His mind flashed back to the words that he had just uttered.
"I would be willing to pay solid cash to be able to sleep at night safely without worrying about a building collapsing on me…?" His eyes lit up with realization.
If he was willing to, then surely a lot of people in the slums would be willing to as well. In fact, while the purchasing power of the residents of the slums was the lowest in the entire nation, the one thing that they were willing to spend money on was some modicum of shelter to protect them from the elements.
That meant that there was demand.
"More importantly…" he realized. "Uncontested demand."
Demand for something as essential as safety was stable, for this was a basic necessity. Thus, he could infer that this demand was most likely subject to minimal market risk, for not being crushed by bricks would rank quite highly on the list of demands.
"And despite there being stable uncontested demand and low risk, there is absolutely no supply."
He gazed around at the decrepit and run-down buildings that were endlessly plastered with make-shift scaffolding and paltry and weak support set up by unskilled and incompetent workers.
Because of the absence of high-quality construction companies, erected buildings were inherently unstable. Modern civil engineering leveraged magitechnology to construct safe and secure buildings—magitechnology that the slums lacked due to the absence of the magigrid that supplied usable magical energy to the inner districts of the city.
Thus, already unskilled and incompetent workers—who were at most employed in some small-time construction company in districts close to the slums—were forced to construct buildings without any magical construction capital.
All of these severely impaired the quality of the end product.
This was especially the case as civil regulation, zoning laws, and other safety protocols simply weren't enforced in the slums.
What further reduced the standards of quality to even more dire levels was the limited purchasing power that residents of the slums had, due to how abysmally poor they were.
The result?
An epidemic of low-quality, highly unsafe, and unstable buildings.
A large portion of the buildings crumbled within eighteen months of construction. Cæ recalled memories of old where he had had some close calls during his early life in the slums, although none nearly as close as the near-death experience he had just experienced.
"There is a tremendous untapped and uncontested demand for safe housing that is also cheap while also being good enough to protect people from extreme weather," Cæ concluded. "Demand that nobody is able to harness. Demand that nobody has thought to harness."
There was a reason that no major construction company extended their services to this particular market segment due to its low purchasing power. It was an assumed fact that people in the slums were obviously too poor to possibly afford the construction services of registered companies.
After, construction had a high cost of production. Almost every single person in the industry avoided catering to slum residents.
They all believed without even the slightest hint of skepticism that there was no market for construction services in the slums.
And yet, Cæ was different.
The extraordinary imagination and divergent thinking bestowed by his Acquired Savant Syndrome allowed him to consider possibilities that nobody else before him had.
"High cost of production…" His eyes gleamed with excitement as a multitude of solutions emerged in his mind. "But does that really need to be the case?"
His mind was flooded with plenty of possibilities. Unfortunately, this matter was outside purely commercial knowledge. He would need to gain intimate familiarity with the production process of construction and become aware of everything that was possible.
"But, from what I understand, it shouldn't be impossible to sell housing that is simultaneously sturdy enough to protect residents from the extreme climate and weather of Elendir while also having a low cost of production," he murmured. "I just need to do some research into the matter."
Plenty of research into the matter.
If he did choose to explore this route, there was no doubt in his mind that it was not something that he would be able to whip together in just the span of a few days the way he had with the meat bun business strategy for Selvigs' Ristorante.
"Also, unless I'm planning to entirely exclude magic entirely, then I will probably need to get into a magicademy like I have always been planning."
After all, learning important details about magic was not easy. And the truly important matters were confidential or classified. Ever since the Twilight Rebellion, the state had begun clamping down the secrets of magic, ensuring that it was not rampant and unregulated.
"Well, that has always been the plan from the very start." He shrugged. "Besides, I'm not aiming for just any magicademy; I'm aiming for the best."
The Elendir Institute of Magic.
"Thankfully, there's one branch in the City of Colohen," he recalled. "There I can pursue the idea that I came up with and explore the possibilities to tap into the demand for safe housing in the slums."
He could also explore avenues in the food industry where he could leverage his experiences to try and create a business that had greater scalability than an individual restaurant.
There were also several other sectors and markets that he had his eyes on for potential commercial ventures. All of these would take a lot of time to research extensively before he could even begin to flesh out the business model, and later the business strategy. All of these were aimed with the goal of serving as steps in the ladder to his ambition of becoming the richest and, thus, the most powerful man in the world.
