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

Chapter 4: Chapter 4 — The Flood

The day Arlen turned ten started out entirely ordinary, which was, in hindsight, the last ordinary thing about it.

He spent the morning hauling water for the tannery two streets over, in exchange for a few coppers and the tannery owner’s promise not to mention it to the guards, since Arlen was technically too young for the job and the tannery owner was technically not supposed to hire him for it. This was a fairly typical arrangement in the slums, and Arlen didn’t think twice about it.

By midafternoon, his arms ached pleasantly, his pockets held four copper coins, and he was in an excellent mood, mostly because Old Maren had promised him stew if he brought back enough firewood before sundown.

He was crouched at the edge of the drainage ditch outside the slum wall, gathering the driest branches he could find, when the smell hit him.

It was smoke — ordinary smoke, drifting from someone’s cookfire a few streets over — mixed with something else underneath it, something faint and strange that didn’t belong anywhere near the slums at all. Instant noodles, cheap and salty, the kind that came in a paper cup with a foil lid.

Arlen had never smelled instant noodles in his life. There was no reason he should have recognized the smell at all.

And yet something in his chest lurched, sharp and sudden, like a step missed in the dark.

He straightened up too fast, dropping half the firewood he’d gathered, and stood very still at the edge of the ditch while the world tilted strangely around him.

Office.

The word arrived from nowhere, and with it came an image — gray, fluorescent light, a desk, a clock reading 11:42 — so vivid and so wrong, so completely foreign to anything a ten-year-old boy in the slums of Greyhaven should know, that Arlen’s knees actually buckled, and he sat down hard in the wet grass at the edge of the ditch.

More followed. Not gently. Not one at a time. It came all at once, a flood breaking through some wall he hadn’t known was there — rain against a window, a train platform, a name that wasn’t Arlen at all, a face in a dark reflection that looked nothing like the face he’d grown up with. A ceiling, dissolving into black. A voice — his voice, but not this voice — thinking one clear, aching thought before everything went dark.

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

Arlen sat in the wet grass with his arms wrapped around his knees and did not move for a long time.

He didn’t cry, exactly, though his eyes stung. It wasn’t sadness, not precisely — it was something stranger and bigger than sadness, the feeling of two entire lives trying to occupy the same small body at once. He was Arlen, ten years old, slum-born, quick-fingered, fond of onion grass and firewood money and Old Maren’s stew.

And he was also — had also been — someone else. Someone tired. Someone who had worked himself into an early grave in a gray city on a world that didn’t exist here, who had died with a single wish still warm on his lips.

He sat very still and let both of those truths settle into him, side by side, waiting to see if they would fight each other or simply learn to share the space.

They settled, eventually. Not instantly — it took the better part of an hour, sitting there at the edge of the ditch with the firewood scattered around him and the light slowly turning gold as the afternoon wore on — but they settled, the way two colors of dye settle into the same bowl of water, swirling together until there’s no telling anymore where one ends and the other begins.

By the time the sun began dipping toward the rooftops, Arlen understood, with a calm that surprised him, exactly what had happened.

He had been given a second chance. An entire second life, in an entire second world — one with forests full of monsters, and guilds full of adventurers, and roads that led, presumably, absolutely everywhere. A world enormous enough that a person could spend a lifetime exploring it and still die with corners left unseen.

The memory of his old life — the office, the overtime, the endless gray sameness of it — didn’t feel like a wound so much as a lesson, already learned, paid for in full, never to be repeated. He remembered the exhaustion of it, the quiet grinding disappointment of a life spent waiting for a ”someday” that never came. He remembered how it had ended.

He was not going to make that mistake twice.

Arlen picked himself up, brushed the wet grass off his trousers, and began gathering the scattered firewood again, methodically, piece by piece, the way he’d done a thousand times before. His hands worked exactly as they always had. But something behind his eyes had changed, quietly and permanently, the way a room looks different after the furniture’s been rearranged even if nothing has technically been added or removed.

He thought about the adventurers he’d watched pass through the city gate — the mud on their boots, the strange gear on their backs, the canvas-wrapped shapes of things he couldn’t yet name. He thought about the green smear of the Verdant Crown Forest on the horizon, and the roads beyond it that he’d never seen, and the roads beyond *those*, stretching out toward places he didn’t even have names for yet.

Everywhere, he thought, and the word settled into him like a stone dropped into still water, sending out slow, steady ripples. I’m going to see all of it. Every bit of it I can reach.

He didn’t know yet how he would manage that, exactly — he was ten years old, penniless, orphaned, and standing in a drainage ditch with an armful of firewood. But he found, oddly, that the scale of the goal didn’t frighten him the way it probably should have. If anything, it steadied him. He had a direction now. A reason. Something worth all the years of ordinary, grinding effort it was probably going to take.

By the time he made it back to the tenement, dusk had settled properly over the slums, and Old Maren was already ladling out stew by the light of a single guttering candle.

”You’re later than usual,” she said, eyeing the firewood in his arms. ”Get lost counting beetles again?”

”Something like that,” Arlen said, and found that he meant it, in a way she couldn’t possibly understand.

He sat down with his bowl of stew, and it tasted, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain even to himself, like the best meal he’d ever had — not because the stew was any different than usual, but because for the first time in two lives, he understood exactly what he wanted, and exactly why he wanted it, and had every intention, this time, of actually going and getting it.