"Heh. For some reason, my predictions often come true. You'd wish that I'll be wrong about some things in the coming times." Josua replied, chuckling from her reaction of his previous words.
While he often joked about it since as far as during his school days, it was uncanny for him, since compared to others, his prediction, on average, would come true more often than not. In this case, for what's about to come, he was actually right about it, and that it would come sooner than he'd think was much more chilling.
Several days later
When he had his daily walk around the city, he started seeing more people eating what seemed to be hamburgers. And from the looks on their faces, it seemed to have actual taste, since some of them were visibly crying while eating it. He then approached one of them.
"Where did you get that burger?" he asked.
"Ah, it's from the Crescent Moon Refreshment Stand. You can find it just around the corner, at the large space." the player replied, pointing at the direction.
He then went to the said direction, and found a massive line in front of the stand. He also saw a girl, apparently part of the staff from the stand, holding a placard with the sign "The Line Ends Here". He then approached the girl.
"Is this where those people bought their hamburgers?" he asked her.
"Um, umm... Y-Yes! We're the Crescent Moon Shop that sells real burgers with real taste! If you'd like, you can join the line and try it for yourself, mister!" She said, fumbling at some of her words.
How young... Josua wondered as he entered the line. Granted, he had a hunch, but he wanted to see if this was for real. After about an hour, he finally got to the stand's front. He saw a quite curvy woman being the cashier.
"Hello, young man! What would you like to order?" she asked.
"Hmm...-" he said as he glanced at the menu and the prices, before answering, "I'll have the super burger and the bottled tea please,".
"One Super Crescent Burger and One Black Rose Tea Bottle, coming right up! That'll be 45 Gold!" she said.
He then took out 45 gold coins from his inventory, and handed it to her. He then waited for a little before the lady gave him his order: what's basically a double burger, and a bottled tea. Hope this isn't a waste of my money... He thought as he walked towards a nearby table and have his meal there. That amount of money could get a lot of those bland foods from the NPC stalls. Then again, this is just out of his own curiosity.
"Well, here goes nothing." he said as he opened the burger's wrap, and took a big bite from it.
There was a sudden shock to his nerves. An assault of flavors lighting up his taste buds that had suffered from the lack of flavor for some time, and the neurons in his avatar's brain went into overdrive as he quickly finished the burger in 10 minutes.
"Holy shit... It has actual taste. Well I'll be damned." he said, while laughing like a madman.
Those bunch from the Crescent Moon Stand were from the Crescent Moon Alliance. For a guild their size, this kind of thing was abnormal, since no guild that are the same size as them or even lower would dare to venture out into the wilds or even have the mind to try these things. By process of elimination, there was only one possible person who could've pushed them into this scheme: Shiroe. He then further went into reading the whole thing.
"Shiroe and I were the only ones in Akiba to know of this information. The fact that a medium-sized guild could even do something like this is probably because of him. Wait a minute... He did say that he left for Susukino some days ago as a favor for his acquaintance to rescue a friend of said acquaintance... Could it be...? Yep. There's no other explanation. But why would he even bother to ask them to do something like this... Wait, those prices... Say even if they could sell a thousand of those burgers, and even if they could continue doing so, with the lacking amount of manpower to fulfill the demand, it would be hard... What's his endgame here..." he mumbled as he drank slowly from the bottled tea.
Wow, a tasteful drink. Nice food for my overdrived brain he thought before going back into his mumbling.
He then stopped his mumbling for a moment, and sent a message to Grim.
To: Grim
From: Josua
I found something that might interest you. Come to my location now.