“Xiao Yu!”

As I came back to the base, Auntie came running over in a panic. Before, sprinting this fast would have left her out of breath. But with the crystals making her and Uncle grow younger and younger, she was hardly breathing harder than usual by the time she reached me.

“I can feel something very, very large behind the base, deep underground. Just yesterday it was so small, I thought it was a wild rabbit in its burrow. But after all the typhoons, it’s become massive! And it has yet to stop growing…”

What a pain. I was expecting aberrants to fall from the sky, not come from underground! I asked Auntie, “Can you sense where it is now?”

She shuddered, but still nodded as she said, “I can… It hasn’t moved from the garden. It hasn’t stopped watching us since I noticed it. I think… It sees more than I can.”

I started giving orders, “Tell Zheng Xing to excavate it swiftly. Everyone else, assemble in the garden and prepare for battle!”

As everyone grabbed their gear, I charged into the garden to see… A giant brown, lumpy mass. Throughout its surface, eyes of all different sizes blinked and stared in various directions. Some eyes were in clusters, like clumps of bubbles.

A voice rang through my head.

I SEE ALL. NOTHING CAN ESCAPE MY SIGHT. PAST. FUTURE. PRESENT. THE LOVED ONES YOU HAVE LOST. THE LOVED ONES YOU HAVE YET TO MEET. FEED ME AND THIS KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE YOURS.

All eyes fixated on me, including the eyes of the other members of the Zhanjiang Garrison.

“What a lousy deal! I can already see the past and present and I’ll get to see the future soon enough!” I retorted back. “Everyone! Attack! Go for the eyes!” The eyes are usually the weakest point, right?

As expected, with so many weak points, the aberrant died very quickly. Shujun looked at its corpse with pity. “If it could see the future, then didn’t it know it was about to die?”

I began slicing open the corpse to pull out the evolution crystal, and found smooth, white flesh that leaked a milky juice. I realized, “It’s an aberrant potato! There are probably smaller seed potatoes still buried in the dirt! Dig them out before they grow back.”

As everyone dug frantically, aided by Auntie pointing out where the potatoes were and Zheng Xing moving the earth the get the deeper potatoes, Shujun began walking around with a basket for everyone to drop the potatoes into.

Several baskets later, she happily said, “We have so many potatoes, I can make mashed potatoes, potato chips, hash browns, blanched matchstick potatoes, French fries, potato curry, latkes, potato bread, cholera, rosti, potato farls, Spanish tortilla, potato ice cream, potato salad, potato pie, baked potatoes, leek and potato soup, aloo gobi, potato casserole, potato fritters, fish and chips, tater tots, papet vaudois, vinegar potatoes, gnocchi, shepherd’s pie, roasted potatoes, potato dip, hurricane potatoes, potato skins, ratatouille, potato pancakes, hassleback potatoes, colcannon, scalloped potatoes, Korean potato pizza, funeral potatoes, boxty, poutine, twice-baked potatoes, three earthly treasures, potato knishes, pierogis, nikujaga, aligot, potato burgers, steamed potatoes, aloo masala, and we can also use them to practice throwing grenades!”

After several days of eating potatoes…

I picked up a potato croquette that was as round as my waistline and wailed, “I think I’m starting to turn potato-shaped!”

Potato-shaped potato croquette potato potato recipe

1. Get a lot of panko breadcrumbs (does not have to be made with potato) and put them on a pan on a hot stove with a sploosh of oil. I’ve never tried this, but I bet you could use crushed up potato chips instead.
2. Stir the breadcrumbs until they’re brownish and toasty. Add some pepper and salt here or back in step 1. Just do it at some point so it won’t be super bland.
3. Cook some ground meat or something you can pretend is ground meat in a pan until it’s brown.
4. Mix in your leftover mashed potatoes with the ground meat. If you don’t have leftover mashed potatoes, then:
   -1. Boil a bunch of potatoes or steam them or sous vide them or microwave them until you can squish the potato pieces with a fork or potato-masher tool.
   0. Mash the potatoes until they’re a tolerable level of lumpiness. Add in stuff like salt and pepper and herbs and garlic powder if you don’t like bland potatoes.
5. Make the mashed potato and meat mixture back into a potato shape.
6. Coat the potato-meat-potato in flour.
7. Coat the potato-meat-potato in a beaten egg. Or if you’re too much of a wimp to beat an egg in a fight, you can use a flour-water batter instead.
8. Coat the potato-meat-potato in the brownish-but-hopefully-not-as-toasty-hot-so-you-don’t-burn-yourself breadcrumbs.
9. Air fry the potato-meat-potatoes (called “croquettes” from here on after) for 10 minutes (600 seconds) at 400F (200 C).
   
   Longer, less succinct recipe here:
   https://www.justonecookbook.com/baked-croquette/