first work she wrote could be directly recognized as a piece by an insider of the crime system. This remained the case to this day, as Jiang Ning’s identity had not yet been discovered.

Everyone was misled, including Inspector Wu.

After he found the content of the middle issue, he immediately had an illusion. Although the article was about a case from Catches in the Song Dynasty, he always felt that the author was an insider from the Public Security Bureau writing about the case he was dealing with. He even doubted whether Ning Meng might be the suspect herself.

The sense of déjà vu was so strong, and some details were written in such a way that it made him feel like he was the father of the female lead described by the author.

He couldn’t help but be emotionally affected by this work, and he always felt that the suspicious case of the family annihilation in Catcher in the Song Dynasty was related to the case he was working on.

He had asked each of his colleagues, and they all denied writing it and were shocked by what Public Security Wu had found.

Then they compared the cases in their hands with the cases written in the book. They all looked at each other, feeling that the undercover was not the author but was hiding among several of their colleagues.

“Should we follow the clues in this story and look for it? Maybe the suspect is really hiding here and there is a murder weapon.” After saying this, the policeman himself felt ridiculous. How could he use a novel’s plot to find clues to the case and track down the murderer?

It seemed like a fantasy.

But after the proposal was made, everyone looked at each other in confusion. On one hand, they suspected that the author was among them, and on the other hand, they also suspected that the murderer was among them. What was more, the idea of the undercover murderer and the author being part of a joint conspiracy shocked them, but at the same time, they were secretly on guard, not wanting to be stabbed in the back before the case was solved.

In the book, the murder weapon was a kitchen knife from the victim’s home. After killing the person, the murderer took the murder weapon away and threw it into the middle of the river when he passed by the bridge.

Several people did not go to find the murder weapon first but went directly to the murderer.

After all, it was said in the book that the murderer was currently hiding in that small mountain village incognito as a resident son-in-law (one who lives with his in-laws). It wouldn’t be long before he commits the murder of the family again and escapes once more. The world was so vast, it might be difficult to find him, and given the murderer’s cruel temperament, people would continue to be killed in the future.

Several police officers were on guard against each other and, in tacit agreement, visited the small mountain village mentioned in the Catcher in the Song Dynasty.

What made them feel incredulous and speechless was that such a small mountain village actually existed. Even the description of the surrounding village matched the path where they were hiding.

They looked at each other, wondering who among them was undercover.

In a public security bureau in the provincial capital, a civilian employee curiously asked Public Security Wu who had finally caught the suspect.

Public Security Wu was on patrol to catch the culprit. He had not had a good sleep for several days and nights. He nodded with a tired expression and couldn’t help but look around among his colleagues.

“It has been interrogated. It was indeed the murderer. The tools of the crime have also been recovered.” The murderer had killed people neatly. After being caught, because there were various details written in Catcher in the Song Dynasty that matched their case, he was interrogated. At the same time, they also used some interrogation methods described in the novel. The murderer quickly broke down and confessed, even showing an indifferent attitude as if he had killed a chicken or duck.

Even his reasons for killing that family and the reasons for killing people in his original hometown were very similar to the logic written in Catcher in the Song Dynasty’s case.

Public Security Wu and others also interrogated him to see if he had any connections with public officials and whether there was a mastermind behind it, but nothing was revealed. The murderer had only been in the provincial capital for less than a week, and the murders were done casually.

When Mr. Wu returned home and lay on the bed before falling into a deep sleep, he was still thinking about who among their colleagues the author was.

It was very simple to get this answer; just find the magazine directly and ask for the author’s identity information. But since the suspect had been caught, the author was not the murderer, nor the mastermind behind it.

Could it be a coincidence?