Having earned their trust, Cæ’s determination surged as he went all out, trying to identify the problem with the restaurant over the next few days. The capacity for thought he had gained due to his Acquired Savant Syndrome was put to good use as he dedicated all of it for the sake of figuring out what was wrong.

First, he continued observing the customers that patronized the restaurant, cataloguing all of them mentally. Over the span of a week, he started focusing on patterns that were continuously recurring while he pondered the possibilities for why the restaurant was struggling to earn despite the influx of customers.

And one by one, he ruled out possibilities.

The first possibility he ruled out was food quality.

Selvig’s Ristorante had great reviews on the maginet as far as food quality went, and having worked in the restaurant for years now, he knew that the food Mr. Selvig cooked was beyond phenomenal.

Over the span of twenty years, they had come to grow a popular local brand thanks to the phenomenal taste of their food. All it took was tasting a bit of their food to verify that it had not only not gotten worse, but had also gotten better—the Selvigs had put in the effort to improve the quality of their food in hopes that it would bring more customers.

Another possibility Cæ ruled out was lowered spending thresholds.

Interest rates were low and the economy was doing fine. Additionally, the custom-tailored suits and expensive magical artifacts of the majority of customers who limited themselves to purchasing beverages indicated that their spending threshold on food was probably not low.

He could also rule out environmental factors, as they were entirely willing to consume beverages.

Thus, it begged the question.

“Why are there almost no sales for any of the food items?”

That was when he remembered one of the very earliest observations he had made.

One that he had made when he entered the restaurant on his very first day.

One that had slipped his entire mind.

“None of them remained for more than fifteen minutes.” Realization dawned on Cæ.

It was not something that people normally kept track of, but Cæ did. Not a single one of the customers stuck around for longer than ten minutes.

Was that a coincidence?

Cæ recalled what Mrs. Selvig had told him a few days ago when she met him for the first time after his accident.

It was an idea we came up with to capitalize on the completion of the flying magitrain system a few blocks away.

“Flying magitrain system… fifteen minute time cap…” Cæ murmured as his eyes lit up with understanding. “This… this might be it.”

He immediately darted to the manager’s office. “Mrs. Selvig!”

The elder woman was taken aback by his enthusiastic calls, the wrinkles on her face accentuating with her frown. “What is it, my boy?”

“How long is the wait for the flying magitrain system between landing and take-off?” he asked with optimism in his voice.

She frowned at the mundane question that had apparently gotten him so worked up.

Yet, she didn’t deny him the answer.

“Fifteen minutes, why do you ask?”

“That must be it,” Cæ declared. “Your customers… they’re not buying your food because the time it takes for it to be prepared and eaten exceeds their waiting time. Your restaurant is a proper diner where large quantities of food are prepared freshly from scratch. However, if each customer is capped at fifteen minutes, then they can’t order your food and make it in time.”

She fell into thought as she contemplated this possibility for the first time.

“You hoped to expand because you had predicted that the arrival of the flying magitrain system would bring you more customers, and you were right,” Cæ informed her with an energetic tone. “However, you miscalculated because you didn’t account for the shift in the nature of consumer demand. Demand for restaurants in this particular locality did indeed increase, but that was demand for fast and convenient food. Not a wholesome diner that serves wonderful fresh food that takes quite some time.”

“That… makes sense,” she realized. “Goodness, when you put all of it together like that, it really is that simple, isn’t it? Silly us.”

In reality, it was simple because Cæ explained simply. Sifting through the keen observations and systematically exploring and refuting each possibility all within the span of a few days was something that very few people would have naturally gone out of their way to do without any prompting of any sort.

“What do we do…?” Mrs. Selvig murmured to herself, concerned. “If we had known this before, then we could have comfortably handled it. But now…”

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She feared it was too late.

They were this close to shutting down the entire place.

She didn’t know if it was possible to turn things around this late in the game when they had already undertaken a lot of magical debt that was starting to suffocate them already.

“Everything can be fixed.”

Cæ’s voice firmly cut through her thoughts, drawing her attention. “Just give me a chance to come up with a solution.”

She gazed at him with a complex expression, before heaving a sigh. “I don’t know if this problem can be fixed at this point, Cæ. Frankly, we have already taken as many risks as we are able to with our previous business loan. So, unless your plans are entirely devoid of any monetary expenses, then…”

It wasn’t an easy condition to adhere to.

And yet, it wasn’t enough to deter him.

“I have a vision for the future of the restaurant, a vision where we overcome this problem and all your financial problems are fixed,” Cæ calmly informed her. “I believe that this vision can be achieved. However, I’ll let the two of you be the judge of that. All I ask is that you give me a chance to present my vision to the two of you.”

