My Wish Is a Potato? And There Are Cavemen Too?
Beep- beep- beep-
"Hoo. Hoo."
Even breathing had become an ordeal. It seemed this agony was finally drawing to a close.
"Hhh. Hhh. Hhh."
Why bother calling the nurse at this point?
I reached for the call button, then let my hand fall. There were still so many books I hadn't read, so many videos I hadn't watched. When I was first admitted, I'd truly believed I'd get back up one day and become a scientist.
"Khh... hhh..."
Maybe being born into a rich family had only made it worse, pumped full of whatever new drug his company wanted tested. Collapsing in the first grade of elementary school and spending twenty years like this. It had been too much.
"Hhhk. Hhhk."
It seemed to be ending now. Farewell, you wretched world. Let's never meet again.
WHOOSH!
Ah. So bright. A beam of light drilling straight down through the ceiling, in the middle of the night? Wait—what light? Was there a lamp directly above my bed?
[Ah, well done, child. With this, the 999th punishment laid upon you has come to an end.]
"Pun...ishment?"
Punishment? My memory only went back twenty-eight years. What was this about nine hundred ninety-nine?
[How does your heart fare?]
"I... don't know..."
What was I even supposed to say about a punishment I had no memory of? Honestly, old man.
[Without your memories, it cannot be helped. You were once a god. You passed on to humanity magic that was forbidden to them, and for that you were punished.]
Unbelievable. Now he was talking about magic. Still—what happened once the punishment was over? Did that mean the pain was finished too?
"Then... hhh... there'll be no more suffering?"
Whoa. That one nearly took my breath away for real. Could you blame me for being curious? Would I be born healthy next time? Then again, with no memories, what was the point? A little unfair, honestly.
[Indeed. You shall live again an immortal life, and I shall send you to a place where many of the humans you love reside. There you may do as you please. Have you any particular wish?]
Huh? Wasn't this supposed to be reincarnation? Immortal? So I wouldn't die? And a wish—like a past-life bonus, a wish-granting ticket?
This was too good to be true!
"A... a potat—ahh—"
Beeeep———
A machine tone I'd heard countless times, yet somehow unfamiliar. Wasn't that the sound of a heart stopping?
Uh... uhh? My strength was gone, all of it... Good heavens. Did I just die mid-wish?
[Truly an eccentric child. The magic you handled before is being managed by another now, so I shall grant you a different gift—along with whatever you particularly desire.]
Excuse me?
God? Was that really you? I never made that wish!
Hello? Hello?
Can't you hear me even when I talk inside my own head?
[Heh heh.]
What? Was that... laughter?
"Mmnh? What is this?"
I opened my eyes—eyes I'd seen somewhere before—onto an unfamiliar sky. Was this not how these things were supposed to go?
As I came to, it all surfaced: my twenty-eight years, ended in that hospital bed. The life of an immortal. Telekinesis. And a potato.
"...Potato?"
Out of nowhere—why a potato? Oh, don't tell me my last words before dying, the thank you, turned into this? I was beyond deflated. My dignity had packed its bags and left.
Tumble-rumble
A single potato dropped from my hand and rolled away across the ground.
"PWAHAHAHAHA!"
It was just suddenly hilarious. Anyone watching would have been dumbfounded. I asked God for my final wish, and I got a potato.
"Still, how many people get limbs that move this well?"
Flex—flex—
Arms and legs moving exactly as I willed them. Hadn't I spent most of my life flat on a hospital bed? Just having working limbs, just being able to stand on my own—wasn't that happiness enough?
Clunk-clunk
Wait, what now? What was this lump on my chest?
Swish-sway
And my hair was enormous. Long, black, falling all the way down to my hips.
"Good grief. I'm a girl?"
Come to think of it, my voice had changed too. Goodbye, voice I never even got to use...
"Hmm? Not that it means much, does it?"
Puberty or otherwise, the drugs had made me skip all of it—everything I knew about a body like this came from books. Whatever. My limbs worked!
