CHAPTER 147: CHAPTER 147 - FAST-FOOD CHAIN

Later that night, Logan sat on his couch, completely alone in his new room.

’Now I really feel like I’m in a prison,’ he thought, glancing around him.

The room had no glass panels that could show him the outside world, just white walls engraved with dozens of mana scriptures.

Deep inside, he longed for freedom. Not the kind where he walks around with a disguise on... No, he wanted to be able to walk around without constantly fearing for his life.

’I need to get stronger,’ he thought, clenching his fist. ’Only then, can I walk freely.’

He would do everything in his might to keep the money flowing and his company afloat in order to reach that strength.

"Speaking of money," Logan muttered, switching his hologram on. "I wonder how my fast-food chain is doing..."

But as he flicked on the hologram, the countless message notifications hit him.

"Shit," he mumbled, scratching his head. "I should take care of that first."

He’d always been busy with something after the assassination attempt, never really in the right mindset to reply to any of them.

As he opened his message folder, dozens of messages from Livia, Grant, and others came flooding in. Hell, even the SSS-rank Allen had messaged him just to check if he was still alive.

"..."

Logan wasn’t sure what to say as he stared at all of the worried messages and the many attempted calls.

’Well... best I can do is call them one by one,’ he thought, pressing on the call button.

His first call connected right away, an angry female voice immediately echoing through the room.

"You asshole! You vanish for days and let everyone think you were dead, and only after releasing a goddamn press conference do you decide to call me?!" Livia shouted.

Logan fell silent, completely caught off guard and feeling guilty.

"I’m... sorry?" he said hesitantly.

Livia exhaled sharply on the other end.

"You’d better be!" she said, still angry, but her voice growing softer. "Do you have any idea how worried we were?"

Logan swallowed hard before finally speaking properly.

"I wasn’t planning to disappear," he said. "Things just got... out of hand."

This time, it was Livia’s turn to fall silent.

Then she spoke again, her tone completely different now.

"Are you okay?" she asked, worried.

Logan smiled and gave a small nod. "More or less."

Livia muttered something on the other end of the line which he couldn’t quite hear, before she spoke loud enough again.

"...Next time, call me first before doing some stupid press conference. Or I swear, I’ll kill you myself."

With that, the call disconnected, leaving Logan stunned.

Finally, he let out a deep sigh. ’I really was an asshole for that, huh.’

He could already imagine that the rest of the calls would go pretty similar to this one.

Logan kept calling his friends one by one, getting chewed out by each of them before having to make up some story about what exactly happened.

After an hour, he finally leaned back on his new couch, having gone through the entire list of friends and close ones.

"That was something..." he mumbled, staring at the ceiling.

Still, it made him realize just how many people actually cared about him.

"It feels nice," he muttered, before glancing down. "I wonder how many of those people would still stand with me if they knew the Willowshade dungeon was partially my fault."

A wave of guilt and shame hit him.

He felt terrible for not being able to trust his friends, but what stung more was not even being able to tell Edric and Silas exactly what happened.

’I still remember how upset Silas was last time I mentioned bait.’

Logan’s head hung low. ’Another secret like the system that I’ll have to carry to the grave.’

After a few minutes, he pushed the guilt aside and finally looked up, remembering why he’d opened the hologram in the first place.

’Let’s take a look at the fast-food chain account,’ he thought, curiosity filling him. ’I wonder how it’s been doing in its first week.’

The chain had been open for six days so far, which should be plenty of time for him to see some results.

Tapping a few buttons on his hologram, a dashboard from his fast-food chain popped up.

Everything from revenue to customer complaints had its own tab, all updated in real time.

Logan glanced at the hologram, filled with expectations as he pressed on the revenue tab.

Total Revenue: $112,267,940.

"...Holy shit," he said, mouth wide open. "It was... this much of a hit?"

After processing the insane number, Logan quickly searched through the other tabs, pulling up customer feedback, location stats, and regional popularity.

Almost all one thousand locations were overloaded with orders, and countless videos had gone viral after people realized the food was dirt-cheap monster meat.

With that, Logan immediately made a decision.

"I need to open more locations immediately," he said. "I’ll gladly double or even triple the current locations."

Since each store cost between six hundred thousand and a million to open, he knew it was time to dip into Mercer Industries’ liquid funds again.

’I just need to take out around three billion,’ he thought, nodding slowly. ’With that, I can open up around three thousand new locations.’

It’d be simple enough. He’d split the locations again like before—half in the United States, the other half spread across the world.

’I wonder just how much money I can earn then,’ he thought, smiling slightly. ’If I have enough liquid funds left over after this, I’ll do another system draw.’

Logan closed the fast-food account and leaned back into the couch, his mind already calculating the next steps.

Anyone else would call it reckless to open that many new stores with only a week of data, but with copycats bound to appear soon, he knew he had no choice.

’You only get an opportunity like this once,’ he thought. ’If it’s wasted, who knows if it’ll ever be there again.’