Mrs. Selvig gazed deeply into his steely gray eyes.

A smile cracked at the edge of her mouth.

“I thought you had changed, but you haven’t.”

A bittersweet smile emerged on her face. “Your eyes still have the same drive and fire they had six years ago when you came into our restaurant determined to get a part-time job.”

Cæ’s expression softened. “Back then, you hired me as a waiter even though you didn’t need one, all because you didn’t have the heart to turn me away. Now, I wish to repay that favor by helping you when you need it the most.”

Her smile grew warm. “Oh, you sweet boy. I don’t know what the future holds for us, Cæ. But I promise that we will give your vision for the future of our restaurant serious consideration.”

Cæ nodded seriously. “That’s all I ask for.”

And thus, he got to work and fleshed out his own vision. It wasn’t easy completing all of it on a short schedule when he knew that the Selvigs were seriously considering shutting down the restaurant that very month.

Coming up with an elaborate and rigorous business strategy within the span of a single day or two to present a compelling and effective vision for the future was not easy.

And yet, he did it.

What surprised even him was that the most time-consuming part was not the actual brainstorming and detail-fleshing sessions. The most time-consuming part was actually creating the physical presentation that would allow the Selvigs to comprehend his vision as easily as possible.

The actual solution itself was not nearly as difficult as he had expected.

He understood why this was the case.

“My Acquired Savant Syndrome.”

It changed the way he thought about business and commerce. A field that he had chosen to get a degree in only because it had the lowest barrier of entry. And even then, he had never been a remarkable student nor had he demonstrated an innate talent or knack for business or commerce.

And yet, after he had been diagnosed with his Acquired Savant Syndrome, the very way that he thought about business and commerce had been changed at its very root.

He felt that when he pondered about what was possible, it was as though his mind expanded to become a microcosm unto itself. A microcosm of ideas, possibilities, chances, and potential.

He was flooded with creativity and imagination.

So much so that it took effort to bring himself back down to Alaria.

And by the time he came down, he had already discovered the solution. Now, the only task left was to convince the Selvig couple.

“And that is precisely what I’m endeavoring to do in this little presentation,” Cæ informed the two of them.

They sat before him, their curious expressions laced with optimism and skepticism.

They had a lot of affection for Cæ, but it was truly difficult for them to get their hopes up after six months of plummeting revenue despite all the measures that they had taken. As much as they liked Cæ, they weren’t necessarily convinced that he was capable of solving all their problems.

“In order to convince you of my solution to the problem of plummeting sales,” Cæ began, “I will begin by fleshing out the entirety of the problem in a more thorough fashion.”

He flipped the first sheet on his little presentation stand, presenting a graph that plotted the restaurant’s revenues over the past six months versus customer visits.

It also featured a graph of monthly expenditure, which had increased ever since they had taken out a business loan for a failed venture, resulting in heavy interest rates that they were just barely managing to pay off.

And lastly, it featured expenditure that was increasingly becoming a liability on the balance sheets. Much of the raw ingredients and other wholesale food supplies that they were accustomed to purchasing had begun sitting in their inventory as their food sales dropped.

Many of the cooks and chefs that they had hired were also becoming a burden due to falling food orders and falling revenue.

“These are all the problems and liabilities that the restaurant is facing,” Cæ explained. “The liabilities are certainly problematic, but they are not the central problem. The most important problem that requires a very fundamental solution is this.”

He tapped on the graph of growing customer visits versus falling revenues. “This requires a very fundamental shift. It requires a new rehashed business strategy that thoroughly addresses the most central reason for falling revenue—the food preparation time.”

He shifted to the next page which featured a bar graph for the dozens of food items that the restaurant supplied and how long, roughly, each took to prepare.

The fifteen-minute mark was marked with a horizontal line.

Not a single one of the items that the restaurant offered could be prepared within fifteen minutes, save for beverages that were now the most ordered item on the menu because the customers knew that it could be prepared very rapidly.

“This needs to change,” Cæ announced. “That is a fundamental and inescapable conclusion and unless you have some revolutionary way to halve the food preparation time, then the solution that I’m about to prepare is the only solution.”

He took out a magical quill, ruthlessly crossing out each and every one of the dozens of items on the menu.

All except for one.

Mr. Selvig’s eyes widened with shock. “You want to get rid of all the food items from my kitchen except for the meat bun?!”

The air tingled with tension.

The man was not pleased by this. “These are recipes that I learned from my mother! These are recipes that I have worked on for years to improve! You want to just get rid of them?!”

The atmosphere boiled tumultuously as Mr. Selvig lost his temper at the radical changes that Cæ was proposing.