There had been one wish I'd nursed through all those hospital years. To run.
"Hahh. Hahh."
My chest felt like it would tear open; my heart was about to burst and my lungs seemed ready to leap out of my mouth. How far had I even gone? Fifty meters, maybe?
Apparently being immortal didn't come with super strength. I was incredibly slow.
"So that's why he gave me psychic powers."
A body that couldn't die but couldn't fight either—perfect for getting abducted and used for human experimentation, no?
Shuddering at the memory of the drug trials I'd been half-forced into over the years, I pushed the thought away.
"So where am I?"
However much I looked around, nothing was familiar. With this worthless body, built by someone who'd sworn off exercise for life, walking anywhere wasn't an option.
"Can't I fly with telekinesis? People fly around all the time in movies..."
The moment I thought it, the instinctive how-to simply rose up inside me. As if knowledge had been injected by force—a feeling of knowing something yet finding it strange. And the method was so simple! Just imagine it?
Bob-bob-bobbing
A white dress with limbs dangling limp beneath it. From a distance, it must look exactly like someone dragging a doll by the scruff of its neck. Perfect for giving somebody a heart attack after dark.
"This is amazing, though? It feels like someone's holding me up?"
I floated high into the air and looked around: a wide river flowing in the distance, vast plains, and mountains—mountains everywhere. Might as well go higher and higher while I was at it. Surely I should spot a city somewhere and head for where people lived?
"Wow. So this is the fabled boundless land?"
The plains stretched all the way to the horizon. Mountains dotted the far distance.
"I'm awfully high up, aren't I? Didn't I pass through a cloud a moment ago?"
Immortal or not, I didn't feel short of breath at all—so up I went.
And the higher I climbed, the more the landscape sharpened into something I knew.
"That over there is the Korean peninsula, and that's China over there... but there are no cities. Nothing."
Human civilization always leaves its mark—somehow, some way. There was nothing. Which meant either after some apocalypse, or before nations had ever existed?
If I gathered people together and planted a flag, wouldn't it be my land?
"World domination?"
Going up had taken forever, and coming down took forever too.
"I'm not exactly hungry, but what is this empty feeling?"
I missed the potato a little. Where had I dropped it?
"Huh?"
There it was, gripped in my hand.
"What—what IS this? Is it haunted? Eeek—!"
WHOOSH
Before I knew it I'd screamed and hurled the potato that had appeared in my palm. It sailed away, far and far indeed. Had I used telekinesis without thinking?
Shame. Roasted, that would've been delicious...
"Huh?"
Another potato appeared in my hand. And there, far away, the potato that had just landed on the ground.
"Oh? Could this be... an infinite potato?"
Of course! A gift from God—he wouldn't hand over just one!
Not bad at all, an infinite potato. I adore potatoes. Delicious roasted or boiled, and the number of dishes you can make with them is endless, no?
"Fufufufu."
CASCADE-CASCADE
I stretched out my hand and thought potatoes—and they came pouring out in a flood, rolling away in every direction. Such a trivial thing, yet so fun. So happy.
Ah~ I would never starve to death. Well, obviously—I couldn't die at all, but still.
Shall I roast some potatoes?
"Wait—telekinesis can't make fire?"
This was a serious problem. No lighter, no flint.
Then I remembered an internet video I'd watched once. They'd started a fire with nothing but dry wood, hadn't they? Time for my scientific knowledge to shine. Friction heat. I would summon fire itself.
I zipped off toward the forest nearby—but the trees were more plentiful than I'd expected, and the whole woods was damp. Soaked through, everything of it. Still, I managed to find dead, rotting timber.
"It'd be nice if that log came over. Can it hear me?"
I'd been hauling my own body weight this whole time—that was barely anything. Fifty kilograms, give or take? How heavy could one log be?
I worried it looked too heavy, but I tried the telekinesis anyway.
CRACK-SNAP-BOOM!
"Huh? That actually worked?"
