Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 1: Chapter 1 — If There Is a Next Life

The rain had been falling since noon, and it was past eleven now.

Jonah Reyes sat at his desk in the corner of the office, the only light in the room coming from his monitor and the dying glow of the city outside the window. Everyone else had gone home hours ago. He’d told himself he’d leave after finishing one more report. That had been three reports ago.

His eyes burned. He rubbed them with the heels of his hands and looked at the clock in the corner of his screen. 11:42 PM. If he left now, he’d catch the last train, sleep maybe four hours, and be back here by eight.

He’d done the math on this before. He always did the math. It never came out in his favor.

The office was quiet except for the hum of the air conditioning and the occasional creak of the building settling. Jonah had worked here for six years. He could probably do the job in his sleep at this point — and some weeks, he suspected he actually was.

He saved the file, stood up, and stretched until his spine popped. His reflection in the dark window looked older than thirty-one. Thinner in the face. Grayer at the temples than he remembered being a year ago.

On his way out, he passed the break room, where a poster for a coworker’s upcoming vacation still hung crooked on the corkboard. Somewhere with white beaches and turquoise water. He’d noticed it every day for two weeks and never once let himself really look at it.

He looked at it now.

He thought about all the places he’d told himself he’d visit ”someday.” Mountains he’d wanted to hike. Cities whose names he liked the sound of. A list he used to keep on his phone, back when he still believed he’d get around to using it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened that note.

Outside, the rain hadn’t let up. Jonah didn’t have an umbrella — he never remembered one — so he just pulled his collar up and walked toward the station with his shoulders hunched against the cold.

The streets were mostly empty. A few other stragglers hurried along under umbrellas, faces lit blue by their phones. Jonah walked past a small ramen shop that was still open, steam fogging up the windows, and for a moment he thought about stopping. He was hungry. He was always hungry these days, in a way that no amount of food seemed to fix.

He kept walking. He had reports due in the morning.

At home, his apartment was exactly as he’d left it — a single lamp by the couch, a stack of mail he hadn’t opened, a dish in the sink from two nights ago. He didn’t bother eating. He microwaved a cup of instant noodles, ate half of it standing at the counter, and left the rest to go cold.

He lay down without showering. He told himself he’d shower in the morning. He always told himself that.

For a while he scrolled through his phone in the dark, the blue light washing over his face. A video autoplayed — some travel vlogger walking through a night market somewhere in Southeast Asia, lanterns strung overhead, a stranger laughing at something off-camera. Jonah watched it twice before he realized how long he’d been staring at it without really seeing it.

He used to want that. He still did, somewhere underneath the exhaustion. He just couldn’t remember the last time wanting something like that had felt like it mattered, instead of just another thing to feel guilty about not having.

He set the phone down on his chest and stared at the ceiling.

One more year, he thought. Once this project wraps. Once I’ve saved enough. Once things calm down.

He’d been telling himself some version of that sentence for almost a decade.

His eyes were heavy. The ceiling blurred slightly, and he thought, distantly, that he should probably see a doctor about the pressure that had been building behind his ribs for the past few days. He’d meant to make an appointment. He hadn’t gotten around to it.

He never got around to anything, in the end. That was the joke of it, wasn’t it? He worked so hard to build a life he never had time to live.

The pressure in his chest sharpened, suddenly, into something that didn’t feel like tiredness anymore.

Jonah’s breath caught. He tried to sit up and found that his arm wouldn’t cooperate, that the room had started to tilt at some wrong angle, that the lamp by the couch had become a smear of yellow light bleeding into the dark.

He wasn’t scared, not exactly. He was too tired to be scared. Mostly he felt a kind of distant, aching disappointment — the sense of a door quietly closing on a room he’d never gotten around to walking into.

I never went anywhere, he thought, and the thought arrived without bitterness, just plain and quiet, like a fact he was noticing for the first time. I never saw any of it.

The ceiling kept receding. The city outside kept humming along without him, indifferent, still full of rain and ramen shops and night trains and every place he’d never been.

If there’s something after this, he thought, please — let it be different.

Let me actually live it, this time. Not survive it. Not wait for it. Live it.

I don’t want to work myself into the ground again and call it a life.

If there’s a next life —

I’ll go everywhere. I’ll see everything. I’ll taste every strange food and cross every mountain and meet people I can’t even imagine yet, and I won’t wait for the right time, because there is no right time, there’s only the time you actually take.

That’s all I want. Just that.

The room had gone fully dark now, the lamp and the ceiling and the city lights all folding into the same soft black.

His last coherent thought was strangely calm, almost like relief.

If there’s a next life... I’ll explore the world.

And then there was nothing at all.