While staring at his layout planning tool that seemed like it was directly copied from a city-building game, Severin tried to imagine how ‘his’ mountaintop might end up looking in the future. He couldn’t visualize a clear image in his head, but one thing he was sure of even now. He would have to go bigger.

That wasn’t only regarding the kitchen he was fiddling around with right now, but the inn as a whole. At least if he didn’t want to keep on expanding on it now and then, as he did with his store. But exactly this had been an idea he had entertained for quite some time now.

One hundred thousand. That was the minimum amount of gold he would have to pay if he decided to go with a pre-made inn purchased at the System’s integrated store.

Severin knew this deal was fairly priced. If he ever decided to model his own building with the same size, the same amount of rooms, and the same furnishing, it would certainly cost him a lot more.

Yet that was an option he had been seriously considering.

To go with fewer and simpler rooms and reduce it to maybe just a single floor with just a single common room. Like this, housing twenty people would have been both possible and very affordable, even in the past.

But in the end, besides everything being more expensive this way, relatively speaking, other issues kept him from acting on this idea.

One was him fearing the System maybe not recognizing such a lacking setup as an actual new establishment in regards to his still unfulfilled quest that required him to expand on his line of business; something he figured would now be redundant anyway the moment he officially obtained his second subclass.

The other was Severin’s steady increase in profits as he leveled up his [Alchemy] profession and learned new recipes, making ‘one hundred thousand gold coins’ sound considerably less intimidating than it had been in the past.

Thanks to a whole bunch of new products and services, the arrival of another guild’s raid group, and a curious old-timer basically throwing money at him, it was actually an amount he now could afford to spend; if barely.

But when previously even this minimum amount of required gold seemed like way too much, now even double that amount appeared insufficient. How things developed, he couldn’t keep thinking about serving tens of people at a time, but instead hundreds.

His whole idea suddenly seemed rather ridiculous.

As his customer base was growing, he should scale his business up, not down.

A setup that would have just barely been sufficient to offer enough housing to Andreas and his group wasn’t good enough anymore. Not with Markus and the Malcos Eagles on his doorstep.

Opening an inn that couldn’t even fit this one guild’s whole group was embarrassing at best. Insulting at worst.

Now he dismissed the plan completely.

He would have to think of something else. But either way, directly going for a kitchen he wouldn’t have to further upgrade in size, one that he could later easily integrate into his future inn, even though he wouldn’t be able to make full use of it right now, was a given. That still left him with the issue of how to best serve his customers.

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‘Thinking about it, I guess for now some sort of outdoor café is the easiest, most efficient solution. Also, the cheapest. Especially since I already own all the premises. Chairs and tables, and we’re good to go. No need to save on those purchases either; it’s not like these things become useless if I should ever decide to close down that café later on.

I would just need Emily to double as a waitress or something. But this would’ve always been an issue. ‘

Severin was rather pleased with his simple idea. But what was true for his future establishments was also true for his already present one. In the past days, he already felt how limiting his store’s current size was, lacking an appropriate amount of both shelf space and retail space in general. This felt especially inadequate to him when considering that his alchemical products were his main moneymaker right now, something he didn’t expect to change anytime soon.

An upgrade was in order.

This time a bit more hesitant, though.

He didn’t plan on anyone other than staff, which for now meant himself and Emily, to ever set foot into the kitchen. Therefore, it wouldn’t matter if most of the space was empty for now.

For his main store, this was different. He had become painfully aware of the need to have enough empty space available for a bunch of people to enter all at once, but having it feel too empty wouldn’t do either. He settled on a half measure.

With a few hand movements, Severin swiped across the floating screen in front of him and adjusted the size of his kitchen layout to a total of ten times twelve meters.

Then, determinedly, he more than tripled the size of his store from sixty-four square meters to two hundred.

For every future expansion, he decided he would simply add another floor on top; that way, he wouldn’t have to take future changes to this building’s dimensions into account when planning future construction projects in its vicinity.

While at it, he also added a bunch of shelves and seating options for his main store’s customers.

The seating arrangements for his would-be café were something he decided to put on hold until he actually set foot in his kitchen first.

He peeked at the total price. About ten thousand.

Without further ado, he confirmed his purchases.

With that, a new flood of System Messages appeared and attacked his senses, numbing him even to the instantaneous change to his surroundings.

[… 10450/50000 gold spend…]

For a moment this message caused him to regret his decision as it reminded him of the circumstances of how he obtained the related quest in the first place, and how as a result he had decided to not spend any more money before finally purchasing his inn. Severin grit his teeth as it almost felt like he somehow lost to the System and that it was now taunting him.

Those notions were immediately forgotten, however, once another notification caught his attention and cleared his mind.

[Congratulations. You acquired the [Cook] subclass. Please continue to work hard to further…]

Severin didn’t bother to finish reading the sentence and sprinted directly outside towards his new building.