Being rotten, it broke apart a bit as it lifted, but I floated the great chunk up and carried it back to my new home.
"Ah... right, I don't have a home. Roast the potatoes first, worry about housing later."
Scritch-scritch
In no time at all I had a pure-white stick and a wide wooden board with a hole in it—crafted exactly like the bushcraft videos I'd watched. In those videos, it was a tearjerker: they'd hunt down a sharp rock, saw and whittle and sand the wood, suffering enormously. And I'd just made it in seconds without even a knife.
Psychic powers were convenient. Psychic powers, ho-ray!
I set a hollowed-out log on the ground for a hearth, split some firewood into a stack, balled up my tinder, readied a bit of kindling—and unleashed the momentous rubbing.
VWEEEE!
Too hard. The board went straight through with a pop, hole and all.
"Well, it happens. Mm-hm. First time, after all."
Making another board was no great labor.
Spin-spin-spin—
This time the stick spun, rather cutely. I waited, patient, and soon hot charcoal dust trickled down between the board and the drill. It piled up in the tinder, caught into embers, and a wisp of smoke curled upward.
"Yes! Got it!"
Gently I lifted the tinder and blew on it—whoo, whoo—and before long the flame caught and climbed.
"Easy! Loo-loo~ la-la~"
Doing a little victory shimmy, I circled the fire and added logs one by one. The primitives must have felt exactly like this whenever they made fire, right? I felt wonderful.
Wasn't this the first thing I'd ever accomplished with my own two hands?
"Ah. This is secretly fun."
Roasting the potatoes, though, left plenty to be desired. With a grill it would've been easy, but I made do, skewering them on sticks and ringing them around the fire. Time passed, the sticks burned through, and one by one the potatoes tumbled into the coals.
"They'll char a bit. I'll just eat the insides."
THUNK-THUNK — I tossed a few more potatoes in. Potatoes burning meant less to eat, after all.
"Honestly, living free and easy like this isn't half bad."
I'd been born rich and spent my childhood swallowed by exercise, instruments, every accelerated lesson imaginable, without ever really knowing my own family's warmth—then, just as elementary school began, the illness. They rarely visited the hospital either; I could barely recall their faces. The people I saw most were doctors and nurses. Living among people was still strange to me.
I could take it slowly, though. Time meant nothing to me anymore.
Rustle. Rustle.
I was sitting there blankly, watching the fire, waiting for the potatoes to cook, when the sound came from behind me. There had been nothing around me at all—and yet there it was.
"Hm?"
I turned around. And came face to face with them.
"KYAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!"
I couldn't believe that sound had come out of me. How could such a volume emerge from such a small body? No strength in the limbs, but the lungs on this thing were superb.
"UOOOOGH!"
"Uuuuu!"
"Uoo!"
They say words become seeds of reality. Or in this case, thoughts. That vague suspicion—isn't this the prehistoric age?—had turned real, standing right in front of me.
They looked a great deal like modern humans, granted—but the stone spears in their hands and the hide wraps around their waists made it obvious at a glance that they were anything but.
"Wh... what the! You guys! Are you doing cosplay or something?"
I asked, but—no. That grimy, filthy appearance, those stone spears: they were the real deal.
Then a single worry crossed my mind. Would they try to eat me?
I was immortal, so what did it matter if they took a bite or two? If they took an arm, would it grow back? Would they drop dead after eating it? I had three arms, after all. Well—two? That would hurt though. Uuuugh.
In that instant, ten thousand thoughts collided.
No. Calm down! I have telekinesis! Have confidence!
"Hah-u?"
One of the prone primitives lifted his head slightly and muttered something—utterly unintelligible.
"WHAT DID YOU SAY!?"
"Hah-u, hah-u."
At my louder voice, they went from prostrate to kneeling, pressed their hands together in reverence, and began bowing over and over. They didn't seem to be threatening me, at least.
"What's a 'hah-u'?"
When I asked, they raised their hands—three of them—and pointed at me.
"I'm the hah-u? Is that... some kind of name?"
