Chapter 70. Growing Potatoes
With compost and potato scraps (from his making of the potato chips) both secured, Rhys could now turn to the next step of his formula: super-charging the chips to make them not just delicious, but also dangerously addictive. Delicious was good. Delicious was a start. It would make him a popular mom and pop type shop. But delicious wasn’t the extent of his ambitions. He wanted that addictive, trashy content that could capture the hearts of the entire world. That truly mid, inoffensive yet tasty, neutral yet deep flavor that could get millions to all agree that yes, this was delicious, that yes, this was worth buying over and over again. He wasn’t trying to make the most delicious, standout, perfect potato chip, because that relied on his taste, and the tastes of other mages. What he wanted to make, was that processed, engineered, studied, perfect flavor, that was no one’s favorite, but which everyone wouldn’t mind finding on their plate. That potato chip.
He couldn’t merely match the flavor and texture. Mages weren’t food-motivated, since they didn’t need to eat. If he made the perfect potato chip exactly according to his world’s recipe, he wouldn’t generate the world-wrapping phenomenon that potato chips were back in his world. He needed something more. Something that would bring mages back again and again, something they craved.
Mana. Techniques. Enlightenment.
He hadn’t yet figured out how to imbue the second two into potatoes, but he knew how to get the first one done, so, with aplomb, Rhys got to work setting up a field to grow the potatoes in. The earth around the trash heap was soaked in impurities, but it was a simple effort to remove them, and once he did, he found himself facing unworked, soft earth, lush and ready to take crops. He took the potato cuttings, all the eyes and other bits not fit for human consumption, and pushed mana into them. As soon as they started to sprout, he placed them into the earth and heaped compost on top. Mana to push them to grow faster and compost to feed the potatoes as they grew, sprouting and sending forth leaves, stretching roots into the earth, so that they had plenty of nutrients to grow big and strong—and more importantly, create mana-dense potatoes.
The cuttings from the few potatoes he’d used to make chips for Bast weren’t nearly enough to start the industrial-scale farm he desired, but luckily, some of the potatoes he’d bought at the market had sprouted or were on the verge thereof, so he cut them up, taking care to separate each sprouting eye, and added them to the garden. He ran laps to the trash pile at first to absorb trash, form a trash star, then run back over to the potato garden to feed them the trash star’s mana, but then realized that he was wasting powerful potential training opportunities. Instead of running laps, he stood still and used Trash Manipulation to call trash to him, absorbed it into himself, and ignited trash stars, funneling most of the mana into growing his potatoes. Not all of it, of course. Some he still fed into himself, steadily strengthening his body, enlarging his passages, and making everything yet more durable and straight-lined, so that he could maximize absorbing mana, then transferring it into the potatoes.
His core filled with a few more drops of that next-tier pure mana. Experimentally, he poked at it, but whatever it was, he struggled to use it yet. Maybe he was too low tier, or maybe his body was simply too trash to utilize the mana properly, but whatever the case, it simply didn’t respond to his manipulations the way normal mana did.
Under his ministrations, the potato plants grew from sprouts to leafy green shrubs in the space of a few hours. Rhys knelt and sent a pulse of mana into the earth, trying to sense the potatoes within. Potato-shaped lumps of mana answered his call, exactly as he’d hoped.
Rhys grinned. Right now, they were dense lumps of mana, but once he cut them into tiny thin sheets and fried them, they would give that exact sensation he wanted—that ephemeral hint of mana that came and passed without ever truly adding anything, but simply giving that taste of satisfaction without ever actually fulfilling it—yes, that was the ideal sensation for a potato chip!
“We’re ready for the second test,” Rhys declared, sticking his hand into the earth to draw forth a freshly-grown mana-imbued potato.
“Test?” Bast lowered his sword. The trees near him were scarred with fresh sword marks, and his robes hung around his waist, his body sweaty from exertion.
Rhys tossed him the potato. “Chop ‘er up, and I’ll get to frying. I need to get it exactly perfect.”
“I thought it was already pretty good,” Bast commented, catching the potato out of the air.