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

Chapter 5: Chapter 5 — A Different Kind of Child

The change didn’t happen all at once, at least not one anyone else could see. Arlen still hauled water for the tannery. He still gathered firewood, still ran errands for coppers, still traded jokes with Denna and the other slum kids over stolen moments between chores. From the outside, nothing about his days looked any different than they had a week before.

But Old Maren noticed anyway. She’d been alive too long, and watched too many children pass through her doorstep, not to notice when one of them changed.

”You’ve gone quiet,” she said one evening, handing him his usual heel of bread. ”Quiet in the thinking way. Not the sulking way.”

”Just thinking about things,” Arlen said.

”What things?”

He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things now, weighing the words before he spoke them. ”The future, I suppose.”

Maren snorted. ”You’re ten. What future does a ten-year-old have to think about, besides supper?”

Arlen only smiled, and didn’t answer, and Maren shook her head and muttered something about strange children as she shuffled back inside — but she watched him a moment longer than usual before she did, the way you watch a pot that’s just started making an unfamiliar sound.

The truth was that Arlen had begun, quietly and deliberately, to plan.

He’d always been resourceful — that hadn’t changed. What had changed was the shape his resourcefulness took. Where before he’d have spent an extra copper on a sweet bun without a second thought, now he found himself pausing, weighing the coin in his palm, and more often than not tucking it away instead. He started keeping the coins in a small cloth pouch sewn into the lining of his shirt, a habit he picked up almost without thinking about it, some old instinct from a life spent worrying about savings and rent and the slow bleed of a paycheck that never stretched quite far enough.

It wasn’t that he’d become miserly. He still shared what he had — split a bun with Denna without hesitation, still gave Old Maren more firewood than her copper technically paid for. But there was a new deliberateness to how he moved through his days, an awareness that every coin, every hour, every small choice was quietly building toward something.

He didn’t tell anyone what that something was. Not yet. It would have sounded absurd coming from a ten-year-old — I’m going to become an adventurer and see the whole world — and worse, saying it out loud somehow felt like it might cheapen it, like a wish spoken too early loses some of its weight.

So instead, he simply began.

He started paying closer attention to the adventurers who passed through the gate. Not just watching them with idle fascination the way he used to, but actually studying them — the different ways they carried their weapons, the various badges pinned to their cloaks that seemed to mark rank or guild affiliation, the easy, practiced way the veteran ones moved compared to the stiffer, more nervous newcomers.

”You’re staring again,” Denna said one afternoon, finding him perched in his usual spot on the low wall near the gate. ”You do that a lot now.”

”I’m learning,” Arlen said.

”Learning what? How to gawk?”

”How things work.” He nodded toward a pair of adventurers hauling in a cart loaded with something large and covered in canvas — a monster carcass, probably, judging by the faint smell drifting off it. ”See the badges on their cloaks? Different colors. I think it’s rank. The dusty ones with the worn boots, they’re probably the experienced ones. The clean ones standing a little too straight — new.”

Denna squinted at him. ”How do you even notice that stuff?”

Arlen shrugged, though privately he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Some of it was simple observation. Some of it, he suspected, came from somewhere deeper — some old instinct for reading a room, a habit worn into him by years of a different life spent in different rooms, watching different kinds of hierarchies.

He didn’t try to explain that part. There wasn’t really a way to.

Instead, he began visiting the small public reading room near the temple district whenever he had a spare hour — a cramped, dusty space maintained more out of civic obligation than genuine enthusiasm, where a handful of tattered books and pamphlets sat available to anyone who could be bothered to read them. Most slum children couldn’t read at all, and Arlen technically couldn’t either, not yet, but he’d begun teaching himself in stolen fragments, tracing letters with his finger, sounding out words under his breath, badgering the elderly clerk who ran the room with more questions than the poor man had patience for.

”Why does a boy like you need to read?” the clerk asked him once, more curious than unkind.

”Because someday I’m going to need to read maps,” Arlen said. ”And guild postings. And probably a lot of other things I don’t know about yet.”

The clerk had given him a long, considering look, and after that started setting aside the simpler pamphlets whenever new ones came in, without ever quite admitting he was doing it on purpose.

Arlen’s days took on a new shape, a quiet rhythm built around three things: earning what coin he could, learning what he could, and — though he never phrased it this way even in his own head — preparing.

He wasn’t in a hurry. That was, perhaps, the strangest part of the change, the part that would have surprised his old self most of all. He’d expected, somewhere in the back of his mind, that regaining his memories would fill him with urgency, a frantic need to start his adventure immediately. Instead, what he felt was something steadier. Patience. The understanding that eight years remained before he’d be old enough to register at the guild, and that those years, rather than being an obstacle, were simply the next part of the journey — the part where he built the foundation everything else would stand on.

He still laughed with Denna over stolen pebbled games. He still enjoyed Old Maren’s stew, still hummed while he swept her stoop, still felt the particular satisfaction of finding a new patch of edible weeds nobody else had noticed. The joy of ordinary things hadn’t left him. If anything, he found himself appreciating them more now, aware in a way he hadn’t quite been before of how precious ordinary, unhurried days actually were.

”You’re still strange,” Denna told him one evening, watching him carefully count out his coppers into two small piles — one for food, one tucked away and untouched. ”But it’s a good kind of strange, I think.”

”I’ll take that,” Arlen said, and meant it.

Above the slum’s crooked rooftops, the sky was beginning to darken toward evening, streaked with the last long light of the day. Somewhere beyond the city wall, the forest waited, dark and vast and full of everything he didn’t understand yet.

He wasn’t ready for it. Not yet.

But for the first time in either of his lives, Arlen felt something settle into place inside him — quiet, certain, and entirely his own.

He had time. And this time, he intended to use every bit of it.