"I suppose my schedule for the foreseeable future is set," he noted with a sense of finality. "Business research. Preparation for getting into the Elendir Institute of Magic. And making sure that Selvig's Ristorante's success is stable."
Together these were surely going to consume every inch of his free time. Each was a full-time job by itself. Even with his enhanced productivity post-coma, he would still have his hands full.
And thus, his grind began.
Over the next few months, he spent his days focusing on exactly these three things. Watching the growth of the restaurant and ensuring that it was stable took over most of his time.
It was still his job.
More importantly, he had a commitment and a promise to keep. While the absence of the powerful cash flow would hurt, what would hurt even more was failing to honor his word to the Selvigs and watching them put down their restaurant, uproot their life, and move away.
That was why he made sure that his two agendas of cultivating magic and mastering magic did not draw him away from his duty to the old couple that he regarded as an aunt and uncle.
Thankfully, his business strategy worked seamlessly.
To such an extent that even he found it difficult to believe. Even with good business strategies, there were always all kinds of bumps and challenges that threatened success, but Cæ realized that he had foreseen each and every single one of them. The precision and accuracy of the outcome that he had envisioned in his mind were so high that he had already not only predicted the problems but also solved them ahead of time.
And thus, Selvig's Ristorante's daily revenue shattered not only anything that they had accomplished in the past year but was also approaching some of their all-time highs. Business was thriving, and Cæ used it to pay for not only the business loans that he had taken for the business but also the medical loans that had been thrusted on him.
This was a sigh of relief to him. He had absolutely no interest in turning into a slave for some rich prick or corporation.
Outside of working at the restaurant, he researched the Elendir Institute of Magic and how he could wind up enrolling in the institute and mastering magic to the greatest extent he possibly could.
"There are four broad programs…" he mumbled as he scrolled through the information on the magical screen. "The Apprentice Program. Senior Program. Master Program. I suppose I would have no choice but to start at the Apprentice Program."
The names of the programs corresponded with the first three ranks of mages.
Apprentice mages.
Senior mages.
Master Mages.
He winced when he read that the average age of Apprentices was eighteen. "Tsk, I will have to sit with a bunch of kids? Give me a break…"
At the age of twenty-two, his proclivity to view teenagers as slightly older than babies had already begun to set in, contributing to his displeasure to have to be in a program with children.
On top of that, it shocked him to know that despite being younger than him, there were particularly gifted teenagers who were already in the Senior Program.
"Wild…" he muttered. "And as for people my age…"
Much to his dismay, they were all in the Senior Programme, and upon graduation would be considered Senior Mages. Knowing how far he was behind his peers made him feel a hint of self-consciousness, before he shook it off with a sigh.
"My situation is different from theirs."
When he thought about what he was actually capable of, He was able to shrug off any thoughts of inferiority. He had an extraordinary gift, one that had certainly come at a terrible price, but one that would give him the power to achieve even the nigh impossible dream that he harbored.
More importantly, he was relieved to know that there were no age limits to the Apprentice Program from what he could find from the maginet. There was only one parameter that the Elendir Institute of Magic or any magicademy was concerned about.
"Aptitude."
Specifically, magical aptitude.
Those footing the enormous bill of a scholarship were most concerned whether that investment was likely to yield dividends in the form of a contracted mage working for ten years for them afterward.
The highest predictor of a successful investment was magical talent.
In the case of magic, it amounted to the two fundamental halves of magic; form and physicality. Eidos and mana.
The magical aptitude test was a nationwide aptitude test held by the government that any registered citizen or immigrant could apply for. It gave results and a ranking that magicademies across the entire nation used to determine which students to accept and reject.
"As long as I get a high rank in the top thousand, there should be no chance that I fail."
Each institute only accepted a thousand students each year for the Apprentice program, balanced out by a thousand students graduating each year. As long as he bagged the highest of ranks, he would get what he wanted.
At the same time, he needed to ensure that he didn't perform too well, especially in regards to eidos. If he displayed his revolutionary talent in this regard to its fullest, then he would face an absurd amount of pressure, as many parties would stop at nothing to get their hands on him.
Including using unsavory methods.
"I need to do just well enough to ensure that the attention works in my favor but not too much that it would erode my agency due to their greed or paranoia."
What was the optimal result that tread that thin line?
He stirred in deep thought before shrugging.
"I guess I'll just aim for rank one."
Each year yielded a rank one student, and he knew that they had nothing to fear. Their futures were particularly bright, and he had never heard of any stories of their rank turning into a source of danger for them.
"I just need to make sure that I don't break any